Arabic and IE

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
manaster at umich.edu wrote:

> The question I like to pose
> nowadays in the form I did in my earlier posting: Could it be
> that IE together with Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber form a
> proper subfamily of AA itself (which at first sounds absurd
> until we realize just how different Cushitic and Chadic are
> from the above)

As long as we are in the business of dispelling myths, we should also
dispel this one. The notion that the sub-saharan  Cushitic and Chadic
languages are radically different from the Afroasiatic languages to the
north and east is a widely held received idea. But it is not widely held
by those who have done comparative work on these languages. As you
should know several different sub-classifications of AA have been
proposed, none has won general acceptance, and probably several others
could be proposed depending on what criteria you base your
classification on.

I am inclined to see Egyptian (along with Omotic, if it really is a
separate branch) as the most divergent of the branches, because so many
of the characteristic Afroasiatic features are lacking (the
prefix-conjugation, object-clitic pronouns, quantitative stem ablaut as
a marker of verbal aspect) or are found only in ambiguous traces (the
system of marking verb valence with the prefixes or suffixes s
(causative), t(reflexive) and n/m (passive), and quantitative stem
ablaut as marker of noun plural).

+++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan