| South Semitic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Yemen, Oman, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan |
| Linguistic classification | Afro-Asiatic
|
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | None |
Approximate historical distribution of South Semitic languages | |
South Semitic is a putative branch of the Semitic languages, which form a branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, found in (North and East) Africa and Western Asia.
The "homeland" of the South Semitic languages is still debated amongst researchers, with sources such as A. Murtonen (1967) and Lionel Bender (1997) [1] suggesting an origin in Ethiopia and others suggesting the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. [2]
A 2009 study by Andrew Kitchen and Christopher Ehret amongst others, based on using a Bayesian model to estimate language change, concluded that the latter viewpoint is more probable, with origins in Southern Arabia, and subsequent migration into the Horn of Africa around 2800 years ago. [3] This statistical analysis could not estimate when or where the ancestor of all Semitic languages diverged from Afroasiatic, but it suggested that the divergence of the East, Central, and South Semitic branches occurred in the Levant around 5750 years ago. [4] With the ancestors of Ethiopians speaking a non-Semitic language, before adopting Semitic, as indicated by German linguist Winfried Noth. [5] Evidence for movements across South Arabia are consistent with some recent genomic findings, [6] which find strong association with the movement and ancestry of human population groups speaking the Afro-Asiatic Semitic languages. The dates matched with the origin of the Semitic languages in the Levant, and spread during the early Bronze Age (~5.7 KYA) into the rest of the Middle East and East Africa. [7]
According to another hypothesis, Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa and desertification made some of its speakers migrate in the fourth millennium BCE into what is now Ethiopia, others northwest into West Asia. [8]
South Semitic is divided into two uncontroversial branches: [9]
The Ethiopian Semitic languages collectively have by far the greatest numbers of modern native speakers of any Semitic language other than Arabic. Eritrea's main languages are mainly Tigrinya and Tigre, which are North Ethiopic languages, and Amharic (South Ethiopic) is the main language spoken in Ethiopia (along with Tigrinya in the northern province of Tigray). Ge'ez continues to be used in Eritrea and Ethiopia as a liturgical language for the Orthodox Tewahedo churches.
Southern Arabian languages have been increasingly eclipsed by the more dominant Arabic (also a Semitic language) for more than a millennium. Ethnologue lists six modern members of the South Arabian branch and 15 members of the Ethiopian branch. [10]
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. Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch.
The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As of 2012, the Cushitic languages with over one million speakers were Oromo, Somali, Beja, Afar, Hadiyya, Kambaata, and Sidama.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Geʽez is an ancient South Semitic language. The language originates from what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Tigrinya is an Ethio-Semitic language commonly spoken in Eritrea and in northern Ethiopia's Tigray Region by the Tigrinya and Tigrayan peoples. It is also spoken by the global diaspora of these regions.
The 38th century BC was a century which lasted from the year 3800 BC to 3701 BC.
Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed proto-language common ancestor to the Semitic language family. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic Urheimat: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa. According to more recent sources nowadays the likeliest place of origin is North Africa.
Ethio-Semitic is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part of the Afroasiatic language family.
Habesha peoples is an ethnic or pan-ethnic identifier that has been historically employed to refer to Semitic-speaking and predominantly Oriental Orthodox Christian peoples found in the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea between Asmara and Addis Ababa and this usage remains common today. The term is also used in varying degrees of inclusion and exclusion of other groups.
Prof. Olga Kapeliuk is an Israeli linguist.
Geʽez is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad and was first used to write the Geʽez language, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Catholic Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and Haymanot Judaism of the Beta Israel Jewish community in Ethiopia. In the languages Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is often called fidäl (ፊደል), meaning "script" or "letter". Under the Unicode Standard and ISO 15924, it is defined as Ethiopic text.
The languages of Ethiopia include the official languages of Ethiopia, its national and regional languages, and a large number of minority languages, as well as foreign languages.
The Tigre people are an ethnic group indigenous to Eritrea. They mainly inhabit the lowlands and northern highlands of Eritrea.
Tigrayans are a Semitic-speaking ethnic group indigenous to the Tigray Region of northern Ethiopia. They speak the Tigrinya language, an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Ethiopian Semitic branch.
Ethiopians are the native inhabitants of Ethiopia, as well as the global diaspora of Ethiopia. Ethiopians constitute several component ethnic groups, many of which are closely related to ethnic groups in neighboring Eritrea and other parts of the Horn of Africa.
The Proto-Afroasiatic homeland is the hypothetical place where speakers of the Proto-Afroasiatic language lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into separate distinct languages. Afroasiatic languages are today mostly distributed in parts of Africa, and Western Asia.
Human habitation in the North African region began over one million years ago. Remains of Homo erectus during the Middle Pleistocene period, has been found in North Africa. The Berbers, who generally antedate by many millennia the Phoenicians and the establishment of Carthage, are understood to have arisen out of social events shaped by the confluence of several earlier peoples, i.e., the Capsian culture, events which eventually constituted their ethnogenesis. Thereafter Berbers lived as an independent people in North Africa, including the Tunisian region.
According to a theory proposed by Ignace Gelb, the Kish civilization encompassed the sites of Ebla and Mari in the Levant, Nagar in the north, and the proto-Akkadian sites of Abu Salabikh and Kish in central Mesopotamia in to the early East Semitic era in Mesopotamia and the Levant. The epoch began in the early 4th millennium BC and ended with the rise of the Akkadian empire. The theory has been discarded by more recent scholarship.
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Samaritans having a continuum into the present day.
Comparative Semitics is a field of comparative linguistics and philology concerning the Semitic languages. While existing as a field of study in and of itself, comparative studies in Semitic languages are often taught as part of individual language curricula, or as part of theological language studies.
