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70-478: There are five Aroid languages: The classification of South Omotic (also called Aroid) is highly disputed and it may be a separate language family. Karo is sometimes considered as a dialect of Hamer, but considered as a separate language by Glottolog which groups both in a Hamer-Karo subfamily. Zaborski (1986) and Lamberti (1993) consider South Omotic to be a separate branch of Cushitic , renaming it as West Cushitic . Bender (2000, 2003) notes that South Omotic

140-412: A voiced alveolar fricative , but a consonant of unknown value. Ehret proposes that it might be a voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ . Some linguists and paleographers believe that they have uncovered evidence of an earlier stage of Beja, referred to in different publications as "Old Bedauye" or "Old Beja." Helmut Satzinger has identified the names found on several third century CE ostraca (potsherds) from

210-490: A " Nilo-Saharan origin" and had become strongly influenced by other "Omotic" language groups. The Proto-Aroid vowel system is also more similar to those of the Surmic and Nilotic languages (Yigezu 2006, 2013). Glottolog 4.0 does not recognize that South Omotic belongs to one of the disputed families, and the candidate group of Omotic languages (grouping both North and South Omotic languages) remains disputed. For this reason it

280-404: A clitic definite article, or have an indefinite suffix. Definite articles indicate gender, number, and case. The indefinite suffix marks gender only, and does not appear in the nominative case. For feminine common nouns, the indefinite suffix is -t ; for masculine nouns and feminine proper nouns, -b . The indefinite suffixes only appear after vowels. The definite article is proclitic. It has

350-413: A corresponding deverbal noun (Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa: "noun of action"; Vanhove: "action noun"; Roper: "nomen actionis"). For weak verbs, the deverbal noun is formed by a suffix -ti attached to the imperative root (see above). For strong verbs, deverbal nouns are not entirely predictable. Examples: There are patterns in strong verb deverbal nouns related to the structure of the citation form of

420-440: A fixed root. Verbs conjugate for a number of tense, aspect, modality, and polarity variations, which have been given different names by different linguists: (Roper analyzes additional subjunctive forms where Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa, and Vanhove see a conditional particle.) Each of the above forms has a corresponding negative. (Vanhove refers to the imperative negative as the "prohibitive".) The past continuous and past share

490-714: A language belonging to another (non-Northern East Sudanic) branch of the Nilo-Saharan family. Rilly also criticizes proposals (by Behrens and Bechaus-Gerst) of significant early Afro-Asiatic influence on Nobiin, and considers evidence of substratal influence on Nobiin from an earlier now extinct Eastern Sudanic language to be stronger. Julien Cooper (2017) states that in antiquity, Cushitic languages were spoken in Lower Nubia (the northernmost part of modern-day Sudan ). He also states that Eastern Sudanic -speaking populations from southern and west Nubia gradually replaced

560-464: A manner converb -a . The past continuous stem for strong verbs is not derivable from any other verb stem. The negative of the past continuous is identical to that of the past: There is only one past tense negative form. For both weak and strong verbs, the past negative is formed through a deverbal participial or converbal form (see above) followed by the present negative of the irregular verb aka "to be". Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa describe

630-552: A modified Kurdish yā' ێ ; in the system devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad it is represented by yā' with a shaddah يّ ; in the Red Sea University system, it is not distinguished from the yā' for /j/ or /iː/ . In the Usakana system, /oː/ is written with a modified Kurdish wāw ۆ ; in the system devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad it is represented by wāw with a shaddah وّ ; in the Red Sea University system, it

700-523: A number of linguistic innovations that are unique to it, as is also the situation with the other subgroups of Cushitic (e.g. idiosyncratic features in Agaw or Central Cushitic). The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are likewise generally acknowledged as normal branch variation. The relation of the Northern Cushitic branch of Cushitic to the other branches

