Afrasian Language

Click Here ---> https://ssurll.com/2tlNpj

The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/Sahel.[2] With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent.

In addition to the languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes many ancient languages, such as Egyptian, which forms a distinct branch of the family; and within the Semitic family, Akkadian, Hebrew, Phoenician, other Canaanite languages, Amorite, Ugaritic and Aramaic. While there is no consensus among historical linguists concerning the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family or the period when the parent language (i.e. Proto-Afroasiatic) was spoken, most agree that it was located within a region of Northeast Africa. Proposed specific locations include the Horn of Africa, Egypt, the eastern Sahara, and the Levant.

In current scholarship, the most common names used for the family are Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic), Hamito-Semitic, and Semito-Hamitic.[6][7], with the latter two having fallen out of favor in English but still seeing frequent usage in other languages, such as German.[8][9] Other proposed names which have not found widespread acceptance among the linguistic community include Erythraic, Lisramic, Noahitic, and Lamekhite.[10][11]

Friedrich Müller introduced the name \"Hamito-Semitic\" to describe the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, published in 1876.[12] Each component of this term was derived from the name of a Biblical son of Noah as detailed in the Book of Genesis: Semitic from his first-born son Shem, and Hamitic from his second son Ham (Genesis 5:32).[13] Each of Noah's sons was traditionally presented as being the common ancestor of several apparently-related people groups, with Shem understood by the original audience as being the common ancestor of the Jews, Assyrians, and Arameans, among others, and Ham seen as the ancestor of the Egyptians and Cushites. This original biblical genealogy reflected political rather than linguistic realities: thus the Canaanites are descendants of Ham, although their language is closely related to Hebrew, and the Elamites are descendants of Shem, although their language is not related to Hebrew at all.[14]

The term Semitic had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer, following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710.[15] Hamitic was coined by Ernest Renan in 1855, to refer to languages that seemed similar to the Semitic languages, but were not themselves provably a part of the family.[15] The association between Africans and the Biblical Ham dates back to at least Isidore of Seville (6th century CE), and earlier 19th-century scholars had vaguely spoken of \"Hamian\" or \"Hamitish\" languages.[16] Several issues with the label \"Hamito-Semitic\" have led to its decline in use by later scholars. For example, the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests the existence of a monophyletic \"Hamitic\" branch alongside Semitic. Additionally, Joseph Greenberg argued that \"Hamitic\" has racial connotations, and that the name \"Hamito-Semitic\" overstates the centrality of the Semitic languages within the family.[17][18] Victor Porkhomovsky suggests that the label \"Hamito-Semitic\" is at this point simply convention and no more implies an opposition between Semitic and \"Hamitic\" languages than \"Indo-European\" implies a \"European\" and an Indic branch.[11]

Greenberg reintroduced the name \"Afroasiatic\" in 1960, a name seemingly coined by Maurice Delafosse (as French afroasiatique) in 1914.[17] The name refers to the fact that this is the only major language family with members in both Africa and Asia.[11] Because the term \"Afroasiatic\" could be taken to mean that the family includes all the languages of Africa and Asia, the term \"Afrasian\" is sometimes used instead; this name was proposed by Igor Diakonoff (1980) and is mostly used by Russian scholars.[18][11]

Scholars generally consider Afroasiatic to have at least five and as many as eight separate branches, with the five universally agreed upon branches consisting of the Berber (also called \"Libyco-Berber\"), Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic.[19] Additionally, a majority of specialists consider the Omotic languages to constitute a sixth branch.[20]

The Berber (or Libyco-Berber) languages are spoken today by perhaps 16 million people.[21] They are often considered to constitute a single language with multiple dialects.[22] Other scholars, however, argue that they are a group of around twelve languages, about as different from each other as the Romance or Germanic languages.[23] In the past, Berber languages were spoken throughout North Africa except in Egypt;[24] since the 7th century CE, however, they have been heavily affected by Arabic and have been replaced by it in many places.[25][26]

There are two extinct languages potentially related to modern Berber.[27] The first is the Numidian language, represented by over a thousand short inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet, found throughout North Africa and dating from the 2nd century BCE onward.[26] The second is the Guanche language, which was formerly spoken on the Canary Islands and went extinct in the 17th century CE.[27] The first longer written examples of modern Berber varieties only date from the 16th or 17th centuries CE.[28]

