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1/Afro-Asiatique
An even more interesting connection between PIE and PAA is Bomhard’s 318 "Proto" roots. According to the above revised version of the phonetic constituents, Bomhard found 318 roots of both proto-languages that had almost exact correspondence in both sound and meaning. This is some of the evidence that leads him to conclude that
Indo-European and Afroasiatic bear a stronger affinity, both in their phonological systems and in their vocabularies, than could possibly have been produced by accident–so strong, indeed, that no linguist could examine them without believing them to have sprung from a common source. (1984:2)
The presence of Afroasiatic speakers in North Africa is due to successive waves of expansion from the Near East, each representing a contemporary form of post-Afroasiatic. In the earliest phase, the language may have been close to contemporary Indo-European, having the same SOV syntactic order inherited from Nostratic, and presumably much the same morphology, but already exhibiting the characteristic Afroasiatic feminine in t, which seems to be peculiar to this family. This wave, with its early Nostratic language, must have represented the first flush of Mesolithic influence in Africa, preceding the advent of the agricultural Neolithic in that region. It extended as far as the Ethiopian highlands and the Chad Basin to the Northwest of them, but there bogged down after converting the local African peoples to Nostratic speech as represented by the Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic speakers of today… It is probable that the Cushitic and Omotic languages still retain traces of early Nostratic morphology…
“Later Southward waves of Afroasiatic speakers occurred at times when the old SOV pattern had changed – or was in process of changing – to the historically observed VSO pattern, accounting for the Berber and Old Egyptian speakers, the Semites of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Ethiopia, and eventually the Arabic expansion of the present era. The Semitic expansions seem to have been relatively late since their languages are less diverse than in the other branches. This is in harmony with the suggestion… that the early Indo-Europeans and Semites were neighbors in or near the Caucasus at a fairy late period.
“Thus, the diversity of the Cushitic and Omotic languages is not due to their speakers’ occupying the original homeland of Afroasiatic expansion [the rejected somewhat ‘unconventional’ proposal], but simply to the fact that these languages represent remnants of early Afroasiatic extended to its Southernmost extreme and evolving in relative isolation from currents of change in the major part of the Afroasiatic speaking world. There is a parallel situation in Northeastern Siberia, where such highly differentiated languages as Gilyak and Chukchi have evolved in isolation from their relatives in the rest of Siberia…” (p. 158 - 59).
The evolution of the Afroasiatic family is then similar to that of the Sinic: as the proto-language spread outward from a center, the outwardmost extensions of the language, being the earliest to depart from the ancestral center, was the most conservative and the most preservative of the elements of the ancestral language, while the language-form of the ancestral homeland went through so much radical changes that the descendant, modern-day form in the area of the ancestral homeland looks hardly like anything of the proto-language.
The Afroasiatic family is special here in being the most divergent from the rest of Nostratic and consequently “has some features that seem to be peculiar and ancient. These include the feminine in t, the second-person pronominal affix k, and perhaps the prefix conjugation of the verb. It may be that Afroasiatic represents a transitional form between a local (Caucasic) version of Dene-Caucasian and the rest of Nostratic, properly speaking. In this sense, Afroasiatic could indeed be the ‘oldest’ of the Nostratic families…” (p. 159).4
“…I conclude that the syntactic structure of the simple sentence in the earliest Nostratic, and probably much of the ancestral Dene-Caucasian as well, was undoubtedly SOV” (p. 159).