770-451: A past negative. Negative forms are not derived from corresponding positive forms, but are independent conjugations. Every verb has a corresponding deverbal noun, which Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa refer to as a "noun of action", Vanhove calls an "action noun", and Roper a "nomen actionis". Numerous serial verb constructions exist which connote different aspectual and potential meanings. The third person masculine singular positive imperative

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840-729: A reconstruction of Proto-Agaw, and Roland Kießling and Maarten Mous (2003) have jointly proposed a reconstruction of West Rift Southern Cushitic. No reconstruction has been published for Lowland East Cushitic, though Paul D. Black wrote his (unpublished) dissertation on the topic in 1974. Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1979) proposed a reconstruction of the consonants of Proto-East Cushitic. No comparative work has yet brought these branch reconstructions together. Sample basic vocabulary of Cushitic languages from Vossen & Dimmendaal (2020:318) (with PSC denoting Proto-Southern Cushitic): Comparison of numerals in individual Cushitic languages: Beja language Beja ( Bidhaawyeet or Tubdhaawi )

910-509: A special form of the verb in negative clauses. Most Cushitic languages distinguish seven person/number categories: first, second, third person, singular and plural number, with a masculine/feminine gender distinction in third person singular. The most common conjugation type employs suffixes. Some languages also have a prefix conjugation: in Beja and the Saho–Afar languages , the prefix conjugation

980-468: A transitive verb; on the other hand, it is explicitly marked for nominative case when it functions as subject in a transitive or intransitive sentence. Possession is usually expressed by genitive case marking of the possessor. South Cushitic —which has no case marking for subject and object—follows the opposite strategy: here, the possessed noun is marked for construct case , e.g. Iraqw afé-r mar'i "doors" (lit. "mouths of houses"), where afee "mouth"

1050-688: A unified Proto-Cushitic language in the Red Sea Hills as far back as the Early Holocene. Based on onomastic evidence, the Medjay and the Blemmyes of northern Nubia are believed to have spoken Cushitic languages related to the modern Beja language . Less certain are hypotheses which propose that Cushitic languages were spoken by the people of the C-Group culture in northern Nubia, or

1120-529: A use: To distinguish between /ɖ/ and /dh/ , ⟨dh⟩ is used for the former and ⟨deh⟩ for the latter. Similarly, ⟨keh⟩ is /kh/ , ⟨teh⟩ is /th/ , ⟨seh⟩ is /sh/ . Single ⟨o⟩ is not used. In all Arabic orthographies, short vowels are written with the same diacritics used in Arabic: fatḥah for /a/ ( ـَ ), kasrah for /i/ ( ـِ ), ḍammah for /u/ ( ـُ ). 'Alif (ا)

1190-599: Is 2,759,000. The name Beja , derived from Arabic : بجا , romanized :  bijā , is most common in English-language literature. Native speakers use the term Bidhaawyeet (indefinite) or Tubdhaawi (definite). Beja is held by most linguists to be part of the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, constituting the only member of the Northern Cushitic subgroup. As such, Beja contains

1260-399: Is a fixed stem followed by a present/imperfective conjugated form of the verb diya "to say." Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa's strong stem is similar to the past continuous/aorist stem (next section), and identical for all numbers, genders, and persons, except the first person plural, which has a prefixed n- . For Vanhove, there are distinct singular and plural stems which are identical to

1330-629: Is an Afroasiatic language of the Cushitic branch spoken on the western coast of the Red Sea by the Beja people . Its speakers inhabit parts of Egypt , Sudan and Eritrea . In 2022 there were 2,550,000 Beja speakers in Sudan, and 121,000 Beja speakers in Eritrea according to Ethnologue . As of 2023 there are an estimated 88,000 Beja speakers in Egypt. The total number of speakers in all three countries

1400-418: Is based on the past/perfective stem, and the persons are based on the future stem; no negative jussive is given: They give various examples of the jussive with translations into English, in order to give a sense of the meaning: Vanhove identifies a complex "potential" form composed of a nominalizing suffix -at followed by a present/imperfective reduced conjugation of the verb m'a 'come' ( eeya in

