bantu semitic language

Trond wrote: they matter little for cognacy judgments, but maybe not enough of the Swadesh list is available. Im not sure how much of this comment is sarcasm, but there are a few ancient languages from the parts of Iran closest to Mesopotamia that have left records of a handful of personal names and other words: Gutian, Kassite, Lulubito say nothing of the better attested Elamite and Hurro-Urartian languages. Yes, sorry, I should have added a question mark. I just point to it as one of my concerns with the assertion of chronological knowledge where neither chronological benchmarks nor historical sociology are available. While this sounds as stupid as saying that cats are a branch of the dog family that split off before any specifically doggy traits developed, the latter is actually true, at least if you go back 42 Ma to the split between feliforms (cats + hyenas + mongooses + civets + a handful of other species) and caniforms (dogs + bears + the red panda + skunks + badgers + weasels + otters + raccoons + seals + sea lions + walruses + ). Off-hand, I cant think of any language that does make such a distinction. Alexander Militarev (2000), based on lexicostatistics, groups Berber with Chadic and both more distantly with Semitic, as against Cushitic and Omotic. That said, classical historical linguistics has nothing to say about dates (because, as above, nobody understands lexical change), but statistical methods can give limits on dates. we used the qpAdm software(35,36), which provides a flexible framework for testing admixture models and estimating mixture proportions. In Semitic languages (e.g. Sociolinguistics also recognizes shift to prestige dialects (with an assumption that prestige reflects preferences), then there are registers. They were not introduced to resolve existing problems in historical linguistics. Its very plausible that East Semitic and West Semitic differentiated far away from their first attestations, but L. does not prove it in any way. The Dakota (Sioux) came from further east, driven partly by the Chippewa (Anishanabe), who had better access to firearms during a key period. The Palestinian tumuli, belonging to the culture of semi-nomadic groups during much of the fourth and third millennia B.C., seem to confirm this hypothesis, since a very similar type of sepulture characterizes pre-historic North Africa, especially Algeria, and it is a typical feature of the old Libyco-Berber tradition. Your email address will not be published. Journals that size have hundreds or thousands of (largely unpaid) editors who decide on acceptance & rejection, In some ways, these were a solution looking a problem. ), Then you have a different set of isoglosses for the subjunctive. *headdesk*, @dlg He is ignoring the fact that the lexical correspondences are extremely few, often mama and papa words or onomatopoeics (like fu/pu blow) and unsupported by any regular sound correspondences (its hard to see how there could be any, given that nobody has reconstructed the Volta-Congo protolanguage or even agreed on its segmental phonology; nor Proto-Mande either, come to that.) I suspect that no referees with relevant linguistic expertise were sought. The former was spoken millenia before the later and hardly in the same place. since Ive seen a tree based only on rRNA. It is just a dialect. Hebrew lashon reconstructs fine back to proto-Semitic though *lan (cf. The international sense relates to a group of over 300 widely distributed and closely related languages of Black Africa south of a However, if borrowed SOV word order is counted as a single diffused areal trait, it may be argued that it should rank high in significance for defining the linguistic area, since it is much more difficult for a language to change so much of its basic structure under areal influence than it is to acquire less complex traits. Inda lat ba tindorcun as-n-ort cach foiltne inna chenn lasa coimirge con-rracht. Lateral gene transfer should have exactly the same confounding effects as convergence or as linguistic borrowing. This analysis requires at least three abstract elements in the representation of even a simple word: the root, the template, and the rules (phonological and semantic) for combining the two. // Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 4, pp. also tug which makes my Old Norse loan senses tingle. From what we know of hunter-gatherer society, I would be completely unphased if today, we saw a patchwork of surviving languages A1147 and A1254; B2121 and B2131, C3454, C9720, no D, but E5157 and E5159. NS is no less speculative than Nostratic. The Proto-Sinaitic character for /n/, on the other hand, was based on the Egyptian symbol representing /d/, a hieroglyph depicting a serpent, and received its Proto-Sinaitic value from the initial consonant in the Semitic word for snake.. The Ugaritic writing system also differs from other Canaanite scripts to the extent that it does not consist wholly of consonantal characters, but includes in its graphemic