1036: 4P

The Afroasiatic Languages

Afro-Asiatic

The Afro-Asiatic family The name reflects the geographic distribution

Northen Africa and the Middle East

Afro-Asiatic

The Afro-Asiatic family

Six branches:

Afro-Asiatic

Egyptian e.g. Coptic

(Egypt)

Omotic Wolaytta (Ethiopia)

Cushitic e.g. Somali (Somalia)

Chadic e.g. Hausa (Nigeria)

BerberSemitic e.g. Arabic e.g. Tachelhit

Hebrew (Marocco)

Afro-Asiatic

Semitic languages

The Semitic languages are believed to have evolved from a hypothetical parent tongue, proto-Semitic.

The Semitic subfamily is divided into East and West Semitic.

The East Semitic branch is extinct (its best-known representative is Akkadian)

Akkadian was the earliest attested Semitic language, which was firrst written around 2600 BCE. Akkadian and its second-millennium dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian, were important lingua francas in the ancient Near East.

Lingua franca: a language widely learned as a second language, enabling communication across a wide area where many languages are spoken.

Akkadian became extinct around 300 CE

Afro-Asiatic

Semitic languages

Afro-Asiatic

Semitic correspondences

The following list will provide some equivalent words in Semitic languages.

Akkadian Aramaic Arabic Hebrew English translation zikaru dikra ʔakar zaʔar male maliku malka malik meleʔ king imeru ʔamara ʔimar ʔamor donkey erʔetu ʔarʔa ʔarʔ ʔereʔ land

Afro-Asiatic

West Semitic Division

Aramaic was the successor to Akkadian as a major lingua franca in the Near East. Today it survives in the form of 19 different languages or dialects spoken in scattered communities in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Israel.

Arabic is by far the most widely spoken of all the Afro-Asiatic languages.

The Canaanite languages were attested in the Levant in the second and first millennia BCE. The best known of these are Hebrew and its close relative, Phoenician. Both Hebrew and Phoenician became extinct around the 1st century CE. Hebrew was revived in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The South Semitic (or Ethiopian) branch: The two most widely known modern languages from this group are Tigrinya (Eritrea) and Amharic (Ethiopia).

Afro-Asiatic

Afro-Asiatic (esp Semitic) languages have transfixes

They have the so-called non-concatenative morphology

Concatenative morphology: involves stringing together morphemes, one after another (we say that they morphemes are concatenated on the stem.)

Non-concatenative morphology: word formation involves changes in the stem, rather than adding subsequent morphemes to it.

The basic meaning of a word (the root) is expressed by three consonants, e.g. ktb‘write’ Different inflectional and derivational changes are obtained by adding vowels around these consonants. These vowels are called transfixes.

Afro-Asiatic

Arabic transfixes (1) Non-concatenative morphology in Arabic: root /ktb/

a. katab ‘write’ perfectiveactive b. kutib ‘was written’ perfective passive c. aktub ‘is writing’ imperfective active d. uktab ‘was being written’ imperfective passive

This type of morphology is also known as templatic morphology This is because, unlike suffixes or prefixes, transfixes look like templates:

(2) "CCC" stands for whatever three consonants the root consists of a. Perfective active: CaCaC b. Perfective passive: CuCiC c. Imperfective active: aCCuC d. Imperfective passive: uCCaC

The consonants of the verb stem carry the lexical meaning of the word: Thus /ktb/ represents the verb �write�

/kb/ �lie� /drb/ �beat� etc.

The vowels are used to signal the aspect, voice and participial vs. finite verb status.

IV Binyam: s s R R N N | |

X X X X X X | ?

/a/ /k/ /t/ /b/

Broken plurals in Arabic (McCarthy (1982)): Singular Plural jundab janaadib �locust� sultaan salaatiin �sultan� duktar dakaatir �doktor� safarjal safaarij �quince� maktab makaatib �office� miftaah mafaatiih �key� nuwar nawaawir �white flower� ¿andaliib ¿anaadil �nightingale�

s s s R R R N N N | |

X X X X X X X (X) X | /a/ /a/ ` /i/

Rule: Link unlinked phonemes to empty timing slots from left to right and one for one subject to the constraint that the linking results always in well-formed syllables.

s s s R R R N N N | |

X X X X X X X X | |

/a/ /a/ /i/

s f r j l

Afro-Asiatic

Afro-Asiatic languages and the development of a writing system

The writing system in many Afro-Asiatic languages is Abjad In Abjad, each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. This type of writing system developed as an adaptation and simplification of Egyptian hieroglyphs because is suited well with the morpho-phonology of Afro-Asiatic (and especially) Semitic languages.

The first wide spread abjad was the Phoenician abjad. It was borrowed by Greeks around the 9th century BCE (but it didn’t quite work for them).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBiuJ40t4rk