1470-543: Is considered for now as a separate family. Below is a reconstruction of Proto-Aroid by Yigezu (2013). Comparison of numerals in individual languages: Cushitic languages The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family . They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa , with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As of 2012,

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1540-403: Is followed by a present tense/imperfective conjugated form of the verb diya "to say", as the future is. There is distinct disagreement between the major grammars of the past century on the modal conjugation or conjugations referred to as "jussive," "optative," and "potential." Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa describe a "jussive" with the following paradigm. For strong verbs, the first person

1610-446: Is identical to that of the past continuous/aorist (above). The present or imperfective has two stems for positive strong verbs, while the negative strong stem is identical to that used for the imperative (and thus also for past/perfective verbs). Weak negative verbs add the prefix ka- to positive past/perfective forms. The strong future stem is described differently by Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa and by Vanhove. Both agree that it

1680-402: Is in fact quite divergent from other Afroasiatic languages , and suggests that it may in fact have connections with Nilo-Saharan , such as Surmic and Nilotic . Enrico Cerulli had proposed that Aroid languages might be a part of Nilotic . Citing lexical similarities with Surmic and other non- Nilotic Nilo-Saharan languages , Yigezu (2013) argues that Aroid ( a.k.a. South Omotic) has

1750-521: Is made a primary branch, as also suggested by Kiessling and Mous (2003). Yaaku is not listed, being placed within Arboroid. Afar–Saho is removed from Lowland East Cushitic ; since they are the most 'lowland' of the Cushitic languages, Bender calls the remnant 'core' East Cushitic. These classifications have not been without contention. For example, it has been argued that Southern Cushitic belongs in

1820-574: Is marked for construct case. Most nouns are by default unmarked for number, but can be explicitly marked for singular (" singulative ") and plural number. E.g. in Bilin , dəmmu "cat(s)" is number-neutral, from which singular dəmmura "a single cat" and plural dəmmut "several cats" can be formed. Plural formation is very diverse, and employs ablaut (i.e. changes of root vowels or consonants), suffixes and reduplication . Verbs are inflected for person/number and tense/aspect. Many languages also have

1890-454: Is not distinguished from the wāw for /w/ or /uː/ . Pitch accent is not marked in any orthography. In Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa (2006 and 2007), stressed syllables are indicated in boldface. In addition to these two systems and several academic systems of transcribing Beja texts, it is possible that Beja was at least occasionally written in the Greek alphabet -based Coptic script during

1960-490: Is overtly marked directly on the noun (e.g. in Awngi , where all female nouns carry the suffix -a ). The case system of many Cushitic languages is characterized by marked nominative alignment, which is typologically quite rare and predominantly found in languages of Africa. In marked nominative languages, the noun appears in unmarked "absolutive" case when cited in isolation, or when used as predicative noun and as object of

2030-495: Is still a productive part of the verb paradigm, whereas in most other languages, e.g. Somali , it is restricted to only a few verbs. It is generally assumed that historically, the suffix conjugation developed from the older prefix conjugation, by combining the verb stem with a suffixed auxiliary verb. The following table gives an example for the suffix and prefix conjugations in affirmative present tense in Somali. Basic word order

2100-532: Is that used by the Eritrean government and was used in a literacy program at Red Sea University in Port Sudan from 2010 to 2013. Three Arabic orthographies have seen limited use: The first below was that used by the now defunct Website Sakanab; the second was devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad and used in his translation of E.M. Roper's Beja lexicon; the third was devised by Mahmud Ahmad Abu Bikr Ooriib, and

2170-421: Is the citation form of the verb. Weak verbs have a long final suffix -aa while strong verbs have a short final suffix -a . For both weak and strong verbs, the negative imperative is formed by an identical set of prefixes baa- (for masculine singular and common plural) and bii- (for feminine singular). Strong verbs use a negative imperative root which has a lengthened vowel. Every Beja verb has

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2240-482: Is unknown. Christopher Ehret proposes, based on the devoicing of Proto-Cushitic voiced velar fricatives, that Northern Cushitic is possibly more closely related to South Cushitic than to the other branches. The identification of Beja as an independent branch of Cushitic dates to the work of Enrico Cerulli between 1925 and 1951. Due to Beja's linguistic innovations, Robert Hetzron argued that it constituted an independent branch of Afroasiatic. Hetzron's proposal

2310-424: Is used as the conjugated auxiliary. (NB: Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa see verbs of the form CiCiC as having identical past continuous [aorist] and future stems. Some verbs of other forms have different stems, which would lead to a greater divergence between the forms described by them and those described by Vanhove.) E.M. Roper, describing the same dialect as Vanhove, identifies the stem employed as being identical to

2380-405: Is used as the seat for these diacritics at the beginning of a word. Long /aː/ is written with 'alif ( ا ) preceded by fatḥah, or alif maddah ( آ ) when word-initial. Long /iː/ is written with yā' ي preceded by kasrah. Long /uː/ is written with wāw و preceded by ḍammah. The systems vary on the representation of long /eː/ and long /oː/ . In the Usakana system, /eː/ is written with

2450-572: Is verb final, the most common order being subject–object–verb (SOV). The subject or object can also follow the verb to indicate focus . The phylum was first designated as Cushitic in 1858. The Omotic languages , once included in Cushitic, have almost universally been removed. The most influential recent classification, Tosco (2003), has informed later approaches. It and two more recent classifications are as follows: Tosco (2000, East Cushitic revised 2020) Geographic labels are given for comparison; Bender's labels are added in parentheses. Dahalo

2520-572: The Medjay and Blemmyes ) spoke Cushitic languages with the latter being related to the modern Beja language . The linguistic affinity of the ancient A-Group culture of northern Nubia—the predecessor of the C-Group culture—is unknown, but Rilly (2019) suggests that it is unlikely to have spoken a language of the Northern East Sudanic branch of Nilo-Saharan, and may have spoken a Cushitic language, another Afro-Asiatic language, or

2590-468: The Southern Nilotic languages have undergone extensive contact with a "missing" branch of East Cushitic that Heine (1979) refers to as Baz . Christopher Ehret proposed a reconstruction of Proto-Cushitic in 1987, but did not base this on individual branch reconstructions. Grover Hudson (1989) has done some preliminary work on Highland East Cushitic, David Appleyard (2006) has proposed

2660-595: The ejectives /pʼ tʼ tʃʼ kʼ/ and the implosive /ᶑ/ . Less common are pharyngeal consonants /ħ ʕ/ , which appear e.g. in Somali or the Saho–Afar languages . Most Cushitic languages have a system of restrictive tone also known as ‘pitch accent’ in which tonal contours overlaid on the stressed syllable play a prominent role in morphology and syntax. Nouns are inflected for case and number . All nouns are further grouped into two gender categories, masculine gender and feminine gender. In many languages, gender

2730-601: The Cushitic branch. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (2000) proposed that the peoples of the Kerma culture – which inhabited the Nile Valley in present-day Sudan immediately before the arrival of the first Nubian speakers – spoke Cushitic languages. She argues that the Nilo-Saharan Nobiin language today contains a number of key pastoralism related loanwords that are of proto-Highland East Cushitic origin, including

2800-517: The Cushitic component of Mbugu (Ma'a). There is a wide range of opinions as to how the languages are interrelated. The positions of the Dullay languages and of Yaaku are uncertain. They have traditionally been assigned to an East Cushitic subbranch along with Highland (Sidamic) and Lowland East Cushitic. However, Hayward thinks that East Cushitic may not be a valid node and that its constituents should be considered separately when attempting to work out

