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107-536: Proto-Afro-Asiatic may refer to Proto-Afro-Asiatic language , the reconstructed common ancestor of the Afro-Asiatic languages Proto-Afro-Asiatic Urheimat , theories concerning the original homeland of Afro-Asiatic Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Proto-Afro-Asiatic . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change

214-547: A case system with at least two cases. Proto-Afroasiatic may have had marked nominative or ergative-absolutive alignment. A deverbal derivational prefix *mV- is also widely reconstructed. While there is disagreement about the forms of the PAA personal pronouns, there is agreement that there were independent and "bound" (unstressed, clitic ) forms. There is also agreement that a widespread demonstrative pattern of n = masculine and plural, t= feminine goes back to PAA, as well as about

321-599: A dental consonant but does co-occur with other pharyngeal consonants , it must itself have originally been a dental *d in Proto-Afroasiatic, which later became *ʕ in Egyptian. Rössler's ideas have come to dominate the field of Egyptology without, however, achieving general acceptance. Orin Gensler argues that Rössler's sound change is typologically extremely unlikely, though still possible, while many of

428-410: A terminative case in -iš . Scholars debate whether these are vestigial cases or adverbial postpositions . The ending -iš has often been connected to the Egyptian postposition js and is sometimes used to reconstruct a Proto-Afroasiatic locative case. Diakonoff also believed he could reconstruct a comitative - dative case in *-dV or *-Vd , an ablative - comparative case in *-kV ,

535-557: A "directive" case in *-l , and an ablative case in *-p . A prefix mV- is the most widely attested affix in AA that is used to derive nouns. For PAA, its shape has variously been reconstructed as *ma- , *ma(i)- , *mV- , and *-m- . In the daughter languages, it is attested with a wide variety of meanings and functions, such as forming deverbal agent nouns , place nouns, instrument nouns, as well as participles. Erin Shay argues that *mV-

642-400: A bridge ( German : Brücke , f. ) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is masculine ( puente , m. ), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticized on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall. A noun may belong to

749-554: A consonant; consonants included in the pattern often involve gemination . If root-and-pattern morphology originated in Proto-Afroasiatic, then an explanation must be found for why it has mostly disappeared in the Omotic and Chadic branches; if it was not present in PAA, then an explanation must be found for why it developed independently in the Semitic, Egyptian, and Cushitic branches. Hans-Jürgen Sasse proposed that Proto-Afroasiatic

856-464: A demonstrative *h- ('this/that') or *ha- ('this/that one'). The most common Afroasiatic interrogative pronoun is *mV , which Ehret reconstructs as *ma , *mi 'what?'. Diakonoff argued that *mV ultimately derived from a demonstrative stem *m- . Only the Semitic reflexes of this root have separate forms for animate ('"who?") and inanimate ("what?") referents. The Old Egyptian and Berber descendants both appear to be used regardless of whether

963-405: A fact which has not yet been explained. Additionally, it is not always clear which words are cognates, as some proposed cognates may be chance resemblances. Moreover, at least some cognates are likely to have been altered irregularly due to analogical change , making them harder to recognize. As words change meaning over time, the question of which words might have originally meant the same thing

1070-432: A few branches, making them difficult to reconstruct. In addition to a singular and plural, Egyptian and Semitic attest a dual , the endings of which can be reconstructed respectively as Ancient Egyptian : * -a(y) and Semitic * -ā (nominative) and * -ay (oblique). These endings are very similar to each other, and due to the dual's attestation in the two earliest attested branches of Afroasiatic it

1177-528: A form of the copula 'to be' or a particle meaning 'self'. Afroasiatic languages attest a variety of determiners , only some of which are likely to derive from Proto-Afroasiatic. As first noticed by Joseph Greenberg , Afroasiatic languages in all branches but Omotic attest a series of third person agreement markers in the form n- (masculine), t- (feminine), and n- (plural), which probably derive from Proto-Afroasiatic determiners; Omotic attests t- (feminine) alone of this set. Additionally, Omotic attests

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1284-401: A given class because of characteristic features of its referent , such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in

1391-663: A grammatical rather than a lexical function, and argue that there is thus no basis to reconstruct it as a lexical feature in PAA, as Diakonoff does; they find Ehret's reasoning more sound. Igor Diakonoff argues that Proto-Afroasiatic required a consonant at both the beginning of a syllable and the end of a word, and that only one consonant was possible at the beginning or end of a syllable. Zygmont Frajzyngier and Erin Shay note that these rules appear to be based on Semitic structures, whereas Chadic includes syllables beginning with vowels as well as initial and final consonant clusters. Christopher Ehret argues that all word stems in PAA took

1498-445: A language relate to sex, such as when an animate –inanimate distinction is made. Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre ) which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. A classifier, or measure word , is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners to be applied to

1605-462: A language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote (for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc.), although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any obvious reason. However it

1712-404: A marked nominative language. However, Abdelaziz Allati notes that, if PAA was originally ergative-aligned, it is unclear why both the attested ancient languages and modern AA languages predominantly have nominative-accusative alignment . Proto-Afroasiatic word order has not yet been established. Igor Diakonoff proposed that PAA had verb-subject-object word order (VSO word order), meaning that

1819-438: A masculine agreement form k- , while Chadic and Cushitic show a gender- and number-neutral form k- : both likely go back to a Proto-Afroasiatic determiner *k- , reconstructed by Ehret as *kaa 'this'. Diakonoff argues that in Proto-Afroasiatic these forms were originally demonstrative pronouns that later developed into third person personal pronouns in some branches and into genitive markers in others. Ehret also reconstructs

1926-417: A noun manifests itself in two principal ways: in the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, and in modifications of other related words ( agreement ). Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners , pronouns or adjectives change their form ( inflect ) according to the gender of noun they refer to ( agreement ). The parts of speech affected by gender agreement,

2033-608: A pluralizing morpheme in which a vowel *a was inserted between the two final consonants of the root, possibly replacing another vowel via apophony . However, Paul Newman has argued that while plurals via vowel alteration are frequent in Chadic, they cannot be reconstructed back to Proto-Chadic or Proto-Afroasiatic. Andréas Stauder likewise argues that Coptic and Egyptian plurals via vowel change may have developed independently. Lameen Souag argues that while some form of vowel-changing plural likely goes back to Proto-Afroasiatic, many of

2140-409: A suffix *-Vb- used to mark harmful animals. Vladimir Orel also attests less well-defined uses for this suffix, while Ehret takes this as a suffix to mark animals and parts of the body. Afroasiatic languages today clearly distinguish singular and plural. One of the first features of Proto-Afroasiatic proposed by Joseph Greenberg was the existence of "internal-a plurals" (a type of broken plural ):

2247-497: A system include later forms of Proto-Indo-European (see below ), Sanskrit , some Germanic languages , most Slavic languages , a few Romance languages ( Romanian , Asturian and Neapolitan ), Marathi , Latin , and Greek . Here nouns that denote animate things (humans and animals) generally belong to one gender, and those that denote inanimate things to another (although there may be some deviation from that principle). Examples include earlier forms of Proto-Indo-European and

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2354-661: A third consonant. As early as the Middle Ages, however, grammarians had noticed that some triradical roots in Arabic differed in only one consonant and had related meanings. According to supporters of original triradicalism such as Gideon Goldenberg, these variations are common in language and inconclusive for the matter. He compares phonetic similarity between words with similar meanings in English such as glow , gleam , glitter , glaze , and glade . Other scholars argue that

2461-483: A tonal system of at least two tonal phonemes, falling tone, rising tone, and possibly a third tone, level tone. Other scholars argue that Proto-AA had a pitch accent and some branches subsequently developed tone. Such scholars postulate that tones developed to compensate for lost or reduced syllables, and note that certain tones are often associated with certain syllable-final consonants. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay note that in AA tonal languages, tone usually has

2568-468: A two vowel system ( *a and *ə ), as supported by Berber and Chadic data, and then developing further vowels. Some scholars postulate that Proto-Afroasiatic was a tonal language, with tonality subsequently lost in some branches. Igor Diakonoff argued for the existence of tone based on his reconstruction of many otherwise homophonous words. Christopher Ehret instead takes the fact that three branches of AA have tone as his starting point; he has postulated

2675-542: A way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects. The same does not apply to Swedish common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. Norwegian Nynorsk , Norwegian Bokmål and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbors have lost one of the genders. As shown,

2782-400: Is c.  4000 BCE , after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary. The estimations offered by scholars as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary widely, ranging from 18,000   BCE to 8,000   BCE. An estimate at the youngest end of this range still makes Afroasiatic

2889-480: Is a later development, which he associates primarily with Semitic. Helmut Satzinger has argued that the earliest form of conjugation in Afroasiatic was the so-called "prefix conjugation," a form found in Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic that uses prefixes to conjugate verbs for person, gender, and number. Other scholars ague that, as there is no evidence for the "prefix conjugation" in Omotic, Chadic, or Egyptian,

2996-492: Is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German Mädchen , meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neuter. Examples of languages with such

3103-416: Is also a divergent proposal that has become popular among Egyptologists ; there is no agreement about PAA's vowels, the existence of tone , or its syllable structure. At the same time, scholars disagree to whether and to what extent the classical Semitic languages are a conservative, faithful representation of PAA morphology. This is particularly important for the question of whether the lexical roots in

3210-461: Is also accepted by Takács, but he reconstructs it as *ʔaw / *wa 'who?'. Diakonoff also reconstructs an interrogative adjective, *ayyV- , which he claims left traces in Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Lipiński, on the other hand, holds this term to be Semitic and deriving from a particle ʔay 'where?'. Takács derives this particle from PAA *ʔay / *ya , a variant of *ʔaw / *wa 'who?'. Most morphological reconstruction for PAA has focused on

3317-470: Is also debate about whether some of the forms may have been nominal (using verbal nouns), or possibly participial or gerundival , rather than purely verbal. TAMs may have been indicated by both changes in the verb stem and the use of suffixes and prefixes. Some scholars argue that prefixes were used for "eventive" (describing things happening) aspects, as opposed to the "suffix conjugation," which described states. Abdelaziz Allati, however, argues that this

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3424-534: Is also found in Dravidian languages . (See below .) It has been shown that grammatical gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others. Caveats of this research include

3531-523: Is also possible for a given noun to be usable with any of several classifiers; for example, the Mandarin Chinese classifier 个 ( 個 ) gè is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers. Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection and can be conditioned by other types of inflection, especially number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection. The grammatical gender of

3638-409: Is also possible for forms closer to PAA to be preserved in languages recorded later, while languages recorded earlier may have forms that diverge more from PAA. In order to provide a more accurate reconstruction of Afroasiatic, it will be necessary to first reconstruct the proto-forms of the individual branches, a task which has proven difficult. As of 2023, there is only the beginning of a consensus on

3745-491: Is also usually reconstructed for the proto-language. The loss of the dual in the other branches over time is a well attested feature in languages, including within the Egyptian and Semitic branches themselves. There is widespread agreement that Proto-Afroasiatic had case inflexion . First proposed by Hans-Jürgen Sasse on the basis of his reconstruction of the Proto-Cushitic case system in 1984, Proto-Afroasiatic

3852-613: Is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can occur in more than one gender. Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement" . Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners , pronouns , numerals , quantifiers , possessives , adjectives , past and passive participles , articles , verbs , adverbs , complementizers , and adpositions . Gender class may be marked on

3959-425: Is attested among the Semitic languages and may have been dialectal in origin. The forms of the personal pronouns are very stable throughout Afroasiatic (excluding Omotic), but there is no consensus on what the reconstructed set of Afroasiatic pronouns might have looked like. Most modern branches have an independent / absolute pronoun, an object pronoun, and a suffix /possessive pronoun. According to Igor Diakonoff,

4066-437: Is evidence for natural gender in all branches, including Omotic, perhaps marked originally by an opposition of PAA *-u (masculine) and *-i (feminine), as also found in the second person singular pronouns . In addition to grammatical gender, Igor Diakonoff argues that Afroasiatic languages show traces of a nominal classification system , which was already unproductive in the Proto-Afroasiatic stage. In particular, he noted

4173-436: Is found in the two oldest attested branches of the family. In the Semitic languages, the "nisba" is used to form adjectives, derive nouns for people associated with a place or profession, and to form hypercoristic names . In Egyptian, it forms adjectives and nouns from nouns and prepositions. The "nisba" is often assumed to be connected to the genitive case ending in Semitic and possibly Cushitic. Igor Diakonoff argued that

4280-429: Is likely that this is inherited from proto-Afroasiatic. Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova (1995) reconstruct 32 consonant phonemes, while Christopher Ehret reconstructs 42. Of these, twelve in both reconstructions rely on the same sound correspondences, while an additional eighteen rely on more or less the same sound correspondences. Both reconstructions also include a number of other consonants. While some of these are

4387-418: Is masculine (meaning "lake") its genitive singular form is Sees , but when it is feminine (meaning "sea"), the genitive is See , because feminine nouns do not take the genitive -s . Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In Welsh , gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has initial mutation , where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain conditions. Gender

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4494-494: Is no evidence for this in Ancient Egyptian, Cushitic, or Chadic, perhaps indicating that there was no gender distinction in the plural in Proto-Afroasiatic. Chadic has both an inclusive and exclusive form of "we", which Igor Diakonoff and Václav Blažek reconstruct also for Proto-Afroasiatic. Helmut Satzinger has argued that Proto-Afroasiatic only distinguished between the "object" and "possessive" pronouns, deriving

4601-499: Is often difficult to answer. As a result, Robert Ratcliffe suggests that Proto-Afroasiatic may never be reconstructed in the same way that Proto-Indo-European has been. The current state of reconstruction is also hindered by the fact that the Egyptian and Semitic branches of Afroasiatic are attested as early as 3000 BCE, while the languages of the Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic branches are only attested much later, sometimes in

4708-416: Is one of the factors that can cause one form of mutation (soft mutation). For instance, the word merch "girl" changes into ferch after the definite article . This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: mab "son" remains unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way. Additionally, in many languages, gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form ( lemma ) of

4815-454: Is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning, e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender, as it is in French with "la masculinité" and "la virilité". In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary. Usually each noun

4922-415: Is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as lo bueno , lo malo ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while grammatical gender refers to certain phonetic characteristics (the sounds at the end, or beginning) of a noun. Among other lexical items, the definite article changes its form according to this categorization. In

5029-412: Is the only prefix in the AA phylum that clearly goes back to the proto-language rather than possibly being an areal feature . The precise meaning and origin of this prefix in PAA are debated. There is a long tradition of comparing the prefix to the interrogative pronoun *mā 'who'. Carsten Peust has suggested a common PAA origin for the prefix in forming nouns of place and instrument, but proposes that

5136-482: Is the reconstructed proto-language from which all modern Afroasiatic languages are descended. Though estimations vary widely, it is believed by scholars to have been spoken as a single language around 12,000 to 18,000 years ago (12 to 18 kya ), that is, between 16,000 and 10,000 BC . Although no consensus exists as to the location of the Afroasiatic homeland , the putative homeland of Proto-Afroasiatic speakers,

5243-500: Is the use of the prefix *ʔan-/*ʔin- , which appears in the Semitic and Old Egyptian first person independent pronouns, the Old Egyptian, Cushitic, and Semitic second person singular and plural pronouns, and the Old Egyptian and Berber third person singular and plural independent pronouns. While Ehret reconstructs this as the original form of the first person singular pronoun, other scholars argue that this element either represents

5350-518: Is usually reconstructed with a case system similar to Proto-Semitic. This gives a nominative ending *-u , accusative or absolutive *-a , and genitive *-i . Besides Proto-Semitic, evidence for these endings is derived from the Cushitic languages and has been argued to exist in Berber as well. The Egyptian nominal ending -w , found on some masculine nouns, may also be evidence of this system. Some evidence for nominative -u may also exist from

5457-456: Is widely agreed to have been present in Proto-Afroasiatic. However, Russell Schuh argues that there was no gender distinction in the plural, as this feature is found only in Semitic and Berber (see also personal pronouns ). Christopher Ehret argues against the consensus that grammatical gender existed in Proto-Afroasiatic, arguing that its development is an isogloss separating all other Afroasiatic languages from Omotic, which alone preserves

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5564-409: The *mV- prefix used in agent nouns and participles is actually a post-PAA development, derived from the interrogative pronoun *mā 'who'. Christopher Ehret, meanwhile, proposes that the prefix did not exist in PAA at all, but is a later development from the interrogative pronoun. Gábor Takács and Andrzej Zaborski both reject a connection to *mā entirely; Takács instead suggests that a connection to

5671-474: The Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics including Igor Diakonoff and Alexander Militarev includes also *pʼ, *tɬ, *ʃ, *kx⁽ʷ⁾, *gɣ⁽ʷ⁾, *kxʼ⁽ʷ⁾, *x⁽ʷ⁾. Taking Ehret's labialized velars as equivalent to Orel and Stolbova's non-labialized set, and taking Ehret's extra nasals as equivalent to Orel and Stolbova's <n>, the two reconstructions mostly agree on the following correspondences between

5778-410: The "nisba" was an "expanded" form of the genitive suffix: he reconstructs the "nisba" suffix as *-iya or -*ī ; he also suggests the existence of a variant *-uwa . Lipiński suggests that the "nisba" originated as a postposition, which was also used to create the genitive case. Christopher Ehret argues that the original form of the suffix was -*iy and also reconstructs a form -*ay . This latter form

5885-455: The "triggers" of the process, because they have an inherent gender, whereas related words that change their form to match the gender of the noun can be considered the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners , pronouns , numerals , quantifiers , possessives , adjectives , past and passive participles , verbs , adverbs , complementizers , and adpositions . Gender class may be marked on

5992-526: The 20th century. The long history of scholarship of the Semitic languages compared to other branches is another obstacle in reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic; typical features of Semitic have often been projected back to the proto-language, despite their cross-linguistic rarity and lack of correspondences in other branches. Like cognates, shared morphological features tend to disappear over time, as can be demonstrated within Afroasiatic by comparing Old Egyptian (2600–2000 BCE) with Coptic (after 200 CE). Yet it

6099-482: The Egyptian preposition m needs further consideration, while Zaborski argues for a connection to a verb *VmV- 'to be'. The term "nisba" refers to a suffix found in the Semitic ( -iy ) and Egyptian ( -j ) branches, with possible relict traces in Berber. A related suffix -āwi occurs in Arabic and possibly Egyptian, as suggested by e.g. ḥmww 'craftsman', from ḥmt 'craft'. Carsten Peust argues that this suffix descends from Proto-Afroasiatic, as it

6206-413: The Omotic branch. By the evidence of Semitic, in the dual and plural , only the nominative and an oblique were distinguished. David Wilson, on the other hand, argues that the case endings are often not cognate in the individual branches of Afroasiatic and that this precludes their reconstruction for the proto-language. Old Akkadian and Palaeosyrian have two additional cases, a locative in -um and

6313-555: The PAA root may have originally been mostly biradical, to which a third radical was then added. Christopher Ehret argues that the third consonants were derivational affixes, proposing as many as thirty-seven separate verbal extensions that subsequently became fossilized as third consonants. This theory has been criticized by some, such as Andrzej Zaborski and Alan Kaye, as being too many extensions to be realistic, though Zygmont Frajzyngier and Erin Shay note that some Chadic languages have as many as twelve extensions. An alternative model

6420-420: The PAA root was originally biradical but saw the biradical roots outside of Semitic as largely the result of losing a third consonant. Afroasiatic languages feature a "root-and-pattern" ( nonconcatenative ) system of morphology, in which the root consists of consonants alone and vowels are inserted via apophony according to "templates" to create words. A "template" consists of one or more vowels and sometimes

6527-458: The addition of a consonant. Not all triradical roots can be convincingly explained as coming from biradicals, and there are cases in which triradical roots with similar meanings appear to differ in one consonant due to root-internal changes or derivation via rhyme. Andréas Stauder argues that the evidence from Ancient Egyptian shows that both tri- and biradical verbs were probably present in Proto-Afroasiatic. Igor Diakonoff, in contrast, argued that

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6634-475: The central vowels *e and *o could not occur together in the same root. Taking a different approach, Ronny Meyer and H. Ekkehard Wolff propose that Proto-Afroasiatic may have had no vowels as such, instead employing various syllabic consonants (*l, *m, *n, *r) and semivowels or semivowel-like consonants (*w, *y, *ʔ, *ḥ, *ʕ, *h, *ʔʷ, *ḥʷ, *ʕʷ, *hʷ) to form syllables; vowels would have later been inserted into these syllables ("vocalogenesis"), developing first into

6741-400: The circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender vary between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like number or case . In some languages the declension pattern followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders. The gender of a noun may affect the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly

6848-473: The different branches of Afroasiatic: Additionally, there is another proposal for the sound correspondences between – and phonetic values of – Egyptian and Semitic consonants. This second theory is known as neuere Komparatistik and was first proposed by Semiticist Otto Rössler on the basis of consonant incompatibilities . In particular, Rössler argued that, since the hieroglyph conventionally transcribed as <ʿ> and described as *ʕ never co-occurs with

6955-427: The difficulty in reconstruction is likely related to the use of vowel changes known as apophony (or "ablaut") in the "root-and-pattern" system found in various Afroasiatic languages. In addition to apophony, some modern AA languages display vowel changes referred to as umlaut . Igor Diakonoff, Viktor Porkhomovksy and Olga Stolbova proposed in 1987 that Proto-Afroasiatic had a two vowel system of *a and *ə , with

7062-790: The earliest family known to have split off from it, the extinct Anatolian languages (see below ). Modern examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe . Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called common gender ), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include Danish and Swedish (see Gender in Danish and Swedish ), and to some extent Dutch (see Gender in Dutch grammar ). The dialect of

7169-481: The effect for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the effect is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender. Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one study found that German speakers describing

7276-442: The etymologies proposed in support of the theory have been attacked by Gábor Takács. The most important sound correspondences in the neuere Komparatistik that differ from the traditional understanding are: Attempts to reconstruct the vocalic system of Proto-Afroasiatic vary considerably. While there is no consensus, many scholars prefer to reconstruct a simple three vowel system with long and short *a , *i , and *u . Some of

7383-444: The existence of an interrogative pronoun *mV , which may not have distinguished animacy . There is some agreement that the PAA verb had two or possibly three basic forms, though there is disagreement about what those forms were and what tenses, aspects, or moods they expressed. There is also widespread agreement that there were possibly two sets of conjugational affixes (prefixes and suffixes) used for different purposes. Additionally,

7490-532: The existence of words that denote male and female, such as the difference between "aunt" and "uncle" is not enough to constitute a gender system. In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns, such as those denoting humans, with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote. Such properties include animacy or inanimacy, " humanness " or non-humanness, and biological sex . However, in most languages, this semantic division

7597-450: The forms of the pronouns in the other branches show evidence of marked nominative alignment. Igor Diakonoff instead argued that Proto-Afroasiatic was an ergative-absolutive language, in which the ergative case marks the subject of transitive verbs and the absolutive case marks both the object of transitive verbs and the subject of intransitive verbs. Satzinger suggests that Proto-Afroasiatic may have developed from ergative-absolutive to

7704-458: The great amount of time since Afroasiatic split into branches, there are limits to what scholars can reconstruct. Cognates tend to disappear from related languages over time. There are currently not many widely accepted Afroasiatic cognates, and it is difficult to derive sound correspondence rules from a small number of examples. The most convincing cognates in Afroasiatic often have the same or very similar consonants but very different vowels,

7811-427: The importance of verbal gemination and reduplication and the existence of three derivational affixes, especially of a causative -*s-, are commonly reconstructed. A numeral system cannot be reconstructed, although numerous PAA numerals and cognate sets from 1 to 9 have been proposed. There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant

7918-450: The independent pronouns via various processes in the branches. He argues that the independent pronouns derive from various strategies combining pronominal elements with different nominal or pronominal bases. Václav Blažek reconstructs an original set of independent pronouns but argues that the ones found in most current Afroasiatic languages arose by a process of suppletion similar to that argued by Satzinger. An example of one such process

8025-561: The individual daughter languages. Most reconstructions agree that PAA had three series of obstruents ( plosives , fricatives , and affricates ) and that the continuants were all voiceless. There is also general agreement that obstruents were organized in triads of voiceless, voiced, and "emphatic" (possibly glottalized ) consonants, and that PAA included pharyngeal and laryngeal consonants . Disagreement exists about whether there were labialized velar consonants. Several Afroasiatic languages have large consonant inventories, and it

8132-515: The inflections in a language relate to sex or gender . According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's languages . According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words." Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20. Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. Depending on

8239-439: The language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. "woman" is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary. In a few languages, the assignment of any particular noun (i.e., nominal lexeme, that set of noun forms inflectable from a common lemma) to one grammatical gender is solely determined by that noun's meaning, or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy. However,

8346-622: The language were originally mostly biradical or triradical , that is, whether they originally had two or three consonants. It also plays into the question of the degree to which Proto-Afroasiatic had root-and-pattern morphology , as most fully displayed in the Semitic , Egyptian , and Cushitic branches. There are nonetheless some items of agreement and reconstructed vocabulary. Most scholars agree that Proto-Afroasiatic nouns had grammatical gender , at least two and possibly three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and possibly dual ), as well as

8453-433: The later realized as [i] or [u] depending on its contact with labial or labialized consonants . Christopher Ehret has proposed a five vowel system with long and short *a , *e , *o , *i , and *u , arguing that his reconstruction is supported by the Chadic and Cushitic vowels. Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova instead proposed a six vowel system with *a , *e , *o , *i , *ü ([ y ]), and *u ; they further argued that

8560-499: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proto-Afro-Asiatic&oldid=867637391 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Proto-Afro-Asiatic language Proto-Afroasiatic ( PAA ), also known as Proto-Hamito-Semitic , Proto-Semito-Hamitic , and Proto-Afrasian ,

8667-706: The majority of scholars agree that it was located within a region of Northeast Africa . The reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic is problematic and has not progressed to the degree found in Indo-European linguistics . The immense amount of time over which the branches have been separated, coupled with the wide gap between the attestations of the original branches (3rd millennium BC for Egyptian and Semitic, 19th and 20th centuries for many Chadic , Cushitic , and Omotic languages ) mean that determining sound correspondences has not yet been possible. In addition to more traditional proposed consonant correspondences, there

8774-764: The merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European (see below ). Some gender contrasts are referred to as classes ; for some examples, see Noun class . In some of the Slavic languages , for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in Polish , also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans. (For details, see below .) A human–non-human (or "rational–non-rational") distinction

8881-438: The noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. As an example, we consider Spanish , a language with two gender categories: "natural" vs "grammatical". "Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender

8988-1022: The noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. Three possible functions of grammatical gender include: Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French pot ("pot") and peau ("skin") are homophones /po/ , but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau . Common systems of gender contrast include: Nouns that denote specifically male persons (or animals) are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons (or animals) are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have any sex, or do not specify

9095-455: The noun, and sometimes a noun can be modified to produce (for example) masculine and feminine words of similar meaning. See § Form-based morphological criteria , below. Agreement , or concord, is a grammatical process in which certain words change their form so that values of certain grammatical categories match those of related words. Gender is one of the categories which frequently require agreement. In this case, nouns may be considered

9202-604: The noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as piece(s) and head in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of East Asian languages , where it is common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three classifier people". A more general type of classifier ( classifier handshapes ) can be found in sign languages . Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that

9309-563: The old Norwegian capital Bergen also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in Norwegian Bokmål . This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in

9416-485: The oldest proven language family. Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact , with the evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples. At present, there is no commonly accepted reconstruction of Afroasiatic morphology, grammar, syntax, or phonology. Because of

9523-531: The original gender system of Afroasiatic had masculine endings *-y/*-w (later *-Vy / *-Vw ) and feminine endings *-H/*-y (later *-āʔ / *-āy ), the later of which was later ousted by feminine *-(a)t on nouns. Marijn van Putten has reconstructed a feminine ending *-ay/*-āy from Semitic and Berber evidence: he argues that this ending comes down from the last common ancestor of Berber and Semitic, which may be Proto-Afroasiatic. Despite arguing that Proto-Afroasiatic had no grammatical gender, Ehret argues that there

9630-465: The original, genderless grammar of the proto-language. Other scholars such as Lionel Bender argue that Omotic has lost grammatical gender despite originally having had it. A feminine morpheme -Vt is found widely in Afroasiatic languages. Lameen Souag argues that this feminine ending -t is probably a case of a grammaticalized demonstrative , as this feature has also independently developed in some Chadic and Cushitic languages. Diakonoff argued that

9737-463: The possibility of subjects' "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light" and male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy." Apparent failures to reproduce

9844-406: The prefix conjugation may be a shared innovation in Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic. In those languages where it appears, the "prefix conjugation" is used with two stems, with Igor Diakonoff identifying one as perfective/punctual as well as jussive, and the other with the imperfective. These stems may also be known as "short form" (=perfective) and "long form" (=imperfective). Assuming a PAA origin,

9951-399: The prefixes can be reconstructed as agreeing with the forms of the "bound" personal pronouns in having *n- for first person plural, *t- for second person plural and singular and feminine third person singular, and *y/*i- for third person masculine and third person plural; the form of the first person singular is unclear, but may be *ʔ- . The prefixes may have originally developed from

10058-479: The pronouns or from auxiliary verbs with pronominal elements, though N. J. C. Kouwenberg argues that the close agreement between the forms in Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic indicates that such grammaticalization must have happened in Proto-Afroasiatic itself or earlier. Grammatical gender Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of

10165-420: The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic , and no widely accepted reconstruction of any of the other branches' proto-forms. Current attempts at reconstructing Afroasiatic often rely on comparing individual words or features in the daughter languages, which leads to results that are not convincing to many scholars. There is currently no consensus on the consonant phonemes of Afroasiatic or on their correspondences in

10272-443: The referent is a person or thing. It is therefore not clear if this pronoun differentiated animacy in Proto-Afroasiatic. Lack of differentiation between "who?" and "what?" is also sporadically attested in Semitic and Cushitic, but appears to be absent in Chadic; most modern AA languages use different lexical roots to make the distinction. Ehret also reconstructs a second interrogative *wa-/*wi- 'what?'. The PAA origin of this form

