Prehistory to 1250: Languages (original) (raw)
Related papers
Word classes in Egyptian, Semitic and Cushitic (Afroasiatic)
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Inria, 2020
Today, the exact number of living Afroasiatic languages is still disputed, with upwards of 375 languages, though the actual number may be less (for a discussion, see Frajzyngier and Shay (2012: 1). The number of speakers is probably around 300,000,000. The languages are spoken in Northern and Central Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Near and Middle East, and Central Asia (Arabic only). Afroasiatic (AA) is the phylum with the longest written record: Over five millennia. Thus, it provides linguists with a wealth of documentation that, among other things, shows the fluidity of some word categories on a long-term scale. Nevertheless, this exceptional time-depth only applies to three of the six Afroasiatic families. Egyptian is attested since approximately 3,000 BC, over a period covering more than four and a half millennia, from ancient Egyptian to Coptic. The latter ceased to be spoken in the fifteenth century AD, but still survives as a liturgical language. For Semitic (98 languages), the first documents date back to the third millennium BC, and were written in Akkadian, a language that used to be spoken in Mesopotamia during the earliest Antiquity between the third and first millennium BC. In North Africa, where Berber (27 languages) is spoken, an old writing system on funerary steles is poorly understood. Its exact relationship with Berber is still difficult to figure out (Galand 2010: 16-17). Documentation increases in the Middle Ages for what is traditionally called "Old Berber", whose affiliation to contemporary Berber is clear (Galand 2010: 18). The three other families, Chadic (202 languages), Cushitic (46 languages) and Omotic (24 languages) have no written tradition, and only started to be significantly described by scholars and missionaries during the nineteenth century, an undertaking which went along with European colonisation and Christianisation of Africa. A handful of these languages started to be written in the twentieth century AD. Somali (Cushitic) is a partial exception. An adapted Arabic script was in use as early as the 13 th century AD for writing Arabic with some Somali words in varied proportions (Lewis 1958: 136). The literature also reports thus far undeciphered ancient scripts (Rigby 1877: 447).
Egyptian Among Neighboring African Languages
UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2020
Ägyptisch unter den benachbarten afrikanischen Sprachen L'égyptien parmi les langues africaines avoisinantes Northeast Africa is dominated by two linguistic macrofamilies, Afroasiatic, with its constituent branches of Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic, and Omotic, and the Nilo-Saharan languages, with the most relevant phylum being the Eastern Sudanic branch spread across the Sahel and East Africa. On present research, there is evidence for contact between ancient Egyptian and ancient Berber, Cushitic, and Eastern Sudanic languages, with possibilities of contact with Ethiosemitic languages (the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea). Evidence of Egypt's contact with neighboring peoples in Northeast Africa is well established from the archaeological record and historical texts, especially along the Middle Nile (Nubia). The use of linguistic material, including loanwords and foreign names, for reconstructing ancient phases of contact between Egyptians and neighboring peoples is a relatively "untapped" source. The lexical data demonstrates a great familiarity and exchange between Egyptian and neighboring languages, which, in many cases, can be attributed to specific historical phases of contact through trade, expeditionary ventures, or conflict. Impediments remain in reconstructing the ancient "linguistic map" of neighboring Africa and our reliance on modern dictionaries of African languages for identifying ancient loanwords. Despite this, the stock of foreign words in the Egyptian lexicon is incredibly important for piecing together this "map." In many cases, the ancient Egyptian lexicon contains the earliest data for foreign languages like Meroitic, Beja, or Berber.
Africa is extremely linguistic diverse, but most of its languages fall into four major phyla, plus isolates. The paper describes the current classification of these and maps their distribution. It is argued that the only way these can be effectively interpreted in terms of prehistory, is the use of an integrated approach which incorporates archaeology and palaeoclimate. Potential interpretations of the four major phyla are proposed, including sections which focus on specific families.