2870-404: The Cushitic languages with over one million speakers were Oromo , Somali , Beja , Afar , Hadiyya , Kambaata , and Sidama . The Cushitic languages with the greatest number of total speakers are Oromo (37 million), Somali (22 million), Beja (3.2 million), Sidamo (3 million), and Afar (2 million). Oromo serves as one of the official working languages of Ethiopia and is also

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2940-603: The Eastern Desert as likely Blemmye , representing a form of Old Beja. He also identifies several epigraphic texts from the fifth and sixth centuries as representing a later form of the same language. Nubiologist Gerald Browne, Egyptologist Helmut Satzinger, and Cushiticist Klaus Wedekind believed that an ostracon discovered in a monastery in Saqqarah also represents the Old Beja language. Browne and Wedekind identified

3010-536: The Eastern branch, with its divergence explained by contact with Hadza- and Sandawe -like languages. Hetzron (1980) and Fleming (post-1981) exclude Beja altogether, though this is rejected by other linguists. Some of the classifications that have been proposed over the years are summarized here: For debate on the placement of the Cushitic branch within Afroasiatic, see Afroasiatic languages . Beja constitutes

3080-673: The Middle Ages. Beja nouns and adjectives have two genders: masculine and feminine, two numbers: singular and plural, two cases: nominative and oblique, and may be definite, indefinite, or in construct state . Gender, case, and definiteness are not marked on the noun itself, but on clitics and affixes. Singular-plural pairs in Beja are unpredictable. Plurals may be formed by: A small number of nouns do not distinguish between singular and plural forms. Some nouns are always plural. A few nouns have suppletive plurals. A noun may be prefixed by

3150-561: The Sidamic proper and the Lowland Cushitic languages as East Cushitic, the remainder as West Cushitic or ta/ne Cushitic. The Aroid languages were not considered Cushitic by either scholar (thought by Cerulli to be instead Nilotic ); they were added to West Cushitic by Joseph Greenberg in 1963. Further work in the 1960s soon led to the putative West Cushitic being seen as typologically divergent and renamed as "Omotic". Today

3220-613: The South Cushitic languages (Rift languages) are a part of Lowland East Cushitic, the only one of the six groups with much internal diversity. Cushitic was formerly seen as also including most or all of the Omotic languages . An early view by Enrico Cerulli proposed a "Sidama" subgroup comprising most of the Omotic languages and the Sidamic group of Highland East Cushitic. Mario Martino Moreno in 1940 divided Cerulli's Sidama, uniting

3290-406: The article on the noun itself does not indicate case. However, agreeing adjectives will be marked for oblique case. No article or indefinite suffix may be applied to the possessed noun. The possessed noun follows the possessor. Examples: (The noun tak 'man' has the suppletive plural (n)da 'men'; raaw 'friend' has the shortened plural raw 'friends'.) Postpositions follow nouns in

3360-458: The definite article are used which do not distinguish between cases, but maintain gender distinctions. In some dialects (e.g. that described by Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa for Port Sudan) the reduced forms maintain number distinctions; in others (e.g. that described by Vanhove and Roper for Sinkat) they do not. Possessive relationships are shown through a genitive suffix -ii (singular possessed) or -ee (plural possessed) which attaches to

3430-531: The earlier Cushitic-speaking populations of this region. In Handbook of Ancient Nubia, Claude Rilly (2019) states that Cushitic languages once dominated Lower Nubia along with the Ancient Egyptian language. He mentions historical records of the Blemmyes , a Cushitic-speaking tribe which controlled Lower Nubia and some cities in Upper Egypt . He mentions the linguistic relationship between

3500-568: The first- and third-person forms are identical. The copular subject will be in the nominative case, the copular complement in the oblique. Oblique -b becomes -w before -wa . Copular complements that end in a vowel will employ an epenthetic y between the final vowel and any vowel-initial copular clitic. Examples: Beja verbs have two different types, first noted by Almkvist: "strong verbs," which conjugate with both prefixes and suffixes and have several principal parts ; and "weak verbs," which conjugate with suffixes only and which have