The Nostratic focal expansion, the third "out of Near East", is thus: beginning at 15,000 BP, a local Dene-Caucasian village south of Caucasus began to expand as the Mesolithic expansion. It split into proto-Afro-Asiatic at the west and the ancestral group of the rest of the Nostratic at the east. (Or the alternative interpretation that the local Dene-Caucasian subgroup split into the proto-Afro-Asiatic on the west and the Nostratic proper on the east.) The proto-Afro-Asiatics have been identified by archaeologists with the Natufians in the territories of Syria and Palestine. “Judging solely from their lexicon, it appears that the Natufians were relatively advanced: they built fortified structures from stone; they cultivated land, raised cattle and hunted with bow and arrow… The Natufians also developed a market system, evident in the existence of words for buy, sell, and price, and they waged war on (kih) and raided (ghwar) their neighbors. Prehistoric poets – or perhaps lawyers – were known for their ability to ‘draw magic signs on sand.’ [Compare these with the emblems the Yang-Shao peoples carved on their potteries.] There were even Natufian haves and have-nots: the rich, who owned w-s-r, or expensive things; those who s-r-kk, or stole; and others made a living by pawning stolen goods…” (Shevoroshkin, ibid., p. 23 – 4.) These proto-Afro-Asiatics, whose linguistic state was still that of general Nostratic (or late Dene-Caucasian subgroup locally), the SOV type, then during their first wave of expansion covered up all of Syriac/ Arabic/ Palestine area and all of North Africa, from the tip of Somalia at the east to the west coast of North Africa. These new colonizers of Africa were of caucasian surface-phenotype; and as their tribes encountered the native Africans, genetic admixtures took place with the natives contributing the major part to the genetic constitution of their common descendants and the new comers the minor part. In linguistic respect however the colonizers had the upperhand, converting native Africans to their Afro-Asiatic speech while the native tongues of North Africa were lost in the process. This is similar to the manner in which the (nuclear) genetic composition of the Ethiopians, for example, was constituted, which constitution however may have been the result of a slow process of admixture since the first wave but not completed until historical times,5 and which consists in a majority of African frequencies plus a minority of Caucasian, reflecting an original mixture of a majority of native Africans with a minority of Caucasians.6 Then a second wave of Afro-Asiatic expansion exploded from the Palestine-Syriac center (the Afro-Asiatic "homeland"), probably for reasons associated with the genesis of agriculture, which would locate this expansion at about 10,000 BP. The new expansion into North Africa again virtually covered up the entire area of the first Afro-Asiatics' north African settlement. By this date, 5000 years after, the Afro-Asiatic dialect in the center ("homeland") had already evolved into the VSO structure recognized today as characteristic of it, seen most conspicuously in the Semitic (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew). Most of the North African speakers of Afro-Asiatic dialects who were descended from the first wave were converted to the speech of the new Afro-Asiatic colonizers, their languages being lost from history. Those Afro-Asiatic dialects from the first wave that survived are located on the periphery: the Cushitic, the Omotic and the Chadic. (See the genealogical tree above left.) The genealogy shows that during the possibly 5,000 years before the second expansion the Afro-Asiatic language field of North Africa had first split into a western dialect, whose modern descendant is the Chadic group, and an eastern dialect, which then split into its western Omotic and eastern Cushitic groups.7 The second wave split into the western Berber groups8 and the eastern Egyptian, which configuration persisted into historic times. Within the central ("homeland") region, there must have been a third, Semitic expansion to cover up a large portion of the Near East and Arabia. The latest Afro-Asiatic expansion, that of the Arabs from the Arabian peninsula ca. 600 A.D., again intruded into North Africa to convert the Egyptian and many of the Berber speakers to the Arabic language. Thus focal expansion occurred repeatedly just within the Afro-Asiatic family itself.
1/Afro-Asiatique
An even more interesting connection between PIE and PAA is Bomhard’s 318 "Proto" roots. According to the above revised version of the phonetic constituents, Bomhard found 318 roots of both proto-languages that had almost exact correspondence in both sound and meaning. This is some of the evidence that leads him to conclude that
Indo-European and Afroasiatic bear a stronger affinity, both in their phonological systems and in their vocabularies, than could possibly have been produced by accident–so strong, indeed, that no linguist could examine them without believing them to have sprung from a common source. (1984:2)
The presence of Afroasiatic speakers in North Africa is due to successive waves of expansion from the Near East, each representing a contemporary form of post-Afroasiatic. In the earliest phase, the language may have been close to contemporary Indo-European, having the same SOV syntactic order inherited from Nostratic, and presumably much the same morphology, but already exhibiting the characteristic Afroasiatic feminine in t, which seems to be peculiar to this family. This wave, with its early Nostratic language, must have represented the first flush of Mesolithic influence in Africa, preceding the advent of the agricultural Neolithic in that region. It extended as far as the Ethiopian highlands and the Chad Basin to the Northwest of them, but there bogged down after converting the local African peoples to Nostratic speech as represented by the Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic speakers of today… It is probable that the Cushitic and Omotic languages still retain traces of early Nostratic morphology…
“Later Southward waves of Afroasiatic speakers occurred at times when the old SOV pattern had changed – or was in process of changing – to the historically observed VSO pattern, accounting for the Berber and Old Egyptian speakers, the Semites of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Ethiopia, and eventually the Arabic expansion of the present era. The Semitic expansions seem to have been relatively late since their languages are less diverse than in the other branches. This is in harmony with the suggestion… that the early Indo-Europeans and Semites were neighbors in or near the Caucasus at a fairy late period.
“Thus, the diversity of the Cushitic and Omotic languages is not due to their speakers’ occupying the original homeland of Afroasiatic expansion [the rejected somewhat ‘unconventional’ proposal], but simply to the fact that these languages represent remnants of early Afroasiatic extended to its Southernmost extreme and evolving in relative isolation from currents of change in the major part of the Afroasiatic speaking world. There is a parallel situation in Northeastern Siberia, where such highly differentiated languages as Gilyak and Chukchi have evolved in isolation from their relatives in the rest of Siberia…” (p. 158 - 59).
The evolution of the Afroasiatic family is then similar to that of the Sinic: as the proto-language spread outward from a center, the outwardmost extensions of the language, being the earliest to depart from the ancestral center, was the most conservative and the most preservative of the elements of the ancestral language, while the language-form of the ancestral homeland went through so much radical changes that the descendant, modern-day form in the area of the ancestral homeland looks hardly like anything of the proto-language.
The Afroasiatic family is special here in being the most divergent from the rest of Nostratic and consequently “has some features that seem to be peculiar and ancient. These include the feminine in t, the second-person pronominal affix k, and perhaps the prefix conjugation of the verb. It may be that Afroasiatic represents a transitional form between a local (Caucasic) version of Dene-Caucasian and the rest of Nostratic, properly speaking. In this sense, Afroasiatic could indeed be the ‘oldest’ of the Nostratic families…” (p. 159).4
“…I conclude that the syntactic structure of the simple sentence in the earliest Nostratic, and probably much of the ancestral Dene-Caucasian as well, was undoubtedly SOV” (p. 159).
The Nostratic focal expansion, the third "out of Near East", is thus: beginning at 15,000 BP, a local Dene-Caucasian village south of Caucasus began to expand as the Mesolithic expansion. It split into proto-Afro-Asiatic at the west and the ancestral group of the rest of the Nostratic at the east. (Or the alternative interpretation that the local Dene-Caucasian subgroup split into the proto-Afro-Asiatic on the west and the Nostratic proper on the east.) The proto-Afro-Asiatics have been identified by archaeologists with the Natufians in the territories of Syria and Palestine. “Judging solely from their lexicon, it appears that the Natufians were relatively advanced: they built fortified structures from stone; they cultivated land, raised cattle and hunted with bow and arrow… The Natufians also developed a market system, evident in the existence of words for buy, sell, and price, and they waged war on (kih) and raided (ghwar) their neighbors. Prehistoric poets – or perhaps lawyers – were known for their ability to ‘draw magic signs on sand.’ [Compare these with the emblems the Yang-Shao peoples carved on their potteries.] There were even Natufian haves and have-nots: the rich, who owned w-s-r, or expensive things; those who s-r-kk, or stole; and others made a living by pawning stolen goods…” (Shevoroshkin, ibid., p. 23 – 4.) These proto-Afro-Asiatics, whose linguistic state was still that of general Nostratic (or late Dene-Caucasian subgroup locally), the SOV type, then during their first wave of expansion covered up all of Syriac/ Arabic/ Palestine area and all of North Africa, from the tip of Somalia at the east to the west coast of North Africa. These new colonizers of Africa were of caucasian surface-phenotype; and as their tribes encountered the native Africans, genetic admixtures took place with the natives contributing the major part to the genetic constitution of their common descendants and the new comers the minor part. In linguistic respect however the colonizers had the upperhand, converting native Africans to their Afro-Asiatic speech while the native tongues of North Africa were lost in the process. This is similar to the manner in which the (nuclear) genetic composition of the Ethiopians, for example, was constituted, which constitution however may have been the result of a slow process of admixture since the first wave but not completed until historical times,5 and which consists in a majority of African frequencies plus a minority of Caucasian, reflecting an original mixture of a majority of native Africans with a minority of Caucasians.6 Then a second wave of Afro-Asiatic expansion exploded from the Palestine-Syriac center (the Afro-Asiatic "homeland"), probably for reasons associated with the genesis of agriculture, which would locate this expansion at about 10,000 BP. The new expansion into North Africa again virtually covered up the entire area of the first Afro-Asiatics' north African settlement. By this date, 5000 years after, the Afro-Asiatic dialect in the center ("homeland") had already evolved into the VSO structure recognized today as characteristic of it, seen most conspicuously in the Semitic (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew). Most of the North African speakers of Afro-Asiatic dialects who were descended from the first wave were converted to the speech of the new Afro-Asiatic colonizers, their languages being lost from history. Those Afro-Asiatic dialects from the first wave that survived are located on the periphery: the Cushitic, the Omotic and the Chadic. (See the genealogical tree above left.) The genealogy shows that during the possibly 5,000 years before the second expansion the Afro-Asiatic language field of North Africa had first split into a western dialect, whose modern descendant is the Chadic group, and an eastern dialect, which then split into its western Omotic and eastern Cushitic groups.7 The second wave split into the western Berber groups8 and the eastern Egyptian, which configuration persisted into historic times. Within the central ("homeland") region, there must have been a third, Semitic expansion to cover up a large portion of the Near East and Arabia. The latest Afro-Asiatic expansion, that of the Arabs from the Arabian peninsula ca. 600 A.D., again intruded into North Africa to convert the Egyptian and many of the Berber speakers to the Arabic language. Thus focal expansion occurred repeatedly just within the Afro-Asiatic family itself.
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