Afroasiatic

Afroasiatic Urheimat main Map showing one of the proposed Afroasiatic Urheimat.

Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is greatly different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic in general and Semitic in particular.

The Afroasiatic identity of Ongota is also broadly questioned, as is its position within Afroasiatic among those who accept it, because of the "mixed" appearance of the language and a paucity of research and data.

According to Ehret (1996), tonal languages appear in the Omotic and Chadic branches of Afroasiatic, as well as in certain Cushitic languages.

Afroasiatic languages are today primarily spoken in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel.

As in other Afroasiatic languages, gender of pronouns differ only in the second and third person singular.

Estimates of the date at which the Proto-Afroasiatic language was spoken vary widely.

Greenberg (1963) and others considered it a subgroup of Cushitic, whereas others have raised doubts about it being part of Afroasiatic at all (e.g. Theil 2006).

Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian).

He regards Chadic and Omotic as the branches of Afroasiatic most remote from the others.

He thus divided Afroasiatic into two major branches, Omotic and Erythraean, with Erythraean consisting of three sub-branches, Cushitic, Chadic-Berber-Egyptian-Semitic-Beja, and Ongota.

However, several proposals grouping Afroasiatic with one or more other language families have been made.

However, this view has largely been abandoned, with Omotic generally agreed to be an independent branch of Afroasiatic, primarily due to the work of Harold C. Fleming (1974) and M. Lionel Bender (1975).

In Afroasiatic: A Survey, edited by Carleton Taylor Hodge.

In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that Afroasiatic spanned the continents of both Africa and Asia.

It also contrasted voiceless and emphatic consonants, as with other Afroasiatic languages, although exactly how the emphatic consonants were realized is not precisely known.

It is uncertain when or where the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family existed.

Nouns Egyptian nouns can be either masculine or feminine (indicated as with other Afroasiatic languages by adding a -t), and singular, plural (-w / -wt), or dual (-wy / -ty).

Omotic: a new Afroasiatic language family.

Only the consonants are given of Proto-Afroasiatic roots (see above).