3570-488: The following forms with masculine monosyllabic nouns that do not begin with /h/ or /ʔ/ (note that an initial glottal stop is usually omitted in writing, and that all words that appear to be vowel-initial actually begin with a glottal stop): The feminine definite articles begin with ⟨ t ⟩ but are otherwise identical ( tuu- , too- , taa- , tee- ). With nouns longer than one syllable and with nouns that begin with /h/ or /ʔ/ , reduced forms of

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3640-419: The genitive. Examples: Adjectives follow the nominal heads of noun phrases. They agree in gender, number, case, and definiteness, and carry case and definiteness markers of the same form as nouns. Clauses may be composed of two noun phrases or a noun phrase and a predicative adjective followed by a copular clitic. The copula agrees in person, gender, and number with the copula complement (the second term), but

3710-499: The grounds that the language shared lexical and phonological features with the Afar and Saho idioms, and also because the languages were historically spoken in adjacent speech areas. However, among linguists specializing in the Cushitic languages, the standard classification of Beja as North Cushitic is accepted. There are also a few languages of uncertain classification, including Yaaku , Dahalo , Aasax , Kw'adza , Boon , Ongota and

3780-422: The inclusion of Omotic as a part of Cushitic has been abandoned. Omotic is most often seen as an independent branch of Afroasiatic, primarily due to the work of Harold C. Fleming (1974) and Lionel Bender (1975); some linguists like Paul Newman (1980) challenge Omotic's classification within the Afroasiatic family itself. A number of extinct populations have been proposed to have spoken Afroasiatic languages of

3850-454: The internal relationships of Cushitic. Bender (2020) suggests Yaaku to be a divergent member of the Arboroid group. The Afroasiatic identity of Ongota has also been 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. Harold C. Fleming (2006) proposes that Ongota is a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands (2009) thinks

3920-636: The languages of the Cushitic branch of Afroasiatic that are spoken in Eritrea , are languages of instruction in the Eritrean elementary school curriculum. The constitution of Eritrea also recognizes the equality of all natively spoken languages. Additionally, Afar is a language of instruction in Djibouti, as well as the working language of the Afar Region in Ethiopia. Christopher Ehret argues for

3990-791: The modern Beja language and the ancient Blemmyan language, and that the Blemmyes can be regarded as a particular tribe of the Medjay. Additionally, historiolinguistics indicate that the makers of the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (Stone Bowl Culture) in the Great Lakes area likely spoke South Cushitic languages. Christopher Ehret (1998) proposed on the basis of loanwords that South Cushitic languages (called "Tale" and "Bisha" by Ehret) were spoken in an area closer to Lake Victoria than are found today. Also, historically,

4060-471: The most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco (2003), namely that Ongota is an East Cushitic language with a Nilo-Saharan substratum . In other words, it would appear that the Ongota people once spoke a Nilo-Saharan language but then shifted to speaking a Cushitic language while retaining some characteristics of their earlier Nilo-Saharan language. Hetzron (1980) and Ehret (1995) have suggested that

4130-639: The only member of the Northern Cushitic subgroup. As such, Beja contains a number of linguistic innovations that are unique to it, as is also the situation with the other subgroups of Cushitic (e.g. idiosyncratic features in Agaw or Central Cushitic). Hetzron (1980) argues that Beja therefore may comprise an independent branch of the Afroasiatic family. However, this suggestion has been rejected by most other scholars. The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are instead generally acknowledged as normal branch variation. Didier Morin (2001) assigned Beja to Lowland East Cushitic on

4200-426: The past continuous as being used for "habitual, repeated actions of the (more distant) past." It is the verb conjugation used for counterfactual conditionals, which leads to Roper's identifying this tense as the "conditional". It is also frequently used in narratives. The past or perfective stem for strong verbs is identical to the citation form (imperative) stem, with predictable phonetic modifications. The negative