Chadic languages number between 150 and 190, making Chadic the largest family in Afroasiatic.[29] The Chadic languages are typically divided into three major branches, East Chadic, Central Chadic, and West Chadic.[30] Most Chadic languages are located in the Chad basin, with the exception of Hausa.[31] Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria.[32] It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers.[29] Eight other Chadic languages have around 100,000 speakers; other Chadic languages often have few speakers and may be endangered of going extinct.[33] Only about 40 Chadic languages have been fully described by linguists.[29]

There are about 30,[34] Cushitic languages, more if Omotic is included,[35] spoken around the Horn of Africa and in Sudan and Tanzania.[34] The Cushitic family is traditionally split into four branches: the single language of Beja (c. 3 million speakers), the Agaw languages, Eastern Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic.[36][34] Only one Cushitic language, Oromo, has more than 25 million speakers; other languages with more than a million speakers include Somali, Saho-Afar, Hadiyya, and Sidaama.[34] Many Cushitic languages have relatively few speakers.[35] Cushitic does not appear to be related to the written ancient languages known from its area, Meroitic or Old Nubian.[37] The oldest text in a Cushitic language probably dates from around 1770;[34] written orthographies were only developed for a select number of Cushitic languages in early 20th century.[35]

The Egyptian branch consists of a single language, Ancient Egyptian, which was historically spoken in the lower Nile Valley.[39] Egyptian is first attested in writing around 3000 BCE and finally went extinct around 1300 CE, making it the language with the longest written history in the world.[26] Egyptian is usually divided into two major periods, Earlier Egyptian (c. 3000-1300 BCE), which is further subdivided into Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian, and Later Egyptian (1300 BCE-1300 CE), which is further subdivided into Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic.[39] Coptic is the only stage written alphabetically to show vowels, whereas Egyptian was previously written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which only represent consonants.[40] In the Coptic period, there is evidence for six major dialects, which presumably existed previously but are obscured by pre-Coptic writing; additionally, Middle Egyptian appears to be based on a different dialect than Old Egyptian, which in turn shows dialectal similarities to Late Egyptian.[41] Egyptian was replaced by Arabic as the spoken language of Egypt,[42] but Coptic continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.[43]

The c. 30 Omotic languages are still mostly undescribed by linguists.[31] They are all spoken in southwest Ethiopia except for the Ganza language, spoken in Sudan.[44] Omotic is typically split into North Omotic (or Aroid) and South Omotic, with the latter more influenced by the Nilotic languages; it is unclear whether the Dizoid group of Omotic languages belongs to the Northern or Southern group.[31] The two Omotic languages with the most speakers are Wolaitta and Gamo-Gofa-Dawro, with about 1.2 million speakers each.[35]

There are between 40 and 80 languages in the Semitic family.[47] Today, Semitic languages are spoken across North Africa, Western Asia, and the Horn of Africa, as well as on the island of Malta, making them the sole Afroasiatic branch with members originating outside Africa.[48][47] Arabic, spoken in both Asia and Africa, has around 300 million native speakers, while the Ethiopian Amharic has around 25 million.[49]

Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic, the Canaanite languages, including Hebrew, as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Ge'ez and Amharic.[50] The classification within West Semitic remains contested. The only group with an African origin is Ethiopian Semitic.[47] The oldest written attestations of Semitic languages come from Mesopotamia, Northern Syria, and Egypt and date as early as c. 3000 BCE.[48]

Common trends in proposals as of 2019 include using common or lacking grammatical features to argue that Omotic was the first language to branch off, often followed by Chadic.[62] In contrast to scholars who argue for an early split of Chadic from Afroasiatic, scholars of the Russian school tend to argue that Chadic and Egyptian are closely related.[63] Three scholars who agree on an early split between Omotic and the other subbranches, but little else, are Harold Fleming (1983), Christopher Ehret (1995), and Lionel Bender (1997).[64] The minority of scholars who favor an Asian origin of Afroasiatic instead tend to place Semitic as the first branch to split off.[65] Disagreement on which features are innovative and which are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic produces radically different trees, as can be seen by comparing the trees produced by Ehret and Igor Diakonoff.[66] 59ce067264

https://www.lexivalentin.com/group/new-jersey/discussion/f2de3454-d883-49d0-8b9e-3f754139a633