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Author Topic: Origins of the Afro-Asiatic languages
ausar
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Locating a phylum in time and space. H. Fleming. African Studies Center, Boston University, Gloucester, MA, 01930, USA. More accurately locating in time and space the hypothetical homeland of the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) linguistic phylum and subsequent movements of its major daughters (e.g., Semitic, Chadic, Omotic). Afrasian is the predominant linguistic phylum in northern Africa, the Nile Valley down to Khartoum, the Red Sea hills, Ethiopian highlands, lowland Horn and much of Kenya and Tanzania. It appears to have been so for the past twenty or thirty millennia. It probably correlates with numerous archeological and fossil human sites of deeper prehistory. Two modern revisions of older and disputed dating systems and locational analyses are undertaken. A new dating system suited for phyla with numerous branches is created and applied; called ELD (Essential Linguistic Dating), it escapes most problems of traditional glottochronology, including binaristic insufficiency. For locations of homelands, a modified version of Dyen?s Dispersal Theory is used. While not necessarily more accurate than traditional intuitive approaches, its assumptions and derivations are clearer and subject to falsification. While new data may modify the resulting Afrasian homeland hypothesis, it appears proto-Afrasian was spoken around 25 kya in the area between Meroe and Aksum. Afrasian was probably part of a larger entity, moving from the Nile Valley into western Eurasia for many millennia. ELD and Dispersal Theory as part of testable hypotheses about linguistic homelands promise to reunite the disparate subfields of ?four-field? anthropology in the pursuit of deeper human prehistory. ====================================================================== Report: Near Eastern languages came from Africa 10,000 years ago Investigator: Ene Metspalu Tuesday May 28th, 2002 by Laura Spinney Analysis of thousands of mitochondrial DNA samples has led Estonian archeogeneticists to the origins of Arabic. Ene Metspalu of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Tartu University and the Estonian Biocentre in Tartu, claims to have evidence that the Arab- Berber languages of the Near and Middle East came out of East Africa around 10,000 years ago. She has found evidence for what may have been the last sizeable migration out of Africa before the slave trade. Genetic markers transmitted through either the maternal or paternal line have been used to trace the great human migrations since Homo sapiens emerged in Africa. But attempts to trace the evolution of languages have met with less success, partly because of the impact on languages of untraceable political and economic upheavals. Metspalu and colleagues analyzed inherited variations in a huge number of samples - almost 3000 - of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) taken from natives of the Near East, Middle East and Central Asia, as well as North and East Africa. mtDNA is inherited through the maternal line, and by comparing their data with existing data on European, Indian, Siberian and other Central Asian populations, the researchers were able to create a comprehensive phylogenetic map of maternal lineages diverging from Africa and spreading towards Europe and Asia. Working in collaboration with language specialists, they found that this movement 10,000 years ago, which was probably centred on Ethiopia, could well have been responsible for seeding the Afro- Asiatic language from which all modern Arab-Berber languages are descended. "This language was spoken in Africa 10,000 or 12,000 years ago," Metspalu told BioMedNet News. "We think it was around that time that carriers brought these Afro-Asiatic languages to the Near East." The language, or its derivatives, later spread much further afield. What could have triggered the movement she can only speculate. One possibility is that increasing desertification was causing famine in Africa and driving hunters further afield in search of animals. Interestingly, the lineages they traced through this 10,000-year-old migration didn't seem to get much further north than modern-day Syria or east of modern-day Iraq. There is no evidence of the lineages in the mtDNA of people from Turkey or Iran, says Metspalu. "We can't understand why this boundary [to the Arab-Berber speaking world] is so sharp," she said. "They came out of Africa, and when they reached Turkey they just stopped." She believes some kind of physical boundary, now vanished, must have impeded them. The same genetic detective work has confirmed archeological evidence that the biggest movement out of Africa occurred around 50,000 years ago - which is when Africans first settled in other continents - and that it originated in a small East African population. <<<http://news.bmn.com/join>>>


Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
somdweller
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most of the languages from asia in this family are extinct; aramaic, hebrew,
and arabic the exceptions. most of the african ones are still spoken. geez is kept somewhat alive in its written form. you notice that they label amharic and tigrean as semetic, as meaning brought by foreigners. semitic is a linguistic term and has nothing to do with ethnicity. besides, semitic languages are a sub-group of the afro-asiatic group which comes from africa anyway. aside from arabic the largest spoken afro-asiatic language is amharic.

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ausar
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Actually,Chadic has the most speakers out of Afro-Asiatic. Let's not forget Ormoic either.


Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
somdweller
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maybe when they made that statistic they were implying that a sizable amount of ethiopia's 65 million people speak it's official language, amharic. also chadic itself has numerous sub-divisions.
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somdweller
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africa has the most diverse language distribution in the world. ausar, do you knowwhat peoples of western and central africa would fall under the category of chadic besides hausa.

when did linguistic researchers decide to include the chadic languages. (hmm, why would they be left out?) sarcasm


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somdweller
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amharic; 2nd largest semitic language spoken, but it's all the same anyway, literally.
Posts: 32 | From: maryland | Registered: Mar 2003  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
   

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