#omotic — Public Fediverse posts

East Cushitic and Omotic passive *-ad’-

I’ve been working on an overview of the morphological arguments for which language families do and do not belong to Afroasiatic. One of the features you find in nearly every branch of Afroasiatic is a system of derivational affixes where *s forms causatives, *m (*n in Semitic and Egyptian) forms some kind of middle, and *t forms reflexives, passives etc. For example, Biblical Hebrew (the *s turns into h or ʔ in most West Semitic languages):

• קָדֵשׁ qāḏēš ‘it is sacred’ (basic verb)
• הִקְדִּישׁ hiqdīš ‘he made sacred’ (causative)
• נִקְדַּשׁ niqdaš ‘he showed himself sacred’ (middle)
• הִתְקַדֵּשׁ hiṯqaddēš ‘he sanctified himself’ (reflexive)

The *m/*n and *t are close in meaning, and sometimes you’ll see *m/*n in one language in a function that *t fulfills in another.

In East Cushitic, the passive suffix *-at- has some allomorphs (variant forms). Hayward (1984, paywall), reconstructs a paradigm where they are distributed according to the person/number/gender of the verb:

1sg.*-ad’-2sg.*-at-3m.sg.*-at-3f.sg.*-at-1pl.*-an-2pl.*-at-3pl.*-at-

Looking at the subject-marking suffixes that would follow this suffix, it becomes clear that the 1pl. form got its *n through assimilation to the following *n. But it isn’t clear where the glottalized (so, ejective or implosive) *d’ in the 1sg. comes from, or why the 1sg. form is different from the 3sg.:1

1sg.*-V2sg.*-tV3m.sg.*-V3f.sg.*-tV1pl.*-nV2pl.*-tVVni3pl.*-VVni

If we look at the matching paradigm in Proto-Agaw (Central Cushitic), or at the historically related prefix conjugation in East Cushitic, Agaw, or Semitic, we see that the 1sg. is marked with ʔ, against y for the 3m.sg. and 3pl. Now the Proto-East-Cushitic passive paradigm makes sense: 1sg. *-at-ʔV assimilated to *-ad’-ʔV, just as 1pl. *-at-nV became *-an-nV. So we’ve got East Cushitic evidence for 1sg. *ʔ as well. That’s cool.

Map of Afroasiatic languages by Wikimedia user Noahedits. Most of the Cushitic south of the Eritrean border is East Cushitic.

Omotic is a group of Ethiopian languages that were briefly considered West Cushitic, but ejected from Cushitic in the 1970s. It’s a diverse group and most scholars think it actually consists of two to four unrelated families. Serious doubts have been raised about whether any of them is even Afroasiatic in the first place.

So far I’ve looked at two of the smaller families, Ari-Banna (= Aroid = South Omotic) and Dizoid (= Majoid = part of North Omotic, allegedly). Morphologically, there’s very little there that looks Afroasiatic. But they have the derivational affixes we’ve been talking about: cf. Hamar (Ari-Banna) causative -(i)s, passive –(a)ɗ– (that’s an implosive), and vestigial –Vm- with a range of mediopassive and imperfective meanings (Petrollino 2016); Sheko (Dizoid) causative -s, passive -t’ (that’s an ejective), middle -n̩ (a syllabic nasal that assimilates to the preceding consonant; Hellenthal 2010). From what I’ve seen, something similar appears to be present in the big Ta-Ne or slightly bigger Narrow Omotic (or North Omotic minus Dizoid) family, again with little else to show for Afroasiatic morphology.

What’s super significant here is that in both (all three? four?) Omotic families, the passive is marked by a glottalized consonant: implosive ɗ in Hamar, ejective t’ in Sheko, something similar in the rest (I think). First of all, this is a typically East Cushitic form of the passive/reflexive affix; I don’t think it occurs elsewhere, you just get reflexes of *t. And second, as we’ve just seen, there’s a beautiful East-Cushitic-internal way to derive the glottalized *d’ from older Afroasiatic *t.