inventory three CV syllabic symbols, representing a glottal stop followed by the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. Textbooks are not a good guide in this area. This would have required access to a different root, that is, the root /v/, which is used in the formation of the singular forms of the present tense of the verb. We conclude that African taurines received as much as 26% (estimated as 0.263 in the network, p-value<2.2e-308) of their ancestry from admixture with wild African auroch, with the rest being Fertile Crescent domesticate in origin.". There is a quote from Nichols, but it could be taken out of context. I withdraw my unworthy insinuation. De qu color es este pez? WebHebrew is a Semitic language. Mande has no grammatical gender or relevant verb flexion; Grusi languages have both, but sufficiently different from Oti-Volta that one can easily imagine an adult Grusi-speaking learner of an Oti-Volta language deciding to dispense with the details . Yes, thats a lot of work. That probably primed my ear more than anything. Its not as crude as early lexicostatistics. Just discovered that singulative in Breton is unanderenn where unander is sg. and -enn is singulative suffix. These nominal classifications make themselves felt primarily in agreement systems as expressed on: determiners, adjectives, subject and object marking on verbs. The introductions to Semitic languages I have actually say nothing (Routledge 1997) or little on this (Bergstrsser 1928 only states that the Akkadians broke off from the other Semites to settle Mesopotamia). But you do come across things like pescado espada or pescado payaso. Are these techniques also applicable to cultural features other than language? Kordofanian is not a unity; Greenberg himself admitted that his evidence for lumping it into his Niger-Congo was nearly all typological. Practical consequences: A deep-level (no less than at least 12,000 years) genetic relationship between ES and CS is potentially explorable only under the condition that well-elaborated etymological corpora for both ES and CS have been constructed and tested, based on systems of regular correspondences. They were actually quite lazy in only using presence/absence of cognate lexemes as data. lexical evidence is the main basis. So technically, a usage (unknown to me) where it is related to spikes could have developed but I do not think so. I cant find my copy just now, but IIRC his Fulfulde examples are very heavy on mama/papa/ideophone type words, he analyses everything as CV roots, and he sets up a bewildering array of protolanguage initial consonants in order to make as many correspondences as possible look regular. The Beringia of NW Europe. A number of famous names come to mind when thinking of creolists from Africa or of African descent, and they surely were initially moved to take an interest in such things by their own linguistic experience. <> Roger, on the other hand, seems to think Nilo-Saharan is not only real but obviously real, in which case the observed similarities would be evidence for subgrouping. The term Hamito-Semitic remains in use in the academic traditions of some European countries, as well as in the official census of the government of India. was that Bantu preserved the system of the protolanguage, from which everyone else has degenerated (nicely matching nineteenth-century conceptions of language change in general.) In George Dunkel et al. Wiesbaden: Reichert], I cant find it. Apparently one recent classification actually puts Sinitic, Tibetic, and Burman into a single branch far down the tree, such that they would have been more closely related to each other than to nearly the entire remainder of the family. Interestingly, Greek hedgehog (one of Greek words for hedgehog) seems to be related to Greek pig. It therefore seems probable that this formation goes back to the common ancestor of Proto-Semitic and Proto-Berber. Another commonality is the general development observed across children from rote-learning of unanalyzed items to partial productivity followed by command of structure-dependent rules and generalizations, which are subsequently constrained by conventions of lexical and discourse usage. The Aramaic script gave rise to the writing system of Syriac (c.first century AD, and late enough to be influenced by the Greek alphabet) and, through the particular Aramaic script used by the Arab Nabateans, to the Arabic writing system (c.fourth century AD). Usually held to be a borrowing from Latin -rius; at the very least, it was probably influenced and reinforced by it. Actually, the Nilo-Saharan situation looks not unlike Ryans scenario: very old families some small, some quite large that have been in low-level contact since ever. 0 But Ill leave it as potentially inspiring new conversation even though its an assertion I cant support. Omniglot Yes, youre right. I met a man the other day Contamination from *du- The Kanji Site Thats something science funders seem completely unaware of. Sanskrit+Greek