and published several articles in Arabic, and I think this thesis is only accessible in Khartoum. Sayd is an Arabic word for fishes and this is our speciality. ( .) in a dictionary, published in Amsterdam in 1700: Simius, Simia | , [] | Aap Meerkat. The term Indo-Hittite was coined between these two phases and regrettably not reintroduced (not even as Indo-Anatolian, which exists but hasnt caught on) during the slow, gradual end of the second phase. So far none of these (geographically) Iranian languages look anything like Semitic. Philology.ru Distribution of the Afroasiatic/Hamito-Semitic languages in Africa. And my experience parallels yours: having first learned historical linguistics through a Romance lens (with some Indo-European), I was quite surprised to realize how little (good) work on (almost all) other language families had been done by comparison, and in the case of some language families the paucity of ANY solid work was enough to make one doubt the validity of the family in question. . This helped me get a ground sense of how the grouping may not be as strong as some would have it, DE. WEST-AFRICAN ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF IGBO. You can still find textbooks that mention Ural-Altaic. Yes. They call it the minimum of cognates and offer another 28 possible cognates. These separate roots act as the head of a morphological subfamily (Figure1). DE: Oh, sure. Thats about as much I can say before reading the paper. I was thinking of it more as a muddy consonant at the edge of d/g, where enunciation might surface the g-ishness, rather than a true assimilation that got reversed, or whatever the term would be. ), Odd that he seems to posit an assimilated form for Proto-NES but unassimilated for Proto-Nubian, though. But in biology, too, phylogenetics has to contend with convergence (most of it not attributable to factors that are already understood in that much detail) and the occasional horizontal gene transfer. It was elicited by a recent article in the world renowned New York Times newspaper published on April, 14 th, If you start off with the number of Hittite words with cognates elsewhere in IE, and apply Swadeshs formula >> with an appropriate error range <<, do you get results comparable to those of Chung et al.? @PlasticPaddy: that looks like a great addition to the previous thread on fish terms and sex trade jargons. Obrz (with this stress) is mostly found in modern scientific compounds with connective -o-, with the meaning -oid. @LH, so apparently you think that without morphology a genetic relationship cant be established. Catch of the day or Todays catch on restaurant menus. Religion has been suggested. Darwin says explicitly that his methods are the (up to date, in the news) methods of comparative philology. I thought it was more like Arab raiders in Africa or Viking raiders in some places: burn a village, steal some women and slaves, come back in a few years and do it again. There is, however, some amount of evidence for large taxonomic blocks (stocks) that constitute subdivisions of this linguistic phantom, albeit not necessarily the same subdivisions as postulated by Greenberg and his followers.. I think a lot of the comparative (sorry) backwardness of comparative work with African languages boils down to the fact that only a handful of people are actually interested in doing it at all, and that some of those, even, are more enthusiastic than careful. But I suppose thats what you meant by dissimilation. If you trust the grammars, the Chilean case is supposed to be the same, and its only the distinctive phonology that causes it to be realised as [al(a)i(h)] (habli, habl). Based on actual real live fieldwork, moreover. Blench likes the first proposal (Afroasiatic). The verb digi has got the whole set of regular inchoative and causative derived forms that other body-position verbs do, and belongs to the minority imperfective-only conjugation just like the others, so it doesnt seem likely to be a recent loan or anything of that kind. Anikins new Russian etymological dictionary, now on letter ) Because authors use slightly different datasets, pick up cognacy judgments from prior researchers or use their own, consider grammatical data or only use lexical data, use variations on the methods of calculation etc. The earliest reference there is to a sexalingual dictionary of Poletika a translation of John Rays trilingual nomenclator classicus (he added Russian, French and German glosses to English, greek and Latin). If you trust the tree, you can then discover innovations in other parts of language by mapping them on the tree. The word Bantu means "the people" and is made up of the stem -ntu ( "person" ) and the plural prefix ba -. And yet genetics seems to show that affinity is not illusory. IIRC English did replace a lot of its Swadesh entries with assorted Frenchy borrowings. Its not so hard to imagine them just being dropped altogether. Hausa (the usual market language thereabouts) is completely unrelated and very different (but then you wouldnt really expect those dodgy merchant types to talk like us salt-of-the-earth farmers anyhow.). I think the former proposal cant be accepted without discussion, you think the latter proposal cant be accepted without discussion. And spoke