So I’m inclined to see the Omotic derived verb suffixes as borrowings from East Cushitic, languages with which they have a long history of contact and that are spoken right next door. That means that the best morphological argument for counting anything Omotic as Afroasiatic can be attributed to contact.2 For the time being, Ari-Banna, Dizoid, and probably Narrow Omotic as well are ending up on my “Not Afroasiatic” list.

1. This is Appleyard’s (2004, paywall) reconstruction of Proto-Lowland-East-Cushitic. It could be that the Highland East Cushitic evidence changes the reconstruction, I don’t know. ↩︎
2. Dizoid has some independent personal pronouns that look nice and Afroasiatic, but you don’t get the typically AA paradigms with t‘s and k‘s interchanging in the second person, for instance. So it could just be a chance resemblance. ↩︎

#Afroasiatic #Cushitic #Hebrew #linguistics #Omotic

The Semitic languages show a regular correspondence of p in some languages and f in others. For instance, ‘mouth’ in Akkadian is p-ū; Biblical Hebrew pe; Biblical Aramaic pūm; Ge’ez ʾäf;1 and Classical Arabic fam-. (Modern South Arabian should have an f too, but has replaced this word.) This sound is uncontroversially reconstructed as Proto-Semitic *p, as in *p-ūm ‘mouth’.2 Traditionally, the change of *p to f was taken as a diagnostic feature of the South Semitic languages.

This figure and the next adapted from Huehnergard & Rubin (2011).

[p] to [f], a plosive changing into a fricative, is an example of lenition. Lenition is a common type of sound change, so we tell our students, so it makes sense that *p is the older sound and it changed to f. So far, so good.

While preparing my first couple of classes for Comparative Semitics this year, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about this anymore. Two things bother me:

1. The examples of p > f I know about are all part of a larger change affecting other plosives too, like Grimm’s Law (Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, *kw > Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *h, *hw and related changes) or Aramaic and Hebrew BGDKPT-spirantization. Is just p turning to f really so common? How about just f turning into p?
2. Most scholars don’t accept the family tree above anymore. In the current model, the changes look more like this:

Now we need three or four separate instances of *p > *f—just as I’m starting to doubt how common that change is. Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), who argue for this second family tree, explain this as an areal change that spread through contact. But what kind of a contact scenario should we think of here? Did f spread from Ancient South Arabian (if those languages even had it) to all its neighbours? It’s not like we see enough other shared contact features to confidently posit a South Semitic language area or something.

Looking at Afroasiatic, things don’t get better:

• Berber has f, not p
• Cushitic has f, not p
• Egyptian has p and f, but we don’t know which one corresponds to Semitic *p (if either)
• Chadic: same as Egyptian, to my knowledge
• (I’m not sure Omotic is Afroasiatic, still reading up on this)

So if we posit Proto-Semitic *p, either we need two more independent cases of *p > *f (Berber, Cushitic),3 maybe more (Egyptian? Chadic?), or we reconstruct *f for Proto-Afroasiatic and say Proto-Semitic changed *f to *p. At which point, why not cut out the middleman and keep *f, then change it to *p in East and Northwest Semitic? Just two changes instead of the minimum of six you need otherwise.

So, are there any good arguments to reconstruct Proto-Semitic *p—or should we press *f and leave behind this relic from theories that believed in a South Semitic subgrouping?

1. Probably influenced by Cushitic, but we can still take it as related to the other Semitic words. ↩︎
2. In my opinion, the only word known so far with a superheavy syllable, exceptionally permitted because the word is monosyllabic. ↩︎
3. I’m also really starting to doubt that Cushitic is one family. So maybe make that four (Berber, Beja, Agaw, East/South Cushitic). ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/11/07/froto-semitic/

#Afroasiatic #Agaw #Akkadian #Ancie #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthAr #Omotic #ProtoSemitic

Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic