So, Afroasiatic... is it really legit?

[KathTheDragon]

I'm not sure what you're asking, Zju?

[Travis B.]

I'm not sure what you're asking, Zju?

I think what Zju's questioning is whether the users on this board are holding to the view that Semitic did not originate in the horn of Africa just out of some orthodoxy.

Personally, I question the idea because it seems as if the Ethiosemitic languages, from my limited knowledge, are influenced by a Cushitic substratum, which does not affect the rest of Semitic, whereas if Ethiosemitic were basal and South Semitic on the Arabian peninsula along with Central and East Semitic were descended from it (as posited by the idea of an Ethiopian Urheimat for Semitic), then any Cushitic influence upon Ethiosemitic would be reflected in Semitic as a whole.

[KathTheDragon]

Ah! Well, yes, that's exactly what I think. As I noted to my friend earlier, I had exactly the same reaction to my own personal "hot takes" on PIE: an unwillingness to abandon the received wisdom. To put it bluntly, is anyone here an expert on Semitic, or are they just repeating things they've heard or read? I suspect the answer is the latter in every case (including mine! I'm no expert, I just chat with one).

whereas if Ethiosemitic were basal and South Semitic on the Arabian peninsula along with Central and East Semitic were descended from it (as posited by the idea of an Ethiopian Urheimat for Semitic), then any Cushitic influence upon Ethiosemitic would be reflected in Semitic as a whole.

Your argument has a critical flaw: South Arabian and Asian Semitic do not descend from African Semitic. They both descend from Proto-Semitic which was spoken a very long time ago, and can you guarantee Cushitic was still spoken exactly where it is today back then? If you can, please lend me your time machine. It's entirely possible that Cushitic came into contact with Semitic only after the family broke up into African Semitic on the one hand, and Asian Semitic and South Arabian on the other.

Of course, if you assume Proto-Semitic was spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula rather than the horn of Africa itself, your argument fails even harder.

[Travis B.]

whereas if Ethiosemitic were basal and South Semitic on the Arabian peninsula along with Central and East Semitic were descended from it (as posited by the idea of an Ethiopian Urheimat for Semitic), then any Cushitic influence upon Ethiosemitic would be reflected in Semitic as a whole.

Your argument has a critical flaw: South Arabian and Asian Semitic do not descend from African Semitic. They both descend from Proto-Semitic which was spoken a very long time ago, and can you guarantee Cushitic was still spoken exactly where it is today back then? If you can, please lend me your time machine. It's entirely possible that Cushitic came into contact with Semitic only after the family broke up into African Semitic on the one hand, and Asian Semitic and South Arabian on the other.

Of course, if you assume Proto-Semitic was spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula rather than the horn of Africa itself, your argument fails even harder.

Um, then I completely misread you, as I thought you were suggesting an Ethiopian Semitic Urheimat with Ethiosemitic being a paraphyletic clade, rather than an unspecified Urheimat that could have been anywhere, with Ethiosemitic and the rest of Semitic being sister clades. The latter makes much more sense to me than the former.

[KathTheDragon]

I thought you were suggesting an Ethiopian Semitic Urheimat with Ethiosemitic being a paraphyletic clade

That's exactly what I've been saying.

[Zju]

I'm not sure what you're asking, Zju?

What are the specific reasons your friend posits that Semitic originated in what is now Ethiopia? (or was it horn of Africa? I honestly lost track)

Are they some particular morphological developments or sound correspondences, or is it just general typology?

[KathTheDragon]

I'm not sure what you're asking, Zju?

What are the specific reasons your friend posits that Semitic originated in what is now Ethiopia? (or was it horn of Africa? I honestly lost track)

Are they some particular morphological developments or sound correspondences, or is it just general typology?

To put it succinctly: the Asian Semitic languages are actually kinda likely to form a single clade, far more likely than it is for all of Afrosemitic to (which is very very likely to be polyphyletic). On balance, it therefore makes far more sense to have to Urheimat be where all the branches are, rather than the one outlier that just hapened to find itself where writing was being invented.

[Travis B.]

I'm not sure what you're asking, Zju?

What are the specific reasons your friend posits that Semitic originated in what is now Ethiopia? (or was it horn of Africa? I honestly lost track)

Are they some particular morphological developments or sound correspondences, or is it just general typology?

To put it succinctly: the Asian Semitic languages are actually kinda likely to form a single clade, far more likely than it is for all of Afrosemitic to (which is very very likely to be polyphyletic). On balance, it therefore makes far more sense to have to Urheimat be where all the branches are, rather than the one outlier that just hapened to find itself where writing was being invented.

How do you rule out the possibility that Ethiosemitic and Asian Semitic are sister clades, rather than Asian Semitic being a branch of Ethiosemitic? Their being sister clades would explain my substratum features in Ethiosemitic are not present in Asian Semitic (aside from positing that Cushitic was spoken nowhere near its current location).

[Vijay]

The only Semiticists I personally know don't really believe in Afroasiatic as a valid language family, so I don't, either.

[Travis B.]

The only Semiticists I personally know don't really believe in Afroasiatic as a valid language family, so I don't, either.