10379-768: The same, they rely on correspondences in the daughter languages which cannot be reconciled. For instance, although both Ehret and Orel and Stolbova reconstruct *tʼ , Ehret gives its Egyptian correspondence as s , while Orel and Stolbova give it as d and t ; and though both reconstruct PAA *tlʼ , Ehret gives its Arabic correspondence as ṣ , while Orel and Stolbova give it as ḍ . Additionally, Ehret has reconstructed 11 consonants not found in Orel and Stolbova, while Orel and Stolbova have reconstructed 2 not found in Ehret. The additional consonants are: An earlier, larger reconstruction from 1992 by Orel, Stolbova and other collaborators from

10486-518: The sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that may appear arbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the modern Romance languages , the Baltic languages , the Celtic languages , some Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Hindi ), and the Afroasiatic languages . This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there

10593-477: The shape CV (with a possible alternate form VC) and CVC, with suffixes often giving the syllabic shape CVCC. David Wilson agrees with Diakonoff that the root syllable could only begin with a single consonant, but adds a requirement that syllables have two mora weight and argues for the possibility of an extra-syllabic consonant at the end of a root (CVC-C or CV:C). The degree to which the Proto-AA verbal root

10700-620: The suffix/possessive pronoun was originally used as the object of verbs and to show a possessive relationship, the "independent" pronoun served to show emphasis, and the "object" pronoun was used to mark the subject of intransitive verbs and the direct object of transitive verbs. All Afroasiatic branches differentiate between masculine and feminine third person singular pronouns, and all except for Cushitic and Omotic also differentiate between second person singular masculine and feminine pronouns. Semitic and Berber also differentiate between masculine and feminine second and third person plural, but there

10807-663: The templates found in the branches likely do not. Several Afroasiatic languages of the Semitic, Chadic, and Cushitic branches attest pluralization via reduplication , a feature which has often been assumed to go back to Proto-Afroasiatic. Robert Ratcliffe has instead argued that this reduplicating pattern originated after PAA, as a way to allow biradical nouns to insert "internal-a," a process which then became generalized to other roots in some languages; as an alternative hypothesis, they may have developed from forms with plural suffixes. Afroasiatic languages also use several pluralizing affixes – few of these, however, are present in more than

10914-745: The verb would come first in most sentences. Carsten Peust likewise supports VSO word order, as this is found in the two oldest attested branches, Egyptian and Semitic. However, Ronny Meyer and H. Ekkehard Wolff argue that this proposal does not concord with Diakonoff's suggestion that PAA was an ergative-absolutive language, in which subject and object are not valid categories. Zygmont Frajzyngier and Erin Shay further note that, if Proto-Afroasiatic had VSO word order, then an explanation must be found for why two of its branches, Omotic and Cushitic, show subject–object–verb word order (SOV word order). Both sets of scholars argue that this area needs more research. A system of sex-based male and female grammatical gender

11021-404: The verb, with categories found in Semitic languages such as aspect , voice , and person . There is little agreement about which tenses, aspects, or moods ( TAMs ) Proto-Afroasiatic might have had: it may have had two basic forms (indicative vs. subjunctive, state vs. action, transitive vs. intransitive, or perfective vs. imperfective) or three (unmarked vs. perfective vs. imperfective). There

11128-460: The way in which the noun inflects for number and case . For example, a language like Latin , German or Russian has a number of different declension patterns, and which pattern a particular noun follows may be highly correlated with its gender. For some instances of this, see Latin declension . A concrete example is provided by the German word See , which has two possible genders: when it

11235-400: Was a marked nominative language, in which the nominative case is only used to mark the subject of a verb, whereas an absolutive case is the citation form of the noun and also marks the object. Evidence for marked nominative alignment comes primarily from the use of cases in Cushitic and the so-called "states" of the noun in Berber languages; additionally, Helmut Satzinger has argued that

11342-404: Was originally triradical (having three consonants) or biradical (having two consonants) is debated. Among the modern branches, most Semitic roots are triradical, whereas most Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic roots are biradical. The "traditional theory" argues for original triradicalism in the family, as is the case in Semitic. In this theory, almost all biradical roots are the result of the loss of

11449-536: Was proposed by Georges Bohas , who argued that the third consonants were added to differentiate roots of similar meaning but without the third consonant having a particular meaning itself. Biradical verbs may also have been made triradical on the model of so-called "weak verbs," which have a final radical y or w . Many scholars do not argue for the original nature of either biradical or triradical roots, instead arguing that there are original triradical roots, original biradical roots, and triradical roots resulting from

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