me so, and spoke me thus: Oh, dallyings a sad mistake; a passage by Kossmann (after listing -s/-us Latin loans and -u Latin loans, speculating that these can possibly reflect different time or borrowing or different Latin case form used). Lots of biologists thought the same when phylogenetics was introduced in biology forty years ago. * Morphological data is of course unavailable for the many isolating branches, and missing data is a problem for Bayesian inference, which overweights the characters that are scored for all taxa. Leopold Bloom, while meditating in the bath, has a similar thought about Palestine. may testify to the arrival of these new population groups. Its not as crude as early lexicostatistics. PIE *VsrV > PGmc *VstrV, Perhaps it can be generalized to any sociolects and dialects to an extent (just to an extent): they can be shaped by decisions, not mere action of some language machine that obeys language laws. 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. 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. I still think that collective/mass is a different meaning. Bantu meaning: 1. a group of languages spoken by people in Central and Southern Africa that includes Swahili. Ku(d) referred to both fresh and salty varieties, and the same sign was used as a semantic determiner for fish of all kettles. : >the chief interest naturally lies in the gutturals. Noic (Russian Noy, Noah) did come time to my mind, but not Mitic, I never thought about it!!! Head-and-shoulder portrait of Adam Smith: INVISIBLE HAND). I didnt think it had ever not been accepted. Finally, Joseph Greenbergs 1950 work led to the widespread rejection of Hamitic as a language category by linguists. The survey paper I was reading in Human Molecular genetics mentioned Natufian affinities for Kelif el Boroud*. It eases my conscience a bit about my dabbling with Swadesh lists in Oti-Volta, where Ive seen fit to discard inconvenient outcomes when they seem grossly at variance with better evidence for subgrouping, but snuck in lexicostatistics as a help to estimating the relative length of the various branches (as opposed to defining the branching in the first place.) But Swahili (Language of the Coasts) has borrowed the word fish from Arabic. Natrix 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. As you say, theres new high-quality data coming in a lot these days, as well; this is not the least of the things that makes a fresh look at comparative Oti-Volta work both possible and fruitful, too (though thats a whole lot less challenging than Eastern Sudanic.). We have early records of the Amorites because they came into contact with the Sumerians in the third millennium B.C.E. And in the acquisition of the lexicon, again across languages, children move from a restricted vocabulary of nursery terms and over or underextensions of conventional items to a period of creative innovation; eventually the conventional lexicon takes over, while at the same time vocabulary growth is both constrained and elaborated by socially and culturally appropriate distinctions of register and usage, lasting into adolescence. Clearly where there are major disagreements between professional linguists the data must be hard to process and most importantly, you must follow the view of an individual The former was spoken millenia before the later and hardly in the same place. My favorite is that they somehow tracked down a 500-word article I wrote in the late 80s about a high school girls badminton game for a local daily newspaper, and theyve asked me at least 100 times to claim its authorship, but I wont give them the satisfaction. Most of the names used to indicate this group have remained current: Semito-Hamitic (Benfey 1869: 683; Petrcek 1972), Hamito-Semitic (Hovelacque 1887: 212; Mukarovsky 1966), Erythraic (Reinisch 1873 apud Cohen 1947:12; Tucker 1967), Afroasiatic (Greenberg 1955: 54; Hodge 1968), Lisramic (Hodge 1972), Afro-Asian (Albright-Lambdin 1970), Afrasian (Dolgopoljskij 1973). Those who argue for Anatolian to have split off earliest explain that use as parallel spread of an originally more limited ending in the r-branches vs. a loss (except for the 3rd pl. (In good faith, certainly.) In the south of the Arabian peninsula a distinct consonantal script had appeared by at least the sixth century BC, and certainly had begun to develop several hundred years earlier. There seem to be a lot of coincidences of population movement that align with Out of Natufian, that you have to wave away to believe Afroasiatic Out of Africa. Also, talk of dilution of Neanderthal ancestry suggests that it was there before it got diluted, but wouldnt it be possible that the Neanderthal admixture took place on a frontier zone, and that the offspring continued moving away from Arabia? First, it may help some to know that DM is quoting the Blench article, not a post somewhere above. But some populations of landlocked salmon never reach the ocean. Quite recently, additional examples of Proto-Sinaitic writing have been discovered near the ancient city of Thebes, along the Farsht Road at Wadi el-Hol, dating c. 1850 BC (Darnell etal., 2005). Bantu. But in any case, the rows should be characters and the cognate sets should be states of these characters. Gk. Having said that, I