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Is anyone familiar with theso-called Afro-Asiaticlanguages?
Seems like it's most of Africa and West Asia (the Middle East). What's the origin of this language family? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A fro-Asiatic_languages
There are six branches in the Afro-Asiatic languages. All of these branches probably had unique origins. Even within those branches are many other languages. Many scholars dispute their origin but some believe that the first Semitic language originated in the Middle East, others say North Africa, and some say Ethiopia. The first Cushitic languages probably began somewhere near Ethiopia and Somalia (Horn of Africa) and its first speakers were the original tribes of the Oromo and Somalis. Berber languages began in North Western Africa by various groups of people. Chadic began in West Africa, the Egyptian language began in Egypt, and Omotic began in Ethiopia. So basically most, if not all, of the Afro-Asiatic languages began in Africa, above Sub-Saharan Africa. They are grouped together because of their similarities in accents, words, and grammar. I'm Somali (Cushitic) and I've heard Ethiopian, specially Amharic (Semitic), people speak their language before. It's sometimes difficult to differentiate between our looks but it's harder to tell apart our language since it sounds so similar. My only clue was that I couldn't understand her (lol).
Semitic people and languagesare Afro-Asiatic. What makesthem "Afro?"?
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, the only branch of that family to be spoken not only in Africa but also in Asia. In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic (from the Biblical "Shem", Hebrew:
I have no clue but it's not only Semitic languages but the following related groupings of sub-families of languages spoken predominantly in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa: # Berber # Chadic # Egyptian # Semitic # Cushitic This is what I found on Wikipedia: "Medieval scholars sometimes linked two or more branches of Afro-Asiatic together. As early as the 9th century, the Hebrew grammarian Judah ibn Quraysh of Tiaret in Algeria perceived a relationship between Berber and Semitic. The latter group was known to him through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. In the course of the 19th century, Europeans also began suggesting such relationships. In 1844, Theodor Benfey suggested a language family consisting of Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (calling the latter "Ethiopic"). In the same year, T.N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and Hausa, but this would long remain a topic of dispute and uncertainty." Since then, the sub-families have been continuously rearranged but have remained a part of the Afro-Asiatic family. The name Afro-Asiatic probably comes from the fact that the sub-families of languages are spoken in Asia and Africa and that there are strong similarities between them such as: * a two-gender system in the singular, with the feminine marked by the /t/ sound, * VSO typology with SVO tendencies, * a set of emphatic consonants, variously realized as glottalized, pharyngealized, or implosive, and * a templatic morphology in which words inflect by internal changes as well as with prefixes and suffixes. You can see examples of the common features of the languages here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A fro-Asiatic_languages#Common_f eatures
Are there any Europeanlanguages that areAfro-Asiatic?
Afrikaans? Oh, never mind, that's based off of Germanic languages.
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