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Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also called Afrasian or Hamito-Semitic[1] or Semito-Hamitic, [2] is a large language family. They are mainly spoken in Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. [3] There are around 300 Afroasiatic languages that are still spoken. About 495 million people speak an Afroasiatic language as ...
The Afroasiatic languages, also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, are a language family of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, 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 ...
This means that it is difficult to know which features in Afroasiatic languages are retentions, and which are innovations. [139] Moreover, all Afroasiatic languages have long been in contact with other language families and with each other, leading to the possibility of widespread borrowing both within Afroasiatic and from unrelated languages ...
- Introduction
- The Afroasiatic Languages
- History of The Project
- Present State of The Project
- Excursus: What Is etymology?
- Annual Reports
The Afroasiatic Index Project is a scholarly initiative that aims at creating an etymologicaldatabase of Afroasiatic languages.
Afroasiatic languages are a group of related languages spoken by various communities from a large area in West African centered around Lake Chad (Chadic), all the way across North Africa (Berber) into Egypt (Egyptian), Ethiopia, and Somalia, and down the Great Rift Valley to the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (Cushitic / Omotic). Crossing over into Wester...
THE CUSHITIC LEXICON PROJECT
The predecessor of the Afroasiatic Index Project was the Cushitic Lexicon Project, or Cushlex. The purpose of the Cushitic Lexicon Project was to provide interested investigators with access to the comparative lexical information contained in cognate sets existing within the 80 odd members of the Cushitic and Omotic language families. The Cushitic Lexicon, whose infrastructure is now largely complete, was done using hardware and software resources (e.g., desktop computer systems and off-the-s...
THE AFROASIATIC INDEX PROJECT
From about 1994 two serious shortcomings in the Cushitic Lexicon approach became apparent. One was that the database programs and data formats were becoming obsolete. Another, more important, one was that programming and interface design were becoming white elephants. These also threatened to become even more of a burden as the Project, as a whole, began to look outward, beyond Cushitic and Omotic, toward the more general Afroasiatic language superfamily. Fortunately, just when the project th...
At present we hope to make once more available a prototype Semitic Index giving etymological relations within Semitic, but not yet to any branches of Afroasiatic outside Semitic, and follow up with a Cushitic Index Since, as indicated, the Cushitic index already notes cognates in other branches, a rudimentary, Cushitic-oriented Egyptian, Berber and...
Etymology is the study of word histories. For example, our word for pig meat, pork, is actually an Old French word, porc--borrowed after the Norman conquest brought French culture to the British Isles. In turn, Old French porc itself developed out of an earlier Latin word, porcus. Our English word pork, therefore, comes down to us, through the inte...
Afroasiatic languages are the fourth largest linguistic phylum, spoken by some 350 million people in North, West, Central, and East Africa, in the Middle East, and in scattered communities in Europe, the United States, and the Caucasus. Some Afroasiatic languages, such as Arabic, Hausa, Amharic, Somali, and Oromo, are spoken by millions of ...
The meaning of AFRO-ASIATIC LANGUAGES is a family of languages widely distributed over southwestern Asia and northern Africa, comprising the Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and Chad subfamilies.
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Where are Afroasiatic languages spoken?
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Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group and is related to Geʽez, or Ethiopic, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church; Amharic is written in a slightly modified form of the alphabet used for writing the Geʽez language. There are 34 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which ...