think his argument, if you follow it through, actually undermines a central plank of Greenbergs Niger-Congo, which is that the Niger-Congo noun class systems are so typologically exceptional that their presence is enough to prove the genetic unity of the group. Oti-Volta-Land is (mostly) a whole lot safer: long may it remain so. forager from Mota, southern Ethiopia(24)to represent distinct components of ances-try plausibly found in ancient and present-dayeastern Africans, with present-day western Africans among the outgroups. Somehow. He seems to be on the forefront of this, in Africa and in NE India. @January First-of-May: The Biblical Aramaic date was the other one that jumped out at me as clearly wrong, but Y explained above what happened there. Now the verbal system, thats more of a challenge worthy of a Starostin ), Are Kehf and Kelif cognates, or different terms that both happen to be applied to this site, because these arent typos. That is what e.g. Andras Rajkis Etymological Dictionary of Arabic Figure 6. But the basic yes/no on adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine is binary and unforgiving. a related process of Unilateral Independent Semantic Development as being to blame for apparent proto-synonymy arising for unexpected items in the first place. Blench is always worth reading, though I priggishly disapprove of his overenthusiasm for top-level lumping. All comments are copyright their original posters. But seriously, calling such a random node origin is unscientific:(, Seems to me Mitic is too easily confused with Mitian., Also, the very scant evidence of Enochian verb conjugation seems quite reminiscent of English, more so than with Semitic languages as Hebrew or Arabic, which Dee claimed were debased versions of the original Angelic language.. He needed words documented and available for many langauges, he chose 165 including hat. ), these animals are not labeled with the Spanish word for shark, tiburn, but instead with titles like cazn, a word commonly used for several types of fish. You come across more African names in descriptive works. What methods? XIX Nianyans Turkish Etymological Dictionary But then the problem becomes; what have we gained? One of the things that made me wonder was how the lights might come on if someone had a hearth tongue in one branch of a group and a market tongue in another. The Daily Growler Do we actually have enough evidence to say that the Natufians went from the Levant into Egypt, rather than from Egypt into the Levant? Though not as cool as Oti-Volta, obvs.) Hey, those Afroasiatic Y chromosomes dont propagate themselves, you know. Japanese, of course, has several words for , the two mentioned in the list are (sakana, uo). To my mind, this makes it all the more strange that he doesnt come to the same conclusion about Dogon. The constants are the semantically salient human and liquid classes; elsewhere the systems get regularly remodelled and recreated. If all we had were the contemporary standard languages, though good luck. Still, it shows at the very least that hunter-gatherers are well able to spread single language families over a large area. . The idea of the Semitic languages originating in Iran is not quite as counterintuitive if you imagine Semitic replacing some other Afro-Asiatic language groups intervening. >So he is hypothesising a change *gd -> d(d) (he does not explain the vowel change.) Blench (1999d). So if I strip off a few layers of irony, it will be just they same. J.Pystynen: Okay, Ill bite: what is the Helsinki slang word for fish? Clearly the idea was a proof of concept: show the method works on the easy cases first, then proceed to more difficult ones. and the Chinese paddlefish seems to be extinct because of the Three Gorges dam. When that came to an end would be when. R.D. I hadnt even realized Rilly ends a section with a stirring call the most urgent task for the progress of the Meroitic philology is not to resume the study of funerary texts or even to explore the most obscure passages of the royal texts, but to work a proper description of languages and dialects that are greatly endangered. And mentions that hes got Nyimang and the Higir dialect of Nara covered, but there are at least another 12 someone needs to claim. He divides Omotic into two branches, North Omotic and South Omotic. This was also supported by the presence of similar mtDNA haplogroups (U6, M1) associated with the back-to-Africa migration, suggesting a continuity between Later Stone Age and Early Neolithic populations in the Maghreb. Perhaps not even Ehret. These emerge relatively early in Turkish compared with European or, First Language Acquisition, Developmental Psychology of, Linguists typically argue in favor of abstract representations for language, but many recent approaches to language within the cognitive science framework have stressed the importance of surface forms. Of course, you wont have large-scale maritime fisheries without reliable seaworthy vessels, but that sailing technology is generally older than the earliest records we have from various societies. Quite the opposite. Let the software count which phylogenetic hypothesis accounts for all the contradictory data in the most parsimonious way. I am not interested in Meinhofs person. (1) an