116-531: Werder ( Somali : Wardheer ; Italian : Uardere ) is a town in eastern Ethiopia . Located in the Werder Zone of the Somali Region , Werder has a latitude and longitude of 6°58′N 45°21′E / 6.967°N 45.350°E / 6.967; 45.350 with an elevation of 541 meters above sea level. It is the administrative center of Werder woreda . The Walwal wells, site of
232-747: A Latin orthography as the official national alphabet over several other writing scripts that were then in use. Concurrently, the Italian -language daily newspaper Stella d'Ottobre ("The October Star") was nationalized, renamed to Xiddigta Oktoobar , and began publishing in Somali. The state-run Radio Mogadishu has also broadcast in Somali since 1951. Additionally, other state-run public networks like Somaliland National TV , regional public networks such as Puntland TV and Radio and, as well as Eastern Television Network and Horn Cable Television , among other private broadcasters, air programs in Somali. Somali
348-492: A pitch accent . At present, there is no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic grammar, syntax, or morphology, nor one for any of the sub-branches besides Egyptian. This means that it is difficult to know which features in Afroasiatic languages are retentions, and which are innovations. Moreover, all Afroasiatic languages have long been in contact with other language families and with each other, leading to
464-509: A Cushitic-Omotic group. Additionally, the minority of scholars who favor an Asian origin of Afroasiatic tend to place Semitic as the first branch to split off. Disagreement on which features are innovative and which are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic produces radically different trees, as can be seen by comparing the trees produced by Ehret and Igor Diakonoff . Responding to the above, Tom Güldemann criticizes attempts at finding subgroupings based on common or lacking morphology by arguing that
580-455: A branch of Afroasiatic persisted as late as the 1980s. In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that a group of languages classified by Greenberg as Cushitic were in fact their own independent "Omotic" branch—a proposal that has been widely, if not universally, accepted. These six branches now constitute an academic consensus on the genetic structure of the family. Greenberg relied on his own method of mass comparison of vocabulary items rather than
696-467: A duality of Semitic and "Hamitic" any more than Indo-European implies a duality of Indic and "European". Because of its use by several important scholars and in the titles of significant works of scholarship, the total replacement of Hamito-Semitic is difficult. While Greenberg ultimately popularized the name "Afroasiatic" in 1960, it appears to have been coined originally by Maurice Delafosse , as French afroasiatique , in 1914. The name refers to
812-422: A majority of scholars: There is no agreement on the relationships between and subgrouping of the different Afroasiatic branches. Whereas Marcel Cohen (1947) claimed he saw no evidence for internal subgroupings, numerous other scholars have made proposals, with Carsten Peust counting 27 as of 2012. Common trends in proposals as of 2019 include using common or lacking grammatical features to argue that Omotic
928-406: A noun or a verb, there is evidence for the existence of distinct noun and verb roots, which behave in different ways. As part of these templates, the alternation ( apophony ) between high vowels (e.g. i, u) and a low vowel (a) in verbal forms is usually described as one of the main characteristics of AA languages: this change codes a variety of different functions. It is unclear whether this system
1044-493: A prominent 40,000-entry Somali dictionary. Most of the terms consisted of commonly used nouns. These lexical borrowings may have been more extensive in the past since a few words that Zaborski (1967:122) observed in the older literature were absent in Agostini's later work. In addition, the majority of personal names are derived from Arabic. The Somali language also contains a few Indo-European loanwords that were retained from
1160-565: A single language family, and in 1876 Friedrich Müller first described them as a "Hamito-Semitic" language family. Müller assumed that there existed a distinct "Hamitic" branch of the family that consisted of Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic. He did not include the Chadic languages, though contemporary Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius argued for the relation of Hausa to the Berber languages. Some scholars would continue to regard Hausa as related to
1276-595: A single language with multiple dialects. Other scholars, however, argue that they are a group of around twelve languages, about as different from each other as the Romance or Germanic languages. In the past, Berber languages were spoken throughout North Africa except in Egypt; since the 7th century CE, however, they have been heavily affected by Arabic and have been replaced by it in many places. There are two extinct languages potentially related to modern Berber. The first
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#17327912337371392-405: A spread of migrating farmers into Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures. Ehret, in a separate publication, argued that the two principles in linguistic approaches for determining the origin of languages which are the principles of fewest moves and greatest diversity had put “beyond reasonable doubt” that the language family “had originated in
1508-497: A syllable to begin with a vowel; however, in many Chadic languages verbs must begin with a consonant. In Cushitic and Chadic languages, a glottal stop or glottal fricative may be inserted to prevent a word from beginning with a vowel. Typically, syllables begin with only a single consonant. Diakonoff argues that proto-Afroasiatic did not have consonant clusters within a syllable. With the exception of some Chadic languages, all Afroasiatic languages allow both open syllables (ending in
1624-525: A vowel) and closed syllables (ending in a consonant); many Chadic languages do not allow a syllable to end in a consonant. Most words end in a vowel in Omotic and Cushitic, making syllable-final consonant clusters rare. Syllable weight plays an important role in AA, especially in Chadic; it can affect the form of affixes attached to a word. Several Afroasiatic languages have large consonant inventories, and it