Do they believe in Semitic-Egyptian-Berber being a valid clade though?

[Vijay]

The only Semiticists I personally know don't really believe in Afroasiatic as a valid language family, so I don't, either.

Do they believe in Semitic-Egyptian-Berber being a valid clade though?

Nope. Pretty sure they don't.

[KathTheDragon]

By the way, "Amazigh" is the name "Berber" speakers would rather were used for their languages.

[Travis B.]

By the way, "Amazigh" is the name "Berber" speakers would rather were used for their languages.

Is this just because it is an exonym, and as we all know, exonyms are inherently perjorative and thus are bad, or more specifically because Arab colonialists use the term to refer to the indigenous population of North Africa west of Egypt, and the term is derived from the Greek term barbaroi, which was used in a blanket fashion to refer to Africans?

[Richard W]

Do they believe in Semitic-Egyptian-Berber being a valid clade though?

Nope. Pretty sure they don't.

Is Cushitic mostly a clade?

[Ares Land]

berbère can be pejorative in North Africa; the Arabic equivalent بَرْبَر is very pejorative -- it means both 'Berber' and 'barbarian'.

Hence the preference for Amazigh or Tamazight. (These seem sort of confusing to me, since they refer to a specific language too -- as opposed to the whole language family -- but I'm not much of an authority on the matter. Apparently it's not much of a problem.)

[Travis B.]

berbère can be pejorative in North Africa; the Arabic equivalent بَرْبَر is very pejorative -- it means both 'Berber' and 'barbarian'.

Hence the preference for Amazigh or Tamazight. (These seem sort of confusing to me, since they refer to a specific language too -- as opposed to the whole language family -- but I'm not much of an authority on the matter. Apparently it's not much of a problem.)

I have seen Amazigh and Tamazight in use, but always to refer to particular languages.

[Starbeam]

I've seen the term "Tamazic" be posited, but I lean on Amazigh(s) being used too. Imazighen for the plural is ridiculous to expect, but I'd prefer it to Berber(s). I'm not such tho, and some people still use Berber for whatever reason. I don't see much issues with exonyms in theory anyway; unless it's something insulting/ slurry or impractical to use.

[Vijay]

I'm pretty sure I've seen native speakers use both Amazigh and Tamazight to refer to the whole family, although I'm guessing this is a new use of the terms.

[hwhatting]

My 10 cents on these matters:
- I don't know any serious scholars who doubt Afro-Asiatic in the sense of a relationship between Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, and Chadic languages like Hausa. (I'd like to know whether the Semiticists Vijay mentions ever studied the issue or just had a glance at the discussions and decided they don't want to get involved). The discussions are only about what belongs and what not (e.g. Omotic). There is common morphology present in several sub-families. The reconstructions are bad because there is too much disparate material (from languages that are badly studied, from groups for which no intermediate reconstruction exists, from languages that may not even belong. etc.).
- Many Ethiopian Semitic languages are badly studied. My understanding is that there is a central group around the "Classical" languages like Ge'ez that shows a closer relationship, and an outer ring that is quite divergent, also between the individual languages. As these are the ones that are badly studied, it's simply not clear at the moment whether that divergence is due to substrate influence or due to early splitting off.
- The "diversity is biggest in the Urheimat" heuristic fails when there have been later migrations and language spreads across the Urheimat. That's exactly what we must assume happened with PIE; depending on whether we assume Kurgan or Anatolia, there were times when no or just a single minority IE languages was spoken in the area and most of the area was Turkic speaking (the Pontic steppes in the Middle Ages, Western and Central Anatolia now).
- But if you want to use that heuristic, Southern Arabia would also be a good place - it shows (at least) three clades, Arabic (with Yemen having some quite divergent dialects), Ancient South Arabian (which may be more than one clade, there's a lot we don't know yet), and Modern South Arabian (the consensus nowadays seems to be that the MSA languages are not continuing Ancient South Arabian. Some group them with African Semitic).
- On the three gender system and the three-way TAM distinction in PIE - although there are still debates, the consensus seems to be shifting towards the position that both are not old, but developments of core IE from an older animate-inanimate and active vs. perfect/mediopassive system after Anatolian split off. In that case, they can't be part of a common heritage with Semitic (and maybe I missed something, but doesn't Semitic have just a two-gender male-female system?).
- On IE languages in Eastern Anatolia - both Armenian and Iranian (Kurdish etc.) are due to immigration; they displaced Hurro-Urartian languages that were spoken there before. Whether the Anatolian IE languages originated in Anatolia or not, is, as you probably all know, under debate.

[WeepingElf]

I agree with you in all points, Hans-Werner. However, I think that the "steppe vs. Anatolia" issue regarding PIE is now quite clearly settled in favour of the steppe hypothesis, especially after archaeogenetic studies have revealed a massive immigration from the Pontic Steppe about 3000 BC, which would have clobbered the languages of the Neolithic farmers in a similar way English displaced most indigenous languages in the USA. But that's only a tangent here, as it doesn't really look like as if IE had any specific affinity to Afroasiatic (except some lexical resemblances which are probably just Neolithic Wanderwörter).