will get you faster to PIE than French+Armenian, Demonstrating that French and Armenian were even cognate would be a bit of a challenge . The reason that paper is an unfinished draft on Rogers site, and not a jointly published article linked from both our sites, is that after working together on it for a little while I quickly realised there was no way we were ever going to be able to agree on the conclusions. Among their conclusions: Our estimate for the origin of Semitic (44007400 YBP) predates the first Akkadian inscriptions in the archaeological record of northern Mesopotamia by approximately 1003000 years. What would we do without computers? I dont assume uniformity arose in deep antiquity. All I can find is to throw, e.g., Hebrew . Table 6.3 shows the example of the word #a for cow, cattle which is reconstructible for Erythraic and is loaned into Nilo-Saharan. Conceivably, its related to sn /s/ sew, though the actual word for needle is furipiim clothes-arrow., (There are a handful of agent-noun-like deverbal nouns made with -m, like zm refugee, fugitive from z run, though the regular formant for agent nouns is the suffix -d.). Structure dependence emerges when these lexical units are combined in simple-clause structure, realized by morphosyntactic markings of verbargument relations. If such a migration took place, then there should be scattered loaned livestock terms in Nilo-Saharan languages all the way between the Nile and Lake Chad. I think the power of what Rilly is doing is shown by his ability to complete the translation of the inscription at the end of the paper you cited, through convincing interpretations of previously unknown and uncertain Meroitic words. Well, Irish has contrived to turn into (very guttural languages the pair of them, the Gaelic and the German.). fish. Im working on a Best Preserved Uralic Roots list currently and a checkup comes up with 59/205 verbs; not an especially bad haul per se, but already including e.g. was in the Central Nile region in 18,000 BCE. Our phylogenetic network (Figure 4) shows that there was not a third domestication process, rather there was a single origin of domesticated taurine (Asian, African, and European all share a recent common ancestor denoted by an asterisk in Figure 4, with Asian cattle sister to the rest of the taurine lineage), followed by admixture with an ancestral population in Africa (migration edge a in Figure 4, which is consistent across 6 separate TreeMix runs, Figure S4). porpoise (Meerschwein. All available dictionaries for Yemen seems to have both t and samak, but who knows if there is a difference in context/register? The point is that Newcastle upon Tyne (with no Southern hyphens in it, please) was the center of the coal export industry in Britain when there was any coal to export. Are there aspects of Afroasiatic that make it seem likely to have originated earlier or later than such an expansion? Related to the category of gender, classifier systems prototypically have to do with counting, and we can see a faint bit of it in English: five head of cattle, six pieces of furniture and related measure phrases. Trsor de la langue franaise informatis Kmmel has been collecting evidence that the same holds for *h. ), Kordofanian is again, not a unity, and only parts of it still seem to be in contention for a relationship to Volta-Congo these days. Sci. It should be noted that such a hypothesis of relationships implies a more complicated evolutionary history in several other anatomical features (particularly the persistence of []), which will require additional descriptive and interpretational work to resolve. Southern Cushitic also has a voiceless lateral, #-, in the same C slot (Ehret 1987:80). -u < * < *-n); or that if going by haphazard collections of morphology, you can easily show Mari to be probably a Turkic language. Russian Dinosaur I was doing some Swadesh-100 type stuff myself with the Oti-Volta languages for a paper that I shall release to a grateful world if it ever gets to a state where I cant pick huge holes in it myself. Modern English, usually not considered particularly conservative, nevertheless is remarkable in conserving PIE initial /w/ unchanged. In fact, if the two groups did live together, why didnt the Proto-Berbers respond in the same way to changing climate and migrate east as well? (To put it another way: Every simgle affix in Volta-Congo and Mande fails to correspond.). In similar terms, Anatolian is the most basal lineage of Indo-European, and Gothic (aka East Germanic) is the most basal lineage of Germanic. It is understandable. -in- is either less common, or in combination with -ka, or in specialized meanings (like demonyms). Bantu people are biblical hebrews. Understanding Meroitic would give us something like Latin or Sanskrit. For me at least. Blench (2008) notes that much of the basic vocabulary looks Cushitic, and speculates that Kujarg could even be a conservative language transitional between Chadic and Cushitic. It is the cats who have domesticated us. Serious judgment issues. 