I think I'd like to learn an #AfroAsiatic language. One with nonconcatentaive root-template morphology.
Probably #Hebrew. Because of my Jewish heritage.
#language #linguistics #nonconcatenativemorphology

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, Aari-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 (Aari-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, Aari-Banna, Dizoid, and probably Narrow Omotic as well are ending up on my “Not Afroasiatic” list.

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. ↩︎

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:

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?

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?

Probably influenced by Cushitic, but we can still take it as related to the other Semitic words. ↩︎

In my opinion, the only word known so far with a superheavy syllable, exceptionally permitted because the word is monosyllabic. ↩︎

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

Two recent publications by Marijn van Putten deserve your attention:

• ‘The Berbero-Semitic adjective’, BSOAS (Open Access). Abstract: “It has long been recognized that the Semitic suffix conjugation and the Berber adjectival perfective suffix conjugation have striking similarities in their morphology, which has been correctly attributed to be the result of a shared inheritance from Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Nevertheless, the function of these conjugations in the respective language families is quite distinct. This article argues that ultimately this suffix conjugation is a predicative suffix in the common ancestor of Berber and Semitic, and moreover shows that Semitic and Berber have significant overlap in the stem formations of adjectives. It is argued that these formations must likewise be reconstructed for their common ancestor.”
• ‘Segolate Plurals and North-West Semitic’, on his blog. Some comments:

Pluralses

Marijn argues against the view that a major shared innovation of the Northwest Semitic languages (Canaanite, Aramaic, Ugaritic et al.) is the regular insertion of *a in the plural of *CVCC– nouns (‘segolates’ in Hebraist terminology) and the replacement of broken plurals by external plurals, including these doubly marked *CVCaC-ū– and *CVCaC-āt– ones. As Jorik Groen and I noted under Marijn’s strong influence, the *a-insertion does not seem to be a Northwest Semitic innovation at all, but arose in pre-Proto-Semitic. “But …

…  I think the whole discussion, by focusing on these segolate plurals is in fact a red herring. Arabic’s plural system cannot be simply compared to the North-West Semitic plural system, and by assuming that they get equated important details are lost. I think if we take a more subtle approach, we can actually come to see a much more pervasive innovation in North-West Semitic, but it has nothing to do with segolate plurals.

Instead of the simple singular-plural distinction typical of Northwest Semitic, Arabic often distinguishes several plurals. Some of these are ‘paucals’, meaning they refer to a small number, and some nouns also have a singulative-collective distinction. Marijn illustrates this with singular (actually singulative?) baqar-at– ‘cow’ (/’head of cattle’), paucal baqar-āt– ‘(three to ten) cows’ (/’heads of cattle’), collective baqar- ‘cattle’, and plural ʔabqār– ‘cows’. We could add dual baqar-at–ā/ay-ni ‘pair of cows’, another category that is no longer productive in Iron Age Northwest Semitic.

baqarun ʔaw ʔabqārun

Let me cite another passage, because it’s going to be important:

Masculine nouns, by definition cannot have collectives, but otherwise have the same system as the feminine, e.g. sg. kalb ‘dog’ pauc. ʔaklub (not **kalab-ūn) pl, kilāb. The notable difference here is therefore that the masculine nouns use a broken plural pattern (rather than a suffixed pattern) to makes the paucal (feminine nouns can actually do this too niʕmah pauc niʕa/imāt, ʔanʕum)

Arab grammarians state that all these plurals with an ʔa– prefix are actually paucals. But these forms are pretty isolated: they only occur in “South Semitic” (Arabic, Ancient and Modern South Arabian, and Ethiosemitic; probably not a genealogical subgroup) and the patterns attested in different languages don’t match that well, making them hard to reconstruct. So, Marijn suggests:

Proto-Semitic distinguished between singular, paucal (formed with the external plural suffixes, and *a-insertion if the singular stem was *CVCC-), and (broken) plural;

Northwest Semitic extends the use of the paucal to the plural, getting rid of the broken plurals; but

Arabic (in contact with the rest of “South Semitic”?) introduces new paucal ʔa– forms which replace the old ‘masculine’ paucals and compete with the ‘feminine’ ones.

So much for the summary, now I get to add some thoughts of my own.

Paucals or singulative plurals?