event: people from islands A and C together colonized island B and created mixed population I imagine, in fact, that Hausa is actually too different to awaken a nascent interest in comparative linguistics: no obvious points of comparison to get you started. In general, I have to insist that areal linguistics, and contact linguistics more broadly, are or at least should be every bit as fundamental to historical linguistics as reconstruction and phylogeny. Thanks for the Melchert paper, drasvi. I think the reason bageri, boulangerie are later formations is that the early baker/fournisseur provided the oven space and/for not only bread or cakes. The really striking thing about the paper for me was how overwhelmingly Natufian the ancestry of Arabian Arabs is. Etymologisches Wrterbuch des Deutschen Overall progression thus involves an evolution in construction types. I didnt believe in Nilo-Saharan at that time any more than I do now; the possibility that I was interested in is that maybe Songhay-Saharan was a valid family. naukoobrzno scient-oid-ly (about somethign that can be science or not, but has appearance of science). ), porkupine: Place was evidently a regular officina gentium , Unpleasantly similar to Soviet Kaderschmiede. And they both characterize the roots as good/very good candidates for cognates, weak candidates (um, Vydrin actually writes week candidates) and definitely different. (Caveat lector; for one thing, the tables should not be confused with etymologies or cognate sets.). that a locational word is used in the English participle. The evidence seems weakly suggestive, italics in the original. ), Perhaps not even Ehret. At this point, people know to code for borrowings. How much that really contributes to interpretation these days, I cant say, because I mostly read IEanist contributions to Hittite philology, so my sample is skewed. The overall progression is thus much as Brown (1973) defined for English: from single words to early word combinations, thence to simple clause structure, followed by a range of devices for clause linkage. Ive just discovered that Roger Blenchs Archaeology, Language and African Past, that drasvi kindly pointed to above, contains the following words from Samuel Johnson himself, no less: There is no tracing the connection of ancient nations but by language; and therefore I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations. By contrast, in French, uninflected verbs surface to the level of the word, as is the case in English. Its precisely by looking at the data from comparison of individual languages that you begin to see how weak the evidence for groups like Gur, for example, really is. the methodology of the paper itself is valueless (after all, its the same as the process that proved that Indo-European originated in Anatolia nine thousand years ago). Digital Dictionaries of South Asia This is Very True Indeed. and i dont know of languages that do a salt/freshwater fish distinction. I give up with that one. Actually, if agriculture reached North Africa as part of the same expansion out of Anatolia that brought agriculture to Europe, and AA reached it later in a pastoral expansion, that would explain why some of the agricultural-substrate words in western Indo-European branches also show up in Berber. Or their civilised hordes began to show thier first interest in savagery. But some had dropped out, at random, so what survived of language C was not C1 through C100, but C11, C14, C22, C37. (Faroese is closely-ish related to Icelandic, both historically and modernly.). .I will reexamine for Anatolian the issue of putative shared, non-trivial innovations with and borrowings from Italic, Celtic, and Germanic, following upon the excellent but almost totally ignored study of Jaan Puhvel 1994. Blenchs own aspersions about splitters, now: they are unfair. I just noticed I missed a whole bunch of comments here. Not saying this contradicts your point. Wordorigins Would-be projectors of a Bantu-like system further back have traditionally argued that this is because languages with less exuberant systems have lost classes. Your email address will not be published. A ukud abak fished in the saltwater sea, while a ukud a dugak fished in rivers and lakes. Contact!!! One classifier (t'u or dtua) is used for larger animals, furniture like tables and chairs, suits of men's clothing so far, things with arms and legs but also germs and fish! three verbs that might have meant to go, three to leave, two to hit, two to cut and two to tie. prounouns). An article on su merced is downloadable here: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=198213. I dont think this is even particularly far-fetched, given my own view that the Proto-Volta-Congo system may only have had three or four classes, and that they were marked not by flexion but by clitic particles, even the position of which before or after the noun varied in different branches. Several phenomenal expressions of late third millennium urban city-states (Ebla, Mari, Urkesh) enlighten us on Syria and its ethnic composition. Chung et al.s paper on the dating of IE is a good combination of the two. Czech, dikobraz: Borrowed from Russian (dikobrz) by Jan Svatopluk Presl;[1] from (dkij, wild) + (braz, looking)., Wish PIE reconstructions were like this:). No it hasnt (And what is a basal lineage in historical linguistic terms, anyway? I think to understand the growth of NS and NC, we have to consider whether there were similar new forces at play earlier than we are aware of. In truth, the difference between morphological characters and lexical ones is quantitative rather than qualitative. He places Ongota in South Omotic. 