4270-421: The past continuous/aorist (for him, "conditional"—see above), just as Vanhove does. However, he understands the form with n- as being used only with the first person plural, as Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa do. In addition to the future, Bidhaawyeet has a similar form expressing desire to undertake an act or intention to do so. The citation root takes a suffix -a for all persons, genders, and numbers, and

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4340-422: The past continuous/aorist first person singular and plural, respectively. Similarly, for weak verbs, Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa have a future stem ending in -i with a first person plural -ni , followed by a present tense/imperfective conjugation of diya . Vanhove sees the -i as a singular future, and the -ni as a general plural. For negative verbs, the negative present/imperfective of diya

4410-459: The people of the Kerma culture in southern Nubia. Most Cushitic languages have a simple five-vowel system with phonemic length ( /a a: e e: i i: o o: u u:/ ); a notable exception are the Agaw languages , which do not contrast vowel length, but have one or two additional central vowels . The consonant inventory of many Cushitic languages includes glottalic consonants , e.g. in Oromo , which has

4480-453: The possessing noun. If the possessing noun is feminine, the genitive marker will begin with t ; if the possessed is feminine, the suffix will end with t . When the suffix does not end with the feminine marker t , it reduces to -(t)i , whether singular or plural (that is, the singular/plural distinction is only marked for feminine possessa). Because this suffix adds a syllable to the noun, full forms of articles cannot be used; thus,

4550-515: The terms for sheep/goatskin, hen/cock, livestock enclosure, butter and milk. However, more recent linguistic research indicates that the people of the Kerma culture (who were based in southern Nubia ) instead spoke Nilo-Saharan languages of the Eastern Sudanic branch, and that the peoples of the C-Group culture to their north (in northern Nubia ) and other groups in northern Nubia (such as

4620-652: The text as a translation of Psalm 30 . Nasals other than /m/ and /n/ are positional variants of /n/ . The consonants /χ/ and /ɣ/ only appear in Arabic loanwords in some speakers' speech; in others', they are replaced by /k/ or /h/ and /g/ . Some speakers replace /z/ in Arabic loanwords with /d/ . Beja has the five vowels /a/ , /e/ , /i/ , /o/ , and /u/ . /e/ and /o/ only appear long, while /a/ , /i/ , and /u/ have long and short variants. Beja has pitch accent . Both Roman and Arabic script have been used to write Beja. The Roman orthography below

4690-429: The verb. However, these are not consistent. A further derived form is a suffix -aa attached to the citation root, and then followed by -b for masculine nouns and -t for feminine. Examples: This form may be used as an adjective, but it is also employed in the construction of multiple conjugated negative forms. Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa analyse this form as a participle. Martine Vanhove analyses it as

4760-755: The working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system including Oromia , Harari and Dire Dawa regional states and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region . Somali is the first of two official languages of Somalia and three official languages of Somaliland . It also serves as a language of instruction in Djibouti , and as the working language of the Somali Region in Ethiopia. Beja, Afar, Blin and Saho ,

4830-718: Was employed briefly at Red Sea University in 2019. No system of writing has gained wide support. The only system to have been employed in publications by more than one writer is the Latin script. In the Roman orthography, the vowels are written with the letters corresponding to the IPA symbols (i.e., ⟨a, e, i, o, u⟩ ). Long vowels are written with doubled signs. As /e/ and /o/ cannot be short vowels, they only appear as ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨oo⟩ , respectively. The single ⟨e⟩ sign, however, does have

4900-399: Was generally rejected by other linguists, and Cerulli's identification of Beja as the sole member of a North Cushitic branch remains standard today across otherwise divergent proposals for the internal relations of the Cushitic language family. Christopher Ehret proposes the following sequence of sound changes between Proto-Cushitic and Beja: Ehret's reconstructed Proto-Cushitic /z/ is not

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