I’m no Arabist, and it would be great to check this in Bettega & D’Anna (2023), but I think Marijn may be conflating a few categories. The way I understand it, the distinction between collective baqar– ‘cattle’ and singulative baqar-at- ‘head of cattle’ (etc.) is important here: it is the basis for understanding baqar-āt– as the plural of the singulative, ‘heads of cattle’. This would be used when talking about several individuated cows, as opposed to a group of non-individuated ʔabqār– ‘cows’ or a collective of baqar– ‘cattle’. Since collectives are uncountable by default, the paucal numerals three through ten call for the use of the individuated/singulative plural, which may result in some overlap between the singulative plural and the paucal in usage.

ʔarbaʕu baqarātin

This distinction becomes important with the masculines, where e.g. ʔaklub– is apparently a paucal, but not a plural singulative (because kalb- isn’t a singulative; there isn’t a contrasting collective). And in the competing feminine cases, I think there might be a contrast between plural singulative niʕim-āt-/niʕam-āt- ‘(individual) favours’ and paucal ʔanʕum– ‘(three to ten) favours’.

All of this implicitly relies on the idea that the paucals were originally only used with numerals, which we might get into some other time. For now, I just want to add that these paucals may be older than Marijn suggests.

How old are the ʔa– paucals?

Marijn writes:

While the true plural pattern kilāb has excellent Afro-Asiatic comparanda, and must certainly be old, ʔaklub is in fact extremely isolated, so isolated that it only occurs in Arabic (the Gəʕəz hägär pl. ʔähgur looks superficially similar, but would be equivalent to *ʔaCCūC).

Just last month, I suggested that Ge’ez CäCuC forms go back to *CaCuC- with a short *u. We might take the superficial correspondence between these ʔaCCuC- (Arabic) and ʔäCCuC (Ge’ez) plurals as an indication that Ge’ez u comes from short *u here too, both patterns reflecting *ʔaCCuC-. Another possible match is seen in Arabic ʔaCCiC-at-, Ge’ez ʔäCCəC-t-, which can be unified in a reconstructed pattern of *ʔaCCiC-(a)t-. And both languages also have many reflexes of the *ʔaCCāC- pattern. (But these aren’t normally counted as paucals, are they?) Either way, some paucal patterns may be reconstructible after all.

Some out-there support for this comes from the word for ‘finger’, Proto-Semitic *ʔitṣbaʕ-. This probably has a cognate in Ancient Egyptian ḏbꜥ, which doesn’t have anything corresponding to the Semitic *ʔ. Since fingers are often counted and come in sets of ten[citation needed], I like the idea that *ʔitṣbaʕ- might be a back formation from an unattested paucal like *ʔatṣbuʕ-1 or *ʔatṣbiʕ-(a)t- ‘(three to ten) fingers’. Since *ʔitṣbaʕ- has reflexes with *ʔi- all over Semitic, that would imply the existence of an *ʔa– paucal in Proto-Semitic.

An important argument against these paucals being old was already raised to me by Marijn privately. ʔa– plurals are fine with a glide occurring as the second radical, as in ʔanyuq- and ʔanwuq- ‘she-camels’ or ʔabwāb- ‘doors’. But in Proto-Semitic, glides were lost between a consonant and a vowel, lengthening the following vowel. So if these forms were old, we’d expect **ʔanūq- and **ʔabāb-. But I think this could be explained by the ongoing productivity of the paucal patterns, which led to glides being restored. True, we usually don’t see analogical restoration in e.g. the *maCCaC- pattern: qwm gives maqām-, not **maqwam-. But an inflectional category like the paucal could be more susceptible to analogy than a derivational one like *maCCaC-. So I think I do lean towards old, Proto-Semitic *ʔa- paucals.

How many plurals?

Where does that leave us? Close to Marijn’s suggestion, probably, but with at least one more contrast: individuated vs. non-individuated plurals. Maybe something like:

‘dog(s)’‘cow(s)’/’cattle’singular/singulative*kalb-*baqar-at-dual*kalb-ā-*baqar-at-ā–individuated/singulative plural*kalab-ū-*baqar-āt-paucal*ʔaklub-*ʔabqār-?non-individuated plural/collective*kilāb-*baqar-

I’m not at all sure about this, but at least it gives us a place to park every form that seems old. The difference between non-individuated plurals and collectives in this system ends up being one of markedness: words for entities that usually occur as an undifferentiated mass have an unmarked collective and derive a (feminine) singulative, while other words have an unmarked singular and an associated broken plural. All in all, this seems like a very overspecified system that could easily collapse in varying ways, giving rise to the different pluralization strategies we find in the attested languages.

baqaratāni

Reflected in Arabic as ʔaṣbuʕ-, but as a byform of the singular. According to the lexicographers, both syllables of the stem can take any of the three short vowels, but only ʔiṣbaʕ- is commonly used and approved of. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/01/22/van-putten-berbero-semitic-adjectives-and-semitic-plurals/

#Afroasiatic #Arabic #Berber #Egyptian #GeEz #linguistics #news #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

Did the Proto-Indo-Europeans borrow agricultural and cultural terms from a population that spoke something close to Proto-Semitic? Rasmus Bjørn has just published a new paper (paywalled) discussing 21 (Proto-)Indo-European words that have been suggested to be borrowed from Semitic or Afroasiatic more generally and argues that yes: there are enough terms in Proto-Indo-European and its daughters to posit the existence of a Semitoid “Old Balkanic” language bordering the PIE steppe homeland to the west.

A very exciting possibility! Unfortunately, there are some issues with the words that Bjørn compares. Let’s dive right in. The main question we’ll try to answer: do these Indo-European words really have close parallels in Semitic, and if so, is there convincing evidence that Semitic was the source and not the recipient language? (I’ve modified some of the transcriptions of reconstructed words to match conventions I’m more used to. (P)IE means that a reconstruction is reflected in several branches of Indo-European but is probably not Proto-Indo-European proper.)

The comparanda

PIE *h₂ster– ‘star’, PS *ʕaθtar– ‘deified morning star’ (Ishtar, Astarte, etc.). Aren Wilson-Wright wrote a 2016 book about the Semitic deity and has suggested before (probably also in the book) that this is a loanword from Indo-European. I’m inclined to agree that ‘star’ > ‘deified Venus’ is a more likely development than vice versa. With four more-or-less matching consonants and very similar meanings, I think a coincidence is unlikely in this case.

PIE *h₃or-(n-) ‘eagle’, PS *ġVrVn– ‘eagle’. I can’t find the alleged Arabic reflex ġaran- in Lane, which leaves just Akkadian urinn- (possibly a Sumerian loanword). If these words are related, the fact that *-n- is only present in a few of the Indo-European reflexes suggests that it was borrowed from Indo-European (or a third language family) into Semitic, not vice versa.

PIE *ḱer-(n-)(h₂/u-) ‘horn’, PS *ḳarn– ‘horn’. Bjørn cites the PS form as *ḳar-n-, but the *n is part of the root in Semitic. I don’t know what’s going on with “Tigre ḳär(n)“, but if it lacks the –n sometimes, I’m highly skeptical that this says anything about Proto-Semitic; all of Tigre’s closest relatives do have the n. The tentative derivation from Proto-Afroasiatic *ḳar– relies on “Omotic [ḳ]ar” and “Egyptian ḳr.ty (dual) ‘horns of the crown (of one of the manifestations of Amun)’”. Omotic isn’t a language; it’s a language family, and we need attested forms to judge the possible relationship. Moreover, Omotic has not been demonstrated to be Afroasiatic. As Marwan Kilani’s personal communication in a footnote points out, the Egyptian attestation is highly specific; if it’s related to the Indo-European word, it could perhaps be a borrowing from something like Greek (I have no idea when or where the word is attested, so this may be difficult). Without any indication that the Semitic –n is a suffix, it is again hard to see the PIE word which sometimes lacks it as a borrowing from Semitic.

PIE *guōu– ‘cow’ (I’ve also seen this as *gueh₃(-)u-). “[T]his is an item that is not attested in PS proper while being shared with the wider Northern Afro-Asiatic speech community”, i.e. Egyptian gw (referring to a certain kind of bull). The similar words in Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, and Sumerian (and elsewhere, like Proto-Bantu gòmbè ‘cattle’) suggest a much wider cultural diffusion and/or onomatopoeia.

PIE *septm ‘seven’, PS *tsabʕ– ‘seven’. I greatly appreciate the informed PS reconstruction based on some Twitter discussions we had in the past. Bjørn cites the masculine stem, *tsabʕ–at-; to really make the comparison to PIE work we should probably add the absolute state ending and make it *tsabʕ–at-Vm. Is there some known PIE process that would get rid of the laryngeal in a form like *seph2tm? If so, the fact that we can understand the *t and *m as Semitic morphemes does make PS > PIE a good possibility, if this isn’t a coincidence.

PIE *(s)ueḱs ‘six’, PS *sidθ– (not “*sidt”) ‘six’. “On the surface not very compelling as a contact phenomenon directly between PIE and PS, but the sequential nature and the similarities that permeate the same group of languages as for the number seven nonetheless make the comparison worth entertaining.” The similarities for ‘seven’ mainly consisted of many languages having a sibilant at the beginning. Either way, the argument for both ‘six’ and ‘seven’ being borrowed from Semitic would be much stronger if PIE ‘six’ also ended in *-tm.

PIE *(H)oḱtoH ‘eight’, Proto-Berber *okkuz ‘four’ (sic; this should probably be *ăkkuẓ, Maarten Kossman p.c.), (Proto?-)Kartvelian *otxo ‘four’. In the background here is the idea that the PIE numeral is a dual, either ending in the PIE dual suffix *-h1 (Bjørn thinks this unlikely) or something related to the PS dual suffix *-ā–na, making it ‘two fours’. The argument is that what looks like a coincidence for ‘eight’ individually may be significant given the pattern that ‘seven’ and ‘six’ also have relatives. We just heard the same argument for ‘six’, so where this isn’t circular, it all relies on ‘seven’. Note that ‘eight’ is not ‘two fours’ anywhere in Afroasiatic.

PIE *medhu- ‘sweet, mead’, PS *mtḳ ‘to be sweet’. “Likely comparanda in both NE Caucasian and Uralic point to a wanderwort, possibly of Afro-Asiatic provenance.” Bjørn cites these comparanda, neither of which has anything corresponding to the PS *ḳ. PIE *dh : PS *t also isn’t very convincing. Also, the word does not mean ‘sweet’ in PIE (that would be *sueh2d-), just ‘mead’ and/or ‘honey’—at least, that’s my understanding of it, but Bjørn has written more about this.

PIE *dh2p- ‘sacrifice, feast’, PS *ðabḥ- ‘sacrifice, slaughter’. The metathesis increases the chance of a coincidental match, but otherwise this one is nice. It would be annoying to bring up Zulu hlaba ‘to stab, slaughter, sacrifice’.

PIE *dhoHn- ‘grain’, PS *duḫn– ‘millet’. This one looks great! No notes. If related, the direction of borrowing is ambiguous.

PIE *gwrH-n- ‘quern, millstone’, PS *gurn- ‘threshing floor’. The PIE *-n- is normally taken to be a nominal suffix so the word can be related to *gwrh2-u- ‘heavy’, but Bjørn suggests folk etymology in PIE. That would also explain why the PKIE laryngeal finds no counterpart in PS. Still, “the comparison between PIE and PS suffers from discontinuous semantics” (in other words: a quern is not a threshing floor).

PIE *kleh2-u- ‘lock, key, bolt’, PS *klʔ ‘to retain, detain’. As Bjørn writes, “[t]he semantic match is not immaculate”. PIE *h2 : PS *ʔ is not so intuitive either.

PIE *(s)teuros, *tauros (with *a!) ‘bull’, PS *θawr- ‘bull, ox’. “The European reflexes of *tauros are uniform to a degree that suggests a late (dialectal) distribution”. The originality of the Semitic form is based on Militarev & Kogan identifying Afroasiatic cognates, which are not presented.

(P)IE *ghaid- ‘goat kid’, PS *gady-. Pretty nice. As with ‘bull’, the form (*a!) and distribution suggest a late loanword. Bjørn also brings in Proto-Berber *a-ɣăyd, which matches the Indo-European forms even better (note that PB *ɣ probably corresponds to PS *ḳ, not *g).

(P)IE *lāp- ‘calf, cow’, PS *ʔalp– ‘bovine’. This one is piggybacking on the credentials of the previous two *a-nimals, which have similar distributions.

(P)IE *bhar-(s-) ‘grain, barley’, PS *bVrr- ‘grain, wheat’. Pretty good: *barr- with an *a is reflected in Hebrew, and the simplification of the *rr to *r is expected in Indo-European.

PIE *h2eǵ–ro-s ‘field’. The Semitic is a bit of a mess here: a PS reconstruction *ḫagar- is based on a Ge’ez form that can’t descend from it (hagar with h) and an Aramaic form that doesn’t exist (haǧar with h and a ǧ that doesn’t exist in premodern Aramaic; haḡar doesn’t exist either). This last one appears to be based on a misinterpretation of Leslau’s note “Ar[abic] ([of] Dat[ina]) haǧar village in ruins”. As Ge’ez hagar means ‘city’ etc., not ‘field’ either, I don’t understand where this *ḫagar ‘arable field’ is coming from.

PIE *h2endh– ‘flower’, PS *ḥinṭ– ‘wheat’. The Semitic etymon is well attested, but the Indo-European one seems spurious (‘marshgrass’, ‘flower’, ‘arable field’, ‘soma plant’… are all of these related?). The formal correspondence is pretty nice, apart from PIE *dh : PS *ṭ.

PIE *ǵlh3(o)u- ‘sister-in-law’, PS *kall-at- ‘bride, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law’ (Arabic kannat- has that last meaning; thanks, Marijn!). Citing earlier publications of his, he states that “the term should … be considered a Wanderwort tied to marriage and alliance strategies defying linguistic and cultural barriers”. This sounds exciting but I find the forms pretty different.

(P)IE *h1is(h2)-u- ‘arrow’, PS *ḥVθ̣θ̣– (not “*ḥiθ̣w-“) ‘arrow’. The *w in Bjørn’s PS reconstruction must be based on Classical Arabic ḥað̣w-at- ‘small (headless) arrow used for practice’, ‘twig’. Without it, there’s hardly any resemblance between the IE and PS words.

(P)IE *peleḱu– ‘axe’, PS *plḳ ‘to split apart’. The semantics are nice but the *-e-e- vocalism would look as strange in PS as it does in Indo-European.

Evaluation

So what have we got?

• ‘seven’ has the same meaning in both families, is formally similar, and has linguistic arguments supporting a borrowing from Semitoid to PIE.
• ‘grain’/’millet’ is semantically and formally very close, with no reason to see either family as the source.
• ‘star’/’Venus’ is formally very close, with the semantics making IE more likely as the source than Semitoid.
• ‘eagle’ and ‘horn’ have formal reasons to see IE as the source, not the recipient (if the Semitic words are even related).
• ‘six’, ‘mead’/’sweet’, ‘quern’/’threshing floor’, ‘bolt’/’to detain’, ‘flower’/’wheat’, ‘sister-in-law’, and ‘axe’/’to split’ all have formal and/or semantic mismatches or problems increasing the chance that they just look similar by accident.
• ‘cow’, ‘eight’, ‘field’, and ‘arrow’ lack a convincing Semitic counterpart. Bringing in other branches of Afroasiatic (which have massively different lexicons!) greatly increases the chance of a coincidental match, especially when we allow for diagonal comparisons like ‘eight’ : ‘four’ and ‘cow’ : ‘class of bull’.

Most interestingly:

• ‘bull’ and ‘grain, barley’/’wheat’ both show a very close formal resemblance; allowing for metathesis, so do ‘calf’/’bovine’ and ‘goat kid’, and maybe ‘sacrifice’. Most of these cannot go back to Proto-Indo-European due to the presence of an *a (rare or non-existent in PIE). Whether ‘sacrifice’ is PIE depends on the identification of possible reflexes in Hittite and Tocharian. Notably, the forms with *a are all limited to European languages, and these words all belong to the same, agricultural semantic field.

Two strong examples and three weak ones isn’t a lot to base a whole account of European prehistory on, but I think this last category could point to post-PIE borrowings from Semitic or something close to it, which is a cool finding! For the rest, with just one word that is more likely to have been borrowed from Semitic into PIE than vice versa and one that could go either way, I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to say that there are Semitoid loans in Proto-Indo-European proper. The two possible examples should be attributed to chance resemblance.

Coincidence, really?

I want to finish with a note on this last point, chance resemblance. Can it really be a coincidence that ‘seven’ is *septm in PIE and *tsabʕ-at-Vm in PS; that ‘grain’ is *dhoHn- in PIE and ‘millet’ is *duḫn– in PS; and so forth, if you want to include more examples? Well… yes. Depending on how many of the comparanda you find close enough to consider them being related, we could just be dealing with the couple of words that end up looking similar and having similar meanings in any two languages you compare. In the case at hand, this risk of coincidence is increased because Bjørn isn’t very strict when identifying formal matches. For example, PIE had (at least) three laryngeals: guttural sounds of unknown realization, labeled *h1, *h2, and *h3. *H means “one of these three but we can’t tell which one”. PS, on the other hand, had six guttural sounds: uvular *ḫ and *ġ, pharyngeal *ḥ and *ʕ, and glottal *h and *ʔ. Bjørn is OK with any of these matching each other:

