quote:Originally posted by the questioner: @Clyde Winters
what makes it Asiatic is the gender distinction between male and female within the language.
African languages do not distinguish between male and female unless they had contact with Asiatics.
Can you give examples? (In a new thread).
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
Gender is found in many African languages that are not associated with Asian languages. The Egyptian languages was spokan thousands of years before they came in contact with Asian languages. The plural feminine in Egyptian is -iptn/iptf and Wolof: batane/batafe. The feminine singular in Egyptian is twy and t3, this corresponds to -twy and ta in Wolof.
The Egyptian relative affirmative formative is -ntt, this corresponds to Wolof affirmative na tya.
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
Gender system are common in the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan.
The Egyptian feminine is -t. The Old Kingdom feminine -t, is found in several African languages:
Galla(Oromo) lafa/lafa-ti 'the earth'
Sidamo -tta or tsa
Ronga, -ati
Zulu, -azi
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
Gender system are common in the Niger-Congo and Khoisan languages.
Some of the Niger-Congo languages that have gender markers include: Ijo,Zande, Zulu and Wolof. There are different personal pronouns for masculine and feminine humans in these languages. The Mande languages also illustrate sex-distinctions.
In the Khoisan languages: Sandawe, Kwali and Aodga we find masculine and feminine distinctions for lexical items.
Posted by capra (Member # 22737) on :
Sex-gender is not exclusive to Afro-Asiatic in Africa, but Clyde is full of shit as usual.
Sidamo and Oromo are Afro-Asiatic languages; the markers Clyde is claiming may actually exist and be cognate with Egyptian, though I certainly wouldn't trust him to report anything accurately.
Zulu has a suffix -kazi which can be added to words for animals or people to make them female, e.g. invu "sheep", invukazi "ewe". This is from a common Bantu root meaning "woman", PB *kádí. It is not a feminine grammatical marker and has no demonstrable connection to Egyptian.
I don't know about Ronga, but Clyde is probably lying.
Neither Wolof nor Zulu have sex-specific personal pronouns. Ijo, Zande, and a handful of other Niger-Congo (if that is a thing) languages do.
This is not the same thing as the sex-based gender in Egyptian, Semitic, and many other Afro-Asiatic languages. It is like the difference between English and French: in English we distinguish 'he' and 'she' for people, but not for objects, and there are no distinct masculine and feminine forms for articles, adjectives, etc. In French, however, all nouns have a gender - an eye is 'he' and a tongue is 'she': le oeil, la langue. In Middle Egyptian jrt "eye" is feminine, ns "tongue" is masculine. Other words have to agree with the gender of the noun.
Many so-called 'Khoisan' languages really do have masculine and feminine grammatical gender, e.g. Hadza and Khoekhoe. Sandawe has a masculine-feminine distinction for people but inanimate objects don't have a gender (masculine is used by default, feminine can be used to mean the object is small, and some people use feminine for the Sun and Moon).
Probably won't bother replying to further lies and obfuscation from Clyde.
Posted by the questioner (Member # 22195) on :
Partly what Capra said is what i agree with
African languages however generally do not have infixes like Semitic and European languages do
Ancient Egyptian or other African languages with Asiatic influence do not have infixes this is what separates them from Europe and Asia
example Europeans say- sing, sung, sang Semitics say- kataba, katabnā , yaktubu, kātib from the root KTB
Posted by DD'eDeN (Member # 21966) on :
Question: Has anyone ever heard of the Lusu people of West Africa, around Ghana, Gambia, Sierra Leone? A ref. to Fernando Poo discovering a river there mentioned Lusu, but I can't find it. In reference to original name "Guinea".