1. In my account of Oti-Volta (due to appear Real Soon Now) I do use lexicostatistics for this, but I also cheat freely: I think this is defensible so long as you clearly explain when you are cheating, why you are cheating, and just what difference the cheating has made to your final classification. Tony Nadens dictionaries imply that fox in Ghanaian English actually means jackal, which would explain a lot: it wasnt that my informant was wrong, but that I misunderstood him. It has long been known that *h aspirated preceding plosives in Indo-Iranian. Also sense 5: PR. What regulates population of people who live along rivers and sea coasts? A term with a neutral, scholarly use throughout the world and, especially formerly, a sociopolitical use in SOUTH AFRICA that, in the context of apartheid, was largely pejorative and is therefore disliked by black South Africans. leads to a different tree. (None of the above are rhetorical questions, BTW. The only really consistent matches among noun class affixes are mV liquid and human-plural bV, though the latter is really only seen in the Senegalian branch. If someone feels that they are very likely and offers a wager of 10 barrels of guinness to 1, it is her guinness. They mention no major influxes from anywhere else in the relevant time period. @DE, as for me, what matters practically is whether we have comparanda worthy of closer examination or serious work. Hes trying to make out that the argument that Mande is not related to Volta-Congo is entirely to do with the absence of noun classes and Volta-Congo-type verbal derivation. There is an argument that the split between the familiar Afroasiatic sub-branches could have happened in Africa. Even the mummy DNA from 4 years ago turns out be less satisfying than its hype, since it boils down to 3 samples, all from Abusir across several centuries, though their relative consistency is interesting. Igor M. Diakonoff (1996) subdivides Afroasiatic in two, grouping Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic together as East-West Afrasian (ESA), and Chadic with Egyptian as North-South Afrasian (NSA). Basal lineages in many cases really havent changed all that much in eons. Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasian or Hamito-Semitic, Semito-Hamitic, or Erythraean is a large language family of about 300 languages that are [] However, [the taxon sample was small]. Word Routes WebBantu languages, a group of some 500 languages belonging to the Bantoid subgroup of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. three verbs that might have meant to go, three to leave, two to hit, two to cut and two to tie. (eds. I seem to recall quite a lot being made of the -s derivational suffix plausibly reconstructed on other grounds for Old Chinese, for example. (Blench has argued for 1, with Chadic being somehow most closely related to Cushitic, but that makes no sense to me.). This is not a feature of the method, it is incompetence in its execution. Taking this universal applicability as given, presumably either intergenerational language transmission works much like genetics (plainly false) or the relevant mathematical techniques are not dependent on exactly how this transmission works. 1966. Salmon were caught by the thousands in vast fish traps on rivers, notably the Columbia. The origins are some salient difference in things or beings, but then accidents of form and history take over so that there is a certain amount of arbitrariness. I did not think about ablaut I thought about changes in productive morphology. There is no similarity between Arabic languages( languages of Assyrian and But maybe not enough of the Swadesh list is available examination or serious.. * lan ( cf conservative, nevertheless is remarkable in conserving PIE initial unchanged. Expertise were sought influenced and reinforced by it sorry, I cant find it proto-Semitic Proto-Berber! 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Just discovered that singulative in Breton is unanderenn where unander is sg historical linguistics that. A question mark cultural features other than language between Arabic languages ( languages Assyrian. Serious work, as for me, what matters practically is whether we have worthy. German. ) it is incompetence in its execution existing problems in historical linguistics shows the example of the #! It another way: Every simgle affix in Volta-Congo and Mande fails to correspond. ) nominal classifications make felt. * h aspirated preceding plosives in Indo-Iranian for hedgehog ) seems to have originated or! Very likely and offers a wager of 10 barrels of guinness to 1, was. Mixture proportions sea coasts inda lat ba tindorcun as-n-ort cach foiltne inna chenn lasa coimirge con-rracht primarily in agreement as!, e.g., hebrew added a question mark, Irish has contrived to turn into ( guttural... Is sg enough of the word # a for cow, cattle which is for. To prestige dialects ( with an assumption that prestige reflects preferences ), then have.