*h1*h2*h3*H*ḫ*h2eǵ–ro-s/*ḫagar-?*dhoHn-/*duḫn–*ġ*h₃or-(n-)/*ġVrVn–*ḥ*h1is(h2)-u/*ḥiθ̣w-*dh2p-/*ðabḥ-; *h2endh–/*ḥinṭ–*ʕ*h₂ster-/*ʕaθtar–*h*h2eǵ–ro-s/*hagar-?*ʔ*kleh2-u-/*klʔ

It’s also fine for a laryngeal or guttural to be present in either language with nothing matching it in the other, as with *septm/*tsabʕ-, *(H)oḱtoH (is this a suffix?)/*okkuz, *lāp-/*ʔalp-, and *ǵlh3(o)u-/*kall-at-. That means that we can increase our forms that would count as a match: PIE *dhoHn– would match all of the following:

• *duḫn–
• *duġn–
• *duḥn–
• *duʕn–
• *duhn–
• *duʔn–
• *dunn–

Moreover, PIE has three series of stops: voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated. PS has similar triads of voiceless, voiced, and ejective stops, affricates, and fricatives. These, too, can mix and match:

*T*D*Dh*T*h₂ster-/*ʕaθtar-, *kleh2-u-/*klʔ, *(s)teuros~*tauros/*θawr-, *lāp-/*ʔalp–*ǵlh3(o)u-/*kall-at-*medhu-/*mtḳ*D*septm/*tsabʕ-, *(s)ueḱs/*sidθ-, *dh2p–/*ðabḥ-*dh2p/*ðabḥ-, *ghaid–/*gady-, *h2eǵ–ro-s/*ḫagar-*dhoHn-/*duḫn-, *gwrH-n-/*gurn-, *ghaid-/*gady-, *bhar-(s-)/*bVrr-*Ṭ*ḱer-(n-)(h₂/u-)/*ḳarn-, *peleḱu-/*plḳ*h2endh–/*ḥinṭ–The one correspondence Bjørn does not find is PIE voiced/PS ejective, which would have worked so well for the Glottalic Theory.

So we can expand our list of acceptable PS matches for PIE *dhoHn-; this now includes:

• *tuḫn–
• *tuġn–
• *tuḥn–
• *tuʕn–
• *tuhn–
• *tuʔn–
• *tunn–
• *duḫn–
• *duġn–
• *duḥn–
• *duʕn–
• *duhn–
• *duʔn–
• *dunn–
• *ṭuḫn–
• *ṭuġn–
• *ṭuḥn– (this root means ‘to grind’, as in tahini! Semantically close enough to match ‘grain’, right?)
• *ṭuʕn–
• *ṭuhn–
• *ṭuʔn–
• *ṭunn–

We’ve increased the odds of getting a match by coincidence by 21 times, and have indeed found another match in the root *ṭḥn ‘to grind’.1 So if we really want to consider how likely it is that these similarities between PIE and PS are coincidental, we should ask ourselves how likely it is for one match as nice as *dhoHn-/*duḫn– to occur by chance, and then multiply that chance by 21. Would we really expect this to happen through sheer chance? In my view: yes, we totally should.

This is only made worse by allowing for metathesis of the second and third consonant: now we have 40 options. Allowing for an additional final consonant corresponding to nothing, as in *medhu-/*mtḳ, multiplies the chance by a factor of 27 or so, taking some root co-occurrence restrictions into account. That would give us 1080 potential matches, although these wouldn’t all look as nice as *dhoHn-/*duḫn-. ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/13/bjorn-old-european-afro-asiatic/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Arabic #Aramaic #Berber #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #IndoEuropean #linguistics #NECaucasian #news #Omotic #ProtoSemitic #Sumerian

Prospects in comparative Cushitic

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/blog-post-prospects-in-comparative-cushitic/

#Afroasiatic #Beja #Cushitic #linguistics

The programme for this year’s #SummerSchool in #Languages & #Linguistics (July 10–21, hybrid online/in Leiden) has been published! Specials this year include the minor Anatolian languages, #AncientEgyptian for linguists, Central Atlas #Tamazight and Comparative #Afroasiatic (w/ @PhDniX), #Romani, and the indigenous languages of North America https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/education/study-programmes/summer-schools/summer-school-in-languages-and-linguistics #LeidenUniversity