1740-510: Is Afroasiatic at all, due its lack of several typical aspects of Afroasiatic morphology. There are between 40 and 80 languages in the Semitic family. Today, Semitic languages are spoken across North Africa, West Asia, and the Horn of Africa, as well as on the island of Malta, making them the sole Afroasiatic branch with members originating outside Africa. Arabic, spoken in both Asia and Africa,
1856-481: Is a consonantal structure into which various vocalic "templates" are placed. This structure is particularly visible in the verbs, and is particularly noticeable in Semitic. Besides for Semitic, vocalic templates are well attested for Cushitic and Berber, where, along with Chadic, it is less productive; it is absent in Omotic. For Egyptian, evidence for the root-and-template structure exists from Coptic. In Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, verbs have no inherent vowels at all;
1972-405: Is a large variety of vocalic systems in AA, and attempts to reconstruct the vocalic system of Proto-Afroasiatic vary considerably. All branches of Afroasiatic have a limited number of underlying vowels (between two and seven), but the number of phonetic vowels can be much larger. The quality of the underlying vowels varies considerably by language; the most common vowel throughout AA is schwa . In
2088-524: Is a result of a long series of southward population movements over the past ten centuries from the Gulf of Aden littoral. Lamberti subdivides Northern Somali into three dialects: Northern Somali proper (spoken in the northwest; he describes this dialect as Northern Somali in the proper sense), the Darod group (spoken in the northeast and along the eastern Ethiopia frontier; greatest number of speakers overall), and
2204-448: Is a tonal language, whereas Banti (1988) suggests that it is a pitch system. The syllable structure of Somali is (C)V(C). Root morphemes usually have a mono- or di-syllabic structure. Clusters of two consonants do not occur word-initially or word-finally, i.e., they only occur at syllable boundaries. The following consonants can be geminate: /b/, /d/, /ɖ/, /ɡ/, /ɢ/, /m/, /n/, /r/ and /l/. The following cannot be geminate: /t/, /k/ and
2320-486: Is against two different labial consonants (other than w ) occurring together in a root, a constraint which can be found in all branches but Omotic. Another widespread constraint is against two non-identical lateral obstruents , which can be found in Egyptian, Chadic, Semitic, and probably Cushitic. Such rules do not always apply for nouns, numerals, or denominal verbs , and do not affect prefixes or suffixes added to
2436-501: Is attested in Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic: it usually affects features such as pharyngealization, palatalization , and labialization . Several Omotic languages have " sibilant harmony", meaning that all sibilants (s, sh, z, ts, etc.) in a word must match. Restrictions against the co-occurrence of certain, usually similar, consonants in verbal roots can be found in all Afroasiatic branches, though they are only weakly attested in Chadic and Omotic. The most widespread constraint
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#17327912337372552-485: Is by far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language today, with around 300 million native speakers, while the Ethiopian Amharic language has around 25 million; collectively, Semitic is the largest branch of Afroasiatic by number of current speakers. Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language, and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic,
2668-428: Is first attested in writing around 3000 BCE and finally went extinct around 1300 CE, making it the language with the longest written history in the world. Egyptian is usually divided into two major periods, Earlier Egyptian (c. 3000–1300 BCE), which is further subdivided into Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian, and Later Egyptian (1300 BCE-1300 CE), which is further subdivided into Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Coptic
2784-419: Is hindered by the massive disparities in textual attestation between its branches: while the Semitic and Egyptian branches are attested in writing as early as the fourth millennium BC , Berber, Cushitic, and Omotic languages were often not recorded until the 19th or 20th centuries. While systematic sound laws have not yet been established to explain the relationships between the various branches of Afroasiatic,
2900-628: Is included, spoken around the Horn of Africa and in Sudan and Tanzania. The Cushitic family is traditionally split into four branches: the single language of Beja (c. 3 million speakers), the Agaw languages, Eastern Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic. Only one Cushitic language, Oromo , has more than 25 million speakers; other languages with more than a million speakers include Somali , Afar , Hadiyya , and Sidaama . Many Cushitic languages have relatively few speakers. Cushitic does not appear to be related to
3016-523: Is likely that this is inherited from proto-Afroasiatic. All Afroasiatic languages contain stops and fricatives ; some branches have additional types of consonants such as affricates and lateral consonants . AA languages tend to have pharyngeal fricative consonants, with Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic sharing ħ and ʕ . In all AA languages, consonants can be bilabial , alveolar , velar , and glottal , with additional places of articulation found in some branches or languages. Additionally,
3132-541: Is mostly used in older Russian sources. The elements of the name were derived from the names of two sons of Noah as attested in the Book of Genesis 's Table of Nations passage: "Semitic" from the first-born Shem , and "Hamitic" from the second-born Ham (Genesis 5:32). Within the Table of Nations, each of Noah's sons is presented as the common progenitor of various people groups deemed to be closely related: among others Shem
3248-481: Is no information on whether Egyptian had tones. In contemporary Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, tone is primarily a grammatical feature: it encodes various grammatical functions, only differentiating lexical roots in a few cases. In some Chadic and some Omotic languages every syllable has to have a tone, whereas in most Cushitic languages this is not the case. Some scholars postulate that Proto-Afroasiatic may have had tone, while others believe it arose later from
3364-597: Is not marked, and front and back vowels are not distinguished. Writing systems developed in the twentieth century include the Osmanya , Borama and Kaddare alphabets , which were invented by Osman Yusuf Kenadid , Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur and Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare , respectively. Several digital collections of texts in the Somali language have been developed in recent decades. These corpora include Kaydka Af Soomaaliga (KAF), Bangiga Af Soomaaliga,
3480-436: Is not the academic consensus. M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli write that there are about 400 languages in Afroasiatic; Ethnologue lists 375 languages. Many scholars estimate fewer languages; exact numbers vary depending on the definitions of " language " and " dialect ". The Berber (or Libyco-Berber) languages are spoken today by perhaps 16 million people. They are often considered to constitute
3596-481: Is rarely pronounced as a velar fricative, Partially the reason why is that it is mostly found in Arabic loanwords. It is pronounced as the phoneme χ when it is an allophone for the letter ⟨q⟩ in syllabic codas. As in A kh ri from A q ri meaning (read). Pitch is phonemic in Somali, but it is debated whether Somali is a pitch accent , or it is a tonal language . Andrzejewski (1954) posits that Somali
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3712-522: Is recognized as an official working language in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. Although it is not an official language of Djibouti , it constitutes a major national language there. Somali is used in television and radio broadcasts, with the government-operated Radio Djibouti transmitting programs in the language from 1943 onwards. The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation also broadcasts in the Somali language in its Iftin FM Programmes. The language
3828-467: Is similar to the stem alternation that typifies Cairene Arabic . Somali has two sets of pronouns: independent (substantive, emphatic) pronouns and clitic (verbal) pronouns. The independent pronouns behave grammatically as nouns, and normally occur with the suffixed article -ka/-ta (e.g. adiga , "you"). This article may be omitted after a conjunction or focus word. For example, adna meaning "and you..." (from adi - na ). Clitic pronouns are attached to
3944-718: Is spoken in the Somali territories within North Eastern Kenya , namely Wajir County , Garissa County and Mandera County . The Somali language is regulated by the Regional Somali Language Academy , an intergovernmental institution established in June 2013 in Djibouti City by the governments of Djibouti, Somalia and Ethiopia. It is officially mandated with preserving the Somali language. As of October 2022, Somali and Oromo are
4060-472: Is that the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests that a monophyletic "Hamitic" branch exists alongside Semitic. In addition, Joseph Greenberg has argued that Hamitic possesses racial connotations , and that "Hamito-Semitic" overstates the centrality of the Semitic languages within the family. By contrast, Victor Porkhomovsky suggests that the label is simply an inherited convention, and doesn't imply
4176-718: Is the Numidian language , represented by over a thousand short inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet , found throughout North Africa and dating from the 2nd century BCE onward. The second is the Guanche language , which was formerly spoken on the Canary Islands and went extinct in the 17th century CE. The first longer written examples of modern Berber varieties only date from the 16th or 17th centuries CE. Chadic languages number between 150 and 190, making Chadic
4292-502: Is the lack of agreement on the subgroupings of Afroasiatic (see Further subdivisions ) – this makes associating archaeological evidence with the spread of Afroasiatic particularly difficult. Nevertheless, there is a long-accepted link between the speakers of Proto- Southern Cushitic languages and the East African Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (5,000 years ago), and archaeological evidence associates
4408-515: Is the only stage written alphabetically to show vowels, whereas Egyptian was previously written in Egyptian hieroglyphs , which only represent consonants. In the Coptic period, there is evidence for six major dialects, which presumably existed previously but are obscured by pre-Coptic writing; additionally, Middle Egyptian appears to be based on a different dialect than Old Egyptian, which in turn shows dialectal similarities to Late Egyptian. Egyptian
4524-461: Is to use a computational methodology such as lexicostatistics , with one of the earliest attempts being Fleming 1983. This is also the method used by Alexander Militarev and Sergei Starostin to create a family tree. Fleming (2006) was a more recent attempt by Fleming, with a different result from Militarev and Starostin. Hezekiah Bacovcin and David Wilson argue that this methodology is invalid for discerning linguistic sub-relationship. They note
4640-609: The African continent , including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch. Arabic , if counted as a single language, is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. Other major Afroasiatic languages include the Cushitic Oromo language with 45 million native speakers, Chadic Hausa language with over 34 million,
4756-566: The Borama script are informally used. Somali is classified within the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, specifically, Lowland East Cushitic in addition to Afar and Saho . Somali is the best-documented of the Cushitic languages, with academic studies of the language dating back to the late 19th century. The Somali language is spoken in Somali inhabited areas of Somalia , Djibouti , Ethiopia , Kenya , Yemen and by members of
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4872-819: The Cushitic branch. It is spoken primarily in Greater Somalia , and by the Somali diaspora as a mother tongue. Somali is an official language in both Somalia and Ethiopia , and serves as a national language in Djibouti , it is also a recognised minority language in Kenya . The Somali language is officially written with the Latin alphabet although the Arabic script and several Somali scripts like Osmanya , Kaddare and
4988-536: The Horn of Africa , and parts of the Sahara and Sahel . Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European , Sino-Tibetan , and Niger–Congo . Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber , Chadic , Cushitic , Egyptian , Semitic , and Omotic . The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to
5104-455: The Near East and South Asia (e.g. khiyaar "cucumber" from Persian : خيار khiyār ). Other loan words have also displaced their native synonyms in some dialects (e.g. jabaati "a type of flat bread" from Hindi: चपाती chapāti displacing sabaayad). Some of these words were also borrowed indirectly via Arabic. As part of a broader governmental effort of linguistic purism in
