Arabic and IE(subdivisions in AA)

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

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

> On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote:
>
> > 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.
> >
> Yet but I don't see why you have to assume that I don't know this.
> But the view I am referring to is not one that I mentione merely
> because
> I picked it from some obsolete reference work as you seem to be
> suggesting.

Well, then, what is the basis for your the claim that Berber, Egyptian,
and Semitic are particularly close within AA?

> As you say yourself, there are a number of different classifications
> that have been or can be proposed.  But ultimately the only thing
> that matters is that the classification reflect historical reality.

This is really the nub of the issue as I see it. And it is why you can't
have classification without reconstruction of language history.
Similarities among languages within an established family may be due to
retention, shared innovation,  subsequent contact, or commn drift. You
can't get a reliable classification if you can't sort these things out.
You can't sort these out if you don't have some idea of what the
situation of the proto-language was, some idea of what the drift
patterns in the family are, and ideally some idea of when and where
contact may have occurred. Since there is still a lot of disagreement
about these issues in AA, there is also a lot of room for disagreement
on subclassification.

> It is by no means obvious that we can in fact arrive at that goal.
> What you say about "criteria" suggests that you do not share this
> goal, i.e., that you view classification as having no obejctive
> historical reality.

No nothing so drastic. I wasn't talking about the goal, so much as the
way things are. Different scholars may find different
subclassifications, depending on what kind of reconstruction they adopt,
that is on what features they regard as innovative.


>  > 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).
> >
> This is not methodologically sound.

Sure it is. I am not proposing an Egyptian/non-Egyptian primary split
within AA.  I am just taking issue with the viewpoint, also expressed by
Miquel Carrasquer Vidal, that Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber look similar
to each other, while Chadic and Cushitic look quite different.
Similarity is in the eye of the beholder, of course. So I thought it
would be best for me to lay out the reasons why for me Semitic, Berber,
Chadic, and Cushitic (i.e, Beja, Agaw, Afar-Saho, and Somali, at least)
look similar and it is Egyptian which looks quite different. It is still
open for debate, by the way, whether all of what I am calling
"characteristic features" really are conservative features. Egyptian
seems to me to pose the same kind of problem within AA as Hittite does
within IE.  It's the oldest language by attestation, but it seems to be
surprisingly innovative. Of course maybe it is all the others which are
innovative, in which case we would have to propose a primary split.



--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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