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 affixes are certainly morphological now, but they show pretty clear evidence of a former life as clitics. Previous studies showed that this ancestry was not present in the Levant during the Neolithic period but appeared in the Bronze Age where 50% of the local ancestry was replaced by a population carrying ancient Iran-related ancestry (Lazaridis et al., 2016). I wonder if the errors are just in the published paper or were actually in the study itself. Naked Translations @Hans, it is hard to prove that that disctionary was the frist book to use the word. Anyway, they became Russian nobility (at the moment a branch of that family with a slightly different family name Politkovskie are more noticeable). -Pharyngeal consonants. Yes; thats why I put So here are my comments on the slides: above them. What he class hyper-rigorous is actually just what Indo-Europeanists, Uralicists, Algonquianists etc call rigorous: standard practice for real comparativists. One of them yesterday was the same (contunuum I believe) as the ancestor of Berber (I called it the least recent own ancestor). Balashon In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that what had previously been known as Western Cushitic is an independent branch of Afroasiatic, suggesting for it the new name Omotic. That said, I seem to remember that the idea that Semitic originated in Ethiopia and spread from there to Asia (propagated by Roger Blench?) Heres the passage: >The word urus (/jrs/; plural uri)[5][6] is a Latin word, but was borrowed into Latin from Germanic (cf. Separately, the comments about the sizes of fish around the world set me thinking. %PDF-1.5 % Tower of Babel etymological database Thats why its so hard to tell if the borrowing in Bi goes all the way down. Sentence first [diyyu] Porcupine is monosyllabic in Kusaal: snm /s:m/. I have no idea what point you want to make. The orders NounPostposition, VerbAuxiliary, Relative ClauseHead Noun, and AdjectiveNoun are all correlated and thus they tend to co-occur with SOV order cross-linguistically (see Word Order). To Khoisan he also added the Tanzanian Hadza and Sandawe, though this view has been discredited as linguists working on these languages consider them to be linguistic isolates. And there is a full grammar of Agolle Kusaal by Anthony Agoswin Musah (but mine is cheaper.). I feel I should make a small defence of computers, along the lines of Garbage-in Garbage-out. Its titled The Small Bang and it reports on a newly funded project to collect linguistic data on Bangime and other Dogon languages. The Geez and Ugaritic dates match, as does that of the misattributed Aramaic. In these approaches, abstract representations emerge as secondary properties at best, and at worst, are absent entirely. And in prehistory, were not aware of any centralizing or homogenizing forces other than demic ones. ), Theyre so intimidating that I never dared look inside! Many of the modernist papers do not really have much to say about the purpose of classification, except where they continue and link it to dates, geography or human genetics. For example, the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol resembling waves of water and used in the Egyptian system as a monoconsonantal symbol with the value /n/ was assigned the value /m/ in the Proto-Sinaitic script, as the word for water in the Semitic language of that script began with /m/. Specifically, *VstrV is the Grimm outcome of PIE *VsrV, *VrV is the Verner outcome. Just looking at some relevant work. [] However, [the taxon sample was small]. some 20% of the most basic vocabulary of this outlier language, and a bit of the grammar, is AA, https://www.oocities.org/gdvbqz/ling/eafricamap2.gif, Id say contact with AA is rather more plausible than contact with Khoe-San. In fact, contact with AA is an absolute certainty , (though Maarten Mous grammar of Iraqw, to be fair, says that currently, at any rate, there is little contact between these two groups apart from the Iraqw obtaining honey from the Hadza in exchange for tobacco.). The rise of state institutions, temple economies, historical writing, in short, civilization, is a hallmark of Sumer and Egypt, c. 3000BCE. I am not sure if ikhths-uvis-jukn is a good ground , it is imperfect because of that Greek i, but if we assume paleo-Balto-Graeco-Armenian laringeal, it starts looking nice. Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish Texts in Cyrillic. Akten der IX. Auroch? The Migration Period vandalized Philolog.ru Having been to SOAS, I feel confident in saying that Erythraic has long since been abandoned there as elsewhere. I like to think well of Blench. If they knew anything about rates of change of languages (or say compared any contemporary language to its form 100 years ago vs 3,000 YBP), wouldnt it be screamingly obvious their methodology makes no sense?