5220-665: The Nilotic languages ; it is unclear whether the Dizoid group of Omotic languages belongs to the Northern or Southern group. The two Omotic languages with the most speakers are Wolaitta and Gamo-Gofa-Dawro , with about 1.2 million speakers each. A majority of specialists consider Omotic to constitute a sixth branch of Afroasiatic. Omotic was formerly considered part of the Cushitic branch; some scholars continue to consider it part of Cushitic. Other scholars have questioned whether it
5336-518: The Omotic languages to constitute a sixth branch. Due to the presumed distance of relationship between the various branches, many scholars prefer to refer to Afroasiatic as a "linguistic phylum" rather than a "language family". G.W. Tsereteli goes even further and outright doubts that the Afro-Asiatic languages are a genetic language family altogether, but are rather a sprachbund. However, this
5452-692: The Proto-Cushitic speakers with economic transformations in the Sahara dating c. 8,500 ago, as well as the speakers of the Proto-Zenati variety of the Berber languages with an expansion across the Maghreb in the 5th century CE. An origin somewhere on the African continent has broad scholarly support, and is seen as being well-supported by the linguistic data. Most scholars more narrowly place
5568-553: The Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain, scientist Johann Maria Hildebrandt noted upon visiting the area that "we know from ancient authors that these districts, at present so desert, were formerly populous and civilised[...] I also discovered ancient ruins and rock-inscriptions both in pictures and characters[...] These have hitherto not been deciphered." According to the 1974 report for Ministry of Information and National Guidance, this script represents
5684-585: The Semitic languages had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer , following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710. Hamitic was first used by Ernest Renan in 1855 to refer to languages that appeared similar to the Semitic languages, but were not themselves provably a part of the family. The belief in a connection between Africans and the Biblical Ham, which had existed at least as far back as Isidore of Seville in
5800-486: The Somali diaspora . It is also spoken as an adoptive language by a few ethnic minority groups and individuals in Somali majority regions. Somali is the most widely spoken Cushitic language in the region followed by Oromo and Afar . As of 2021, there are approximately 24 million speakers of Somali, spread in Greater Somalia of which around 17 million reside in Somalia. The language is spoken by an estimated 95% of
5916-610: The Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) declared it the Somali Democratic Republic 's primary language of administration and education. Somali was thereafter established as the main language of academic instruction in forms 1 through 4 , following preparatory work by the government-appointed Somali Language Committee. It later expanded to include all 12 forms in 1979. In 1972, the SRC adopted
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#17327912337376032-410: The comparative method of demonstrating regular sound correspondences to establish the family. An alternative classification, based on the pronominal and conjugation systems, was proposed by A.N. Tucker in 1967. As of 2023, widely accepted sound correspondences between the different branches have not yet been firmly established. Nevertheless, morphological traits attributable to the proto-language and
6148-500: The glottal stop ( ʔ ) usually exists as a phoneme, and there tends to be no phonemic contrast between [p] and [f] or [b] and [v]. In Cushitic, the Ethiopian Semitic language Tigrinya , and some Chadic languages, there is no underlying phoneme [p] at all. Most, if not all branches of Afroasiatic distinguish between voiceless , voiced , and " emphatic " consonants. The emphatic consonants are typically formed deeper in
6264-404: The "Hamites", the originators of Hamitic languages, with (supposedly culturally superior) "Caucasians", who were assumed to have migrated into Africa and intermixed with indigenous "Negroid" Africans in ancient times. The "Hamitic theory" would serve as the basis for Carl Meinhof 's highly influential classification of African languages in his 1912 book Die Sprache der Hamiten . On one hand,
6380-656: The "Hamitic" classification was justified partially based on linguistic features: for example, Meinhof split the presently-understood Chadic family into "Hamito-Chadic", and an unrelated non-Hamitic "Chadic" based on which languages possessed grammatical gender. On the other hand, the classification also relied on non-linguistic anthropological and culturally contingent features, such as skin color, hair type, and lifestyle. Ultimately, Meinhof's classification of Hamitic proved to include languages from every presently-recognized language family within Africa. The first scholar to question
6496-507: The 6th century AD, led scholars in the early 19th century to speak vaguely of "Hamian" or "Hamitish" languages. The term Hamito-Semitic has largely fallen out of favor among linguists writing in English, but is still frequently used in the scholarship of various other languages, such as German. Several issues with the label Hamito-Semitic have led many scholars to abandon the term and criticize its continued use. One common objection
6612-522: The African branches of Afroasiatic are very diverse; this suggests the rapid spread of Semitic out of Africa. Proponents of an origin of Afroasiatic within Africa assume the proto-language to have been spoken by pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers , arguing that there is no evidence of words in Proto-Afroasiatic related to agriculture or animal husbandry. Christopher Ehret, S.O. Y. Keita, and Paul Newman also argue that archaeology does not support
6728-561: The Canaanite languages (including Hebrew), as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Ge'ez and Amharic. The classification within West Semitic remains contested. The only group with an African origin is Ethiopian Semitic. The oldest written attestations of Semitic languages come from Mesopotamia, Northern Syria, and Egypt and date as early as c. 3000 BCE. There are also other proposed branches, but none has so far convinced
6844-522: The Cushitic and Semitic Afroasiatic languages spoken in the Horn region (e.g. Amharic ). However, Somali noun phrases are head-initial, whereby the noun precedes its modifying adjective. This pattern of general head-finality with head-initial noun phrases is also found in other Cushitic languages (e.g. Oromo), but not generally in Ethiopian Semitic languages. Somali uses three focus markers: baa , ayaa and waxa(a) , which generally mark new information or contrastive emphasis. Baa and ayaa require
6960-456: The Egyptian word rmṯ ("person")—and Erythraean —referring to the core area around which the languages are spoken, the Red Sea —have also been proposed. Scholars generally consider Afroasiatic to have between five and eight branches. The five that are universally agreed upon are Berber (also called "Libyco-Berber"), Chadic , Cushitic , Egyptian , and Semitic . Most specialists consider
7076-799: The Ethiopian military placed staff members of the Dutch chapter of the NGO Doctors without Borders (MSF) under house arrest in Werder, accusing them of providing medical support to the ONLF. The MSF reported in September 2008 that refugees from fighting in the local conflict between Somali insurgents and the Ethiopian government had flocked to Werder in search of food and water. "An estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people are currently living in squalid conditions,"
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#17327912337377192-455: The Horn of Africa, Egypt, and the eastern Sahara. A significant minority of scholars argues for an origin in the Levant . The reconstructed timelines of when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary extensively, with dates ranging from 18,000 BC to 8,000 BC. Even the latest plausible dating makes Afroasiatic the oldest language family accepted by contemporary linguists. Comparative study of Afroasiatic
7308-423: The Horn of Africa”. A significant minority of scholars supports an Asian origin of Afroasiatic, most of whom are specialists in Semitic or Egyptian studies. The main proponent of an Asian origin is the linguist Alexander Militarev , who argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by early agriculturalists in the Levant and subsequently spread to Africa. Militarev associates the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic with
7424-592: The Italians built a road to carry motor traffic from Italian Somaliland to Werder in the Ogaden by way of Geladi with the fort of Walwal becoming a crucial component for the Italians to win the war. The subjects of the Sultans Jasin and Refle were forced to accept Italian rule, otherwise, they would not be permitted to draw water at Werder. The eastern part of Ogaden was administered by Ethiopian officials for
7540-564: The Latin nor Osmanya scripts accommodate this numerical switching. *the commas in the Osmanya number chart are added for clarity Afroasiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic , sometimes Afrasian ), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic , are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia , North Africa ,
7656-542: The Levantine Post- Natufian Culture , arguing that the reconstructed lexicon of flora and fauna, as well as farming and pastoralist vocabulary indicates that Proto-AA must have been spoken in this area. Scholar Jared Diamond and archaeologist Peter Bellwood have taken up Militarev's arguments as part of their general argument that the spread of linguistic macrofamilies (such as Indo-European, Bantu, and Austro-Asiatic) can be associated with
7772-585: The Lower Juba group (spoken by northern Somali settlers in the southern riverine areas). Benadir (also known as Coastal Somali) is spoken on the central Indian Ocean seaboard, including Mogadishu . It forms a relatively smaller group. The dialect is fairly mutually intelligible with Northern Somali. The language has five basic vowels . Somali has 22 consonant phonemes . The retroflex plosive /ɖ/ may have an implosive quality for some Somali Bantu speakers, and intervocalically it can be realized as
7888-585: The MSF stated, "under makeshift shelters, with limited access to water, no sanitation, and the carcasses of dead animals around them." Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency in 2005, this town has an estimated total population of 18,357, of whom 9,737 are men and 8,620 are women. The 1997 census reported the town to have a total population of 12,309 of whom 6,433 were men and 5,876 women. The largest ethnic group reported in this town
8004-797: The Semitic Amharic language with 25 million, and the Cushitic Somali language with 15 million. Other Afroasiatic languages with millions of native speakers include the Semitic Tigrinya and Modern Hebrew , the Cushitic Sidaama , and the Omotic Wolaitta language , though most languages within the family are much smaller in size. There are many well-attested Afroasiatic languages from antiquity that have since died or gone extinct , including Egyptian and
8120-588: The Semitic Himyarite and Sabaean languages that were largely spoken in what is modern day Yemen —"there is an extensive and ancient relationship between the people and cultures of both sides of the Red Sea coast" Mire posits. Yet, while many more such ancient inscriptions are yet to be found or analyzed, many have been "bulldozed by developers, as the Ministry of Tourism could not buy the land or stop
8236-407: The Semitic languages Akkadian , Biblical Hebrew , Phoenician , Amorite , and Ugaritic . There is no consensus among historical linguists as to precisely where or when the common ancestor of all Afroasiatic languages, known as Proto-Afroasiatic , was originally spoken. However, most agree that the Afroasiatic homeland was located somewhere in northeastern Africa, with specific proposals including
8352-668: The Somali Web Corpus (soWaC), a Somali read-speech corpus, Asaas (Beginning in Somali) and a Web-Based Somali Language Model and text Corpus called Wargeys (Newspaper in Somali). For all numbers between 11 kow iyo toban and 99 sagaashal iyo sagaal , it is equally correct to switch the placement of the numbers, although larger numbers is some dialects prefer to place the 10s numeral first. For example 25 may both be written as labaatan iyo shan and shan iyo labaatan (lit. Twenty and Five & Five and Twenty). Although neither
8468-525: The Somali language, the past few decades have seen a push in Somalia toward replacement of loanwords in general with their Somali equivalents or neologisms . To this end, the Supreme Revolutionary Council during its tenure officially prohibited the borrowing and use of English and Italian terms. Archaeological excavations and research in Somalia uncovered ancient inscriptions in a distinct writing system . In an 1878 report to
8584-530: The Somali people's extensive social, cultural, commercial and religious links and contacts with nearby populations in the Arabian peninsula. Arabic loanwords are most commonly used in religious, administrative and education-related speech (e.g. aamiin for "faith in God"), though they are also present in other areas (e.g. kubbad-da , "ball"). Soravia (1994) noted a total of 1,436 Arabic loanwords in Agostini a.o. 1985,
8700-469: The Somali poems by Sheikh Uways and Sheikh Ismaaciil Faarah. The rest of the existing historical literature in Somali principally consists of translations of documents from Arabic. Since then a number of writing systems have been used for transcribing the Somali language. Of these, the Somali Latin alphabet , officially adopted in 1972, is the most widely used and recognised as official orthography of
8816-543: The colonial period. Most of these lexical borrowings come from English and Italian and are used to describe modern concepts (e.g. telefishen-ka , "the television"; raadia-ha , "the radio"). There are 300 loan words from Italian, such as garawati for "tie" (from Italian cravatta ), dimuqraadi from democratico (democratic), mikroskoob from microscopio , and so on. Additionally, Somali contains lexical terms from Persian , Urdu and Hindi that were acquired through historical trade with communities in
8932-705: The country's inhabitants, and also by a majority of the population in Djibouti. Following the start of the Somali Civil War in the early 1990s, the Somali-speaking diaspora increased in size, with newer Somali speech communities forming in parts of the Middle East, North America and Europe. Constitutionally, Somali and Arabic are the two official languages of Somalia . Somali has been an official national language since January 1973, when
9048-534: The destruction". Besides Ahmed's Latin script, other orthographies that have been used for centuries for writing the Somali language include the long-established Arabic script and Wadaad's writing . According to Bogumił Andrzejewski , this usage was limited to Somali clerics and their associates, as sheikhs preferred to write in the liturgical Arabic language. Various such historical manuscripts in Somali nonetheless exist, which mainly consist of Islamic poems ( qasidas ), recitations and chants. Among these texts are
9164-626: The development of agriculture; they argue that there is clear archaeological support for farming spreading from the Levant into Africa via the Nile valley. Afroasiatic languages share a number of phonetic and phonological features. Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, Omotic, and most languages in the Semitic branch require every syllable to begin with a consonant (with the exception of some grammatical prefixes). Igor Diakonoff argues that this constraint goes back to Proto-Afroasiatic. Some Chadic languages allow
9280-446: The different languages, central vowels are often inserted to break up consonant clusters (a form of epenthesis ). Various Semitic, Cushitic, Berber, and Chadic languages, including Arabic, Amharic, Berber, Somali, and East Dangla, also exhibit various types of vowel harmony . The majority of AA languages are tonal languages : phonemic tonality is found in Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, but absent in Berber and Semitic. There
9396-402: The earliest written attestation of Somali. Much more recently, Somali archaeologist Sada Mire has published ancient inscriptions found throughout Somaliland . As much for much of Somali linguistic history the language was not widely used for literature, Dr. Mire's publications however prove that writing as a technology was not foreign nor scarce in the region. These piece of writing are from
9512-487: The establishment of cognates throughout the family have confirmed its genetic validity . There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant 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
9628-426: The evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples. Likewise, no consensus exists as to where proto-Afroasiatic originated. Scholars have proposed locations for the Afroasiatic homeland across Africa and West Asia. Roger Blench writes that the debate possesses "a strong ideological flavor", with associations between an Asian origin and "high civilization". An additional complicating factor
9744-566: The existence of "Hamitic languages" was Marcel Cohen in 1924, with skepticism also expressed by A. Klingenheben and Dietrich Westermann during the 1920s and '30s. However, Meinhof's "Hamitic" classification remained prevalent throughout the early 20th century until it was definitively disproven by Joseph Greenberg in the 1940s, based on racial and anthropological data. Instead, Greenberg proposed an Afroasiatic family consisting of five branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic. Reluctance among some scholars to recognize Chadic as
9860-503: The fact that it is the only major language family with large populations in both Africa and Asia. Due to concerns that "Afroasiatic" could imply the inclusion of all languages spoken across Africa and Asia, the name "Afrasian" ( Russian : afrazijskije ) was proposed by Igor Diakonoff in 1980. At present it predominantly sees use among Russian scholars. The names Lisramic —based on the Afroasiastic root *lis- ("tongue") and
9976-544: The first time on 23 September 1948 when Ethiopian administrators were sent to Kebri Dahar , Kelafo and Werder. Although Werder remained in Somali hands at the end of the Ogaden War , Ethiopian units under Brigadier-General Demisse Bulto, commander of the First Revolutionary Army, recovered Werder as part of Operation Lash by November 1980, using the town as one of three bases to successfully clear
10092-441: The flap [ɽ] . Some speakers produce /ħ/ with epiglottal trilling as / ʜ / in retrospect. /q/ is often epiglottalized . The letter ⟨dh⟩ is a retroflex flap when it is pronounced intervocalically, hence becoming the phoneme ( ɽ ): for example, Qu r aanjo (Ant) from Qu dh aanjo; But however, more often than not is the pronunciation of ɽ to the unretained-retroflex ɾ . The letter ⟨kh⟩
10208-400: The focused element to occur preverbally, while waxa(a) may be used following the verb. Somali loanwords can be divided into those derived from other Afroasiatic languages (mainly Arabic), and those of Indo-European extraction (mainly Italian). Somali's main lexical borrowings come from Arabic, and are estimated to constitute about 20% of the language's vocabulary. This is a legacy of
10324-471: The fricatives. Two vowels cannot occur together at syllable boundaries. Epenthetic consonants, e.g. [j] and [ʔ], are therefore inserted. Somali is an agglutinative language, and also shows properties of inflection . Affixes mark many grammatical meanings, including aspect, tense and case. Somali has an old prefixal verbal inflection restricted to four common verbs, with all other verbs undergoing inflection by more obvious suffixation. This general pattern
10440-436: The homeland near the geographic center of its present distribution, "in the southeastern Sahara or adjacent Horn of Africa." The Afroasiatic languages spoken in Africa are not more closely related to each other than they are to Semitic, as one would expect if only Semitic had remained in a West Asian homeland while all other branches had spread from there. Likewise, all Semitic languages are fairly similar to each other, whereas
10556-405: The languages share a number of common features. One of the most important for establishing membership in the branch is a common set of pronouns. Other widely shared features include a prefix m- which creates nouns from verbs, evidence for alternations between the vowel "a" and a high vowel in the forms of the verb, similar methods of marking gender and plurality, and some details of phonology such as
10672-888: The largest family in Afroasiatic by number of extant languages. The Chadic languages are typically divided into three major branches, East Chadic, Central Chadic, and West Chadic. Most Chadic languages are located in the Chad Basin , with the exception of Hausa . Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria. It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers. Eight other Chadic languages have around 100,000 speakers; other Chadic languages often have few speakers and may be in danger of going extinct. Only about 40 Chadic languages have been fully described by linguists. There are about 30 Cushitic languages, more if Omotic
10788-602: The method's inability to detect various strong commonalities even between well-studied branches of AA. A relationship between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and the Berber languages was perceived as early as the 9th century CE by the Hebrew grammarian and physician Judah ibn Quraysh , who is regarded as a forerunner of Afroasiatic studies. The French orientalist Guillaume Postel had also pointed out similarities between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic in 1538, and Hiob Ludolf noted similarities also to Ge'ez and Amharic in 1701. This family
10904-422: The most common names for the family are Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic ), Hamito-Semitic , and Semito-Hamitic . Other proposed names that have yet to find widespread acceptance include Erythraic / Erythraean , Lisramic , Noahitic , and Lamekhite . Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic to describe the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1876). The variant Semito-Hamitic
11020-619: The notorious clash between Italian and Ethiopian troops which triggered the Second Italian-Abyssinian War , are located around 12 kilometers to the north-east of the town. One of the Dhulbahante garesas Mohammed Abdullah Hassan constructed in 1910 was built in the town, following the relocation of his capital to Taleex the year before, allowing him to consolidate his control over the Huwan . During 1933–34
11136-523: The only Cushitic languages available on Google Translate . The Somali languages are broadly divided into three main groups: Northern Somali , Benadir and Maay . Northern Somali forms the basis for Standard Somali. It is spoken by the majority of the Somali population with its speech area stretching from Djibouti , and the Somali Region of Ethiopia to the Northern Frontier District . This widespread modern distribution
11252-594: The other Afroasiatic languages, but the idea was controversial: many scholars refused to admit that the largely unwritten, " Negroid " Chadic languages were in the same family as the " Caucasian " ancient civilizations of the Egyptians and Semites. An important development in the history of Afroasiatic scholarship – and the history of African linguistics – was the creation of the " Hamitic theory " or "Hamitic hypothesis" by Lepsius, fellow Egyptologist Christian Bunsen , and linguist Christian Bleek . This theory connected
11368-453: The plural of the masculine noun dibi ("bull") is formed by converting it into feminine dibi . Somali is unusual among the world's languages in that the object is unmarked for case while the subject is marked, though this feature is found in other Cushitic languages such as Oromo. Somali is a subject–object–verb (SOV) language. It is largely head final , with postpositions and with obliques preceding verbs. These are common features of
11484-435: The poor state of present documentation and understanding of particular language families (historically with Egyptian, presently with Omotic). Gene Gragg likewise argues that more needs to be known about Omotic still, and that Afroasiatic linguists have still not found convincing isoglosses on which to base genetic distinctions. One way of avoiding the problem of determining which features are original and which are inherited
11600-483: The possibility of widespread borrowing both within Afroasiatic and from unrelated languages. There are nevertheless a number of commonly observed features in Afroasiatic morphology and derivation, including the use of suffixes , infixes , vowel lengthening and shortening as a morphological change, as well as the use of tone changes to indicate morphology. Further commonalities and differences are explored in more detail below. A widely attested feature in AA languages
11716-453: The presence of pharyngeal fricatives . Other features found in multiple branches include a specialized verb conjugation using suffixes (Egyptian, Semitic, Berber), a specialized verb conjugation using prefixes (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), verbal prefixes deriving middle (t-), causative (s-), and passive (m-) verb forms (Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic), and a suffix used to derive adjectives (Egyptian, Semitic). In current scholarship,
11832-420: The presence or absence of morphological features is not a useful way of discerning subgroupings in Afroasiatic, because it can not be excluded that families currently lacking certain features did not have them in the past; this also means that the presence of morphological features cannot be taken as defining a subgroup. Peust notes that other factors that can obscure genetic relationships between languages include
11948-525: The rest of eastern Ethiopia of foreign Somali troops by 3 December. Government security forces and members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) clashed in Werder on 23 February 1994. More than 50 people were reported killed during the initial incident and in the three days of skirmishes that followed. The fighting forced the town's population to flee and seek shelter in the surrounding countryside. On 26 January 2008,
12064-778: The root. Roots that may have contained sequences that were possible in Proto-Afroasiatic but are disallowed in the daughter languages are assumed to have undergone consonant dissimilation or assimilation . A set of constraints, developed originally by Joseph Greenberg on the basis of Arabic, has been claimed to be typical for Afroasiatic languages. Greenberg divided Semitic consonants into four types: "back consonants" ( glottal , pharyngeal , uvular , laryngeal , and velar consonants ), "front consonants" ( dental or alveolar consonants ), liquid consonants , and labial consonants . He showed that, generally, any consonant from one of these groups could combine with consonants from any other group, but could not be used together with consonants from
12180-551: The same group. Additionally, he showed that Proto-Semitic restricted a sequence of two identical consonants in the first and second position of the triliteral root. These rules also have a number of exceptions: Similar exceptions can be demonstrated for the other AA branches that have these restrictions to their root formation. James P. Allen has demonstrated that slightly different rules apply to Egyptian: for instance, Egyptian allows two identical consonants in some roots, and disallows velars from occurring with pharyngeals. There
12296-557: The state. The script was developed by a number of leading scholars of Somali, including Musa Haji Ismail Galal , B. W. Andrzejewski and Shire Jama Ahmed specifically for transcribing the Somali language, and uses all letters of the English Latin alphabet except p , v and z . There are no diacritics or other special characters except the use of the apostrophe for the glottal stop , which does not occur word-initially. There are three consonant digraphs : DH, KH and SH. Tone
12412-419: The throat than the others; they can be realized variously as glottalized , pharyngealized , uvularized , ejective , and/or implosive consonants in the different branches. It is generally agreed that only the obstruents had a contrast between voiceless and voiced forms in Proto-Afroasiatic, whereas continuants were voiceless. A form of long-distance consonant assimilation known as consonant harmony
12528-408: The verb and do not take nominal morphology. Somali marks clusivity in the first person plural pronouns; this is also found in a number of other East Cushitic languages, such as Rendille and Dhaasanac. As in various other Afro-Asiatic languages, Somali is characterized by polarity of gender , whereby plural nouns usually take the opposite gender agreement of their singular forms. For example,
12644-609: The vowels found in a given stem are dependent on the vocalic template. In Chadic, verb stems can include an inherent vowel as well. Most Semitic verbs are triliteral (have three consonants), whereas most Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic verbs are biliteral (having two consonants). The degree to which the Proto-AA verbal root was triliteral is debated. It may have originally been mostly biconsonantal, to which various affixes (such as verbal extensions ) were then added and lexicalized. Although any root could theoretically be used to create
12760-429: The written ancient languages known from its area, Meroitic or Old Nubian . The oldest text in a Cushitic language probably dates from around 1770; written orthographies were only developed for a select number of Cushitic languages in the early 20th century. The Egyptian branch consists of a single language, Egyptian (often called "Ancient Egyptian"), which was historically spoken in the lower Nile Valley. Egyptian
12876-628: Was formally described and named "Semitic" by August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781. In 1844, Theodor Benfey first described the relationship between Semitic and the Egyptian language and connected both to the Berber and the Cushitic languages (which he called "Ethiopic"). In the same year T.N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and the Hausa language, an idea that was taken up by early scholars of Afroasiatic. In 1855, Ernst Renan named these languages, related to Semitic but not Semitic, "Hamitic," in 1860 Carl Lottner proposed that they belonged to
12992-540: Was replaced by Arabic as the spoken language of Egypt, but Coptic continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church . The c. 30 Omotic languages are still mostly undescribed by linguists. They are all spoken in southwest Ethiopia except for the Ganza language , spoken in Sudan. Omotic is typically split into North Omotic (or Aroid) and South Omotic, with the latter more influenced by
13108-419: 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 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
13224-438: Was the Somali (98.2%). This is a slightly lower share than in the woreda as a whole (99.9%), as over 88% of the non-Somali inhabitants of the woreda live in the town. Somali language Somali ( / s ə ˈ m ɑː l i , s oʊ -/ sə- MAH -lee, soh- ; Latin script: Af Soomaali ; Wadaad : اف صومالِ ; Osmanya : 𐒖𐒍 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘 [af soːmaːli] ) is an Afroasiatic language belonging to
13340-683: Was the father of the Jews , Assyrians , and Arameans , while Ham was the father of the Egyptians and Cushites . This genealogy does not reflect the actual origins of these peoples' languages: for example, the Canaanites are descendants of Ham according to the Table, even though Hebrew is now classified as a Canaanite language , while the Elamites are ascribed to Shem despite their language being totally unrelated to Hebrew. The term Semitic for
13456-623: Was the first language to branch off, often followed by Chadic. In contrast to scholars who argue for an early split of Chadic from Afroasiatic, scholars of the Russian school tend to argue that Chadic and Egyptian are closely related, and scholars who rely on percentage of shared lexicon often group Chadic with Berber. Three scholars who agree on an early split between Omotic and the other subbranches, but little else, are Harold Fleming (1983), Christopher Ehret (1995), and Lionel Bender (1997). In contrast, scholars relying on shared lexicon often produce
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