Haplogroup N and its related Uralic Languages and Cultures
“Haplogroup N’s founding father may have lived as long as 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. This common father may have lived in today’s South-East-Asia. The Y-DNA haplogroup N has a wide distribution primarily in Northern Eurasia often associated (but not necessarily) with current and earlier Uralic speakers in Europe. It is a myth that haplogroup N in Europe is from the Huns and the Mongols. To quote Rootsi at the University of Tartu, Estonia who is leading the research on hg N. The age of hg N3 in the Finnic-Ugric speaking population in eastern Europe suggests a much earlier arrival from the east. “From the archaeological point of view, hg N3 is spread in Europe in the area of comb-ceramic culture. It is not, however, obvious that the spread of the two can be temporarily connected, because STR diversity-based calculations of the time depth of hg N3 among the Finn-speaking European population suggest expansion time before-around the end of Pleistocene – that is long before the rise of the comb-ceramic culture in the 4th millennium BCE or around 6,000 years ago.” “The modern human colonization of Eurasia and Australia is mostly explained by a single-out-of-Africa exit following a southern coastal route throughout Arabia and India. However, dispersal across the Levant would better explain the introgression with Neanderthals, and more than one exit would fit better with the different ancient genomic components discovered in indigenous Australians and in ancient Europeans. The existence of an additional Northern route used by modern humans to reach Australia was previously deduced from the phylogeography of mtDNA macrohaplogroup N. Here, we present new mtDNA data and new multidisciplinary information that add more support to this northern route.” “Because Africa’s climate hampers DNA preservation, knowledge of its genetic variability is mainly restricted to modern samples, even though population genetics dynamics and back-migrations from Eurasia may have modified haplotype frequencies, masking ancient genetic scenarios. Thanks to improved methodologies, ancient genetic data for the African continent are now increasingly available, starting to fill in the gap. Here, reserchers present newly obtained mitochondrial genomes from two ~7000-year-old individuals from Takarkori rock-shelter, Libya, representing the earliest and first genetic data for the Sahara region. These individuals carry a novel mutation motif linked to the haplogroup N root. Our result demonstrates the presence of an ancestral lineage of the N haplogroup in the Holocene “Green Sahara,” associated with a Middle Pastoral (Neolithic) context.” Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages “The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples. We present genome-wide ancient DNA data for 181 individuals from this region spanning the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age. We find that Early to Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer populations from across the southern forest and forest-steppes of Northern Eurasia can be characterized by a continuous gradient of ancestry that remained stable for millennia, ranging from fully West Eurasian in the Baltic region to fully East Asian in the Transbaikal region. In contrast, cotemporaneous groups in far Northeast Siberia were genetically distinct, retaining high levels of continuity from a population that was the primary source of ancestry for Native Americans. By the mid-Holocene, admixture between this early Northeastern Siberian population and groups from Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin produced two distinctive populations in eastern Siberia that played an important role in the genetic formation of later people. Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic-Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is found substantially only among Yeniseian-speaking groups and those known to have admixed with them. Ancestry from the second, Yakutian Late Neolithic-Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is strongly associated with present-day Uralic speakers. We show how Yakutia_LNBA ancestry spread from an east Siberian origin ~4.5kya, along with subclades of Y-chromosome haplogroup N occurring at high frequencies among present-day Uralic speakers, into Western and Central Siberia in communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy: a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that spread explosively across an enormous region of Northern Eurasia ~4.0kya. However, the ancestry of the 16 Seima-Turbino-period individuals–the first reported from sites with this metallurgy–was otherwise extraordinarily diverse, with partial descent from Indo-Iranian-speaking pastoralists and multiple hunter-gatherer populations from widely separated regions of Eurasia. Our results provide support for theories suggesting that early Uralic speakers at the beginning of their westward dispersal where involved in the expansion of Seima-Turbino metallurgical traditions, and suggests that both cultural transmission and migration were important in the spread of Seima-Turbino material culture.”
2004 Afro-Asiatic and Semitic Languages
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, edited by Roger D. Woodard. Cambridge: CUP. 138-59. Reprinted in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, ed. Roger D. Woodard. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. 225–46.
The Oldest Berber Text(s)? Egyptian Evidence for the Ancient Libyan Language(s
Études et Documents Berbères, 2024
The Ancient Libyans, the protohistorical inhabitants of North Africa, west of the Nile, are long assumed to have been ancestral to historical and modern Berber groups now indigenous to the region. Though many theories have circulated in recent years as to the linguistic identities of these people(s), few have consulted a small but important dataset of Ancient Libyan personal names, ethnonyms, loanwords, and even texts found in Pharaonic Egyptian textual records in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. Examination of these, often brief and isolated, Ancient Libyan words in light of modern Berber languages, suggests that speakers of a para-Berber or early Berber language entered within the realm of Egyptian interaction sometime in the late 2nd millennium BCE, as best attested on pQeheq, a very fragmentary Qeheq-language magical text now in the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin. Here the text, which may be the oldest known Berber-language (or at least non-Egyptian and non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic language) text, and the Qeheq language’ potential affiliation with the Berber family within Afro-Asiatic is presented, alongside a linguistic history of interactions between Egyptians and Ancient Libyans.
2015
For ninety per cent of our history, humans have lived as 'hunters and gatherers', and for most of this time as talking individuals. No direct evidence for the origin and evolution of language exists; we do not even know if early humans had language, either spoken or signed. Taking an anthropological perspective, Alan Barnard acknowledges this diffi culty and argues that we can nevertheless infer a great deal about our linguistic past from what is around us in the present. Hunter-gatherers still inhabit much of the world, and in suffi cient number to enable us to study the ways in which they speak, the many languages they use and what they use them for. Far from 'primitive', they are linguistically very sophisticated, possessing extraordinarily large vocabularies and highly evolved languages of great grammatical complexity. Barnard investigates the lives of hunter-gatherers by understanding them in their own terms. How do they, as non-literate people, perceive language? What do they use it for? Do they have no knowledge of grammar, or have they got so much grammatical sense that they delight in playing games with it? Exploring these and other fascinating questions, the book will be welcomed by all those interested in the evolution of language.