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Aroid Languages
The Aroid or Ari-Banna (formerly South Omotic or Somotic) languages possibly belong to the Afro-Asiatic family and are spoken in Ethiopia. Languages There are five Aroid languages: * ''Aari-Gayil languages'' ** Aari ** Gayil * ''Hamer-Karo languages'' ** Hamer-Banna ** Karo (Ethiopia) * Dime External classification The classification of South Omotic (also called Aroid) is highly disputed and it may be a separate language family. Karo is sometimes considered as a dialect of Hamer, but considered as a separate language by Glottolog which groups both in a ''Hamer-Karo'' subfamily. Zaborski (1986) and Lamberti (1993) consider South Omotic to be a separate branch of Cushitic, renaming it as ''West Cushitic''. Bender (2000, 2003) notes that South Omotic is in fact quite divergent from other Afroasiatic languages, and suggests that it may in fact have connections with Nilo-Saharan, such as Surmic and Nilotic. Citing lexical similarities with Surmic and other non-Nilotic Nil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east and northeast, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia has a total area of . As of 2022, it is home to around 113.5 million inhabitants, making it the 13th-most populous country in the world and the 2nd-most populous in Africa after Nigeria. The national capital and largest city, Addis Ababa, lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates. Anatomically modern humans emerged from modern-day Ethiopia and set out to the Near East and elsewhere in the Middle Paleolithic period. Southwestern Ethiopia has been proposed as a possible homeland of the Afroasiatic langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afroasiatic Languages
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent. Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a ''de facto'' group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. The languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the ''daughter languages'' within a language family as being ''genetically related''. According to ''Ethnologue'' there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aroid Languages
The Aroid or Ari-Banna (formerly South Omotic or Somotic) languages possibly belong to the Afro-Asiatic family and are spoken in Ethiopia. Languages There are five Aroid languages: * ''Aari-Gayil languages'' ** Aari ** Gayil * ''Hamer-Karo languages'' ** Hamer-Banna ** Karo (Ethiopia) * Dime External classification The classification of South Omotic (also called Aroid) is highly disputed and it may be a separate language family. Karo is sometimes considered as a dialect of Hamer, but considered as a separate language by Glottolog which groups both in a ''Hamer-Karo'' subfamily. Zaborski (1986) and Lamberti (1993) consider South Omotic to be a separate branch of Cushitic, renaming it as ''West Cushitic''. Bender (2000, 2003) notes that South Omotic is in fact quite divergent from other Afroasiatic languages, and suggests that it may in fact have connections with Nilo-Saharan, such as Surmic and Nilotic. Citing lexical similarities with Surmic and other non-Nilotic Nil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Aroid
The Aroid or Ari-Banna (formerly South Omotic or Somotic) languages possibly belong to the Afro-Asiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic family and are spoken in Ethiopia. Languages There are five Aroid languages: * ''Aari-Gayil languages'' ** Aari language, Aari ** Gayil language, Gayil * ''Hamer-Karo languages'' ** Hamer language, Hamer-Banna ** Karo language (Ethiopia), Karo (Ethiopia) * Dime language, Dime External classification The classification of South Omotic (also called Aroid) is highly disputed and it may be a separate language family. Karo is sometimes considered as a dialect of Hamer, but considered as a separate language by Glottolog which groups both in a ''Hamer-Karo'' subfamily. Zaborski (1986) and Lamberti (1993) consider South Omotic to be a separate branch of Cushitic languages, Cushitic, renaming it as ''West Cushitic''. Lionel Bender, Bender (2000, 2003) notes that South Omotic is in fact quite divergent from other Afroasiatic languages, and suggests that it ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nilotic Languages
The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples. Etymology The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa. Demographics Nilotic peoples, who are the native speakers of the languages, originally migrated from the Gezira area in Sudan. Nilotic language speakers live in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Subdivisions According to linguist Joseph Greenberg, the language family is divided up into three subgroups: *Eastern Nilotic languages such as Turkana and Maasai *Southern Nilotic languages such as Kalenjin and Datooga *Western Nilotic languages such as Luo, Nuer and Dinka Before Greenberg's reclassification, Nilotic was used to refer to Western Nilotic alone, with the other two being grouped as related " Nilo-Hamitic" languages. Blench (2012) treats the Burun languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surmic Languages
The Surmic languages are a branch of the Eastern Sudanic language family. Today, the various peoples who speak Surmic languages make their living in a variety of ways, including nomadic herders, settled farmers, and slash and burn farmers. They live in a variety of terrain, from the lowlands of South Sudan and the banks of the Omo River to mountains over 2,300 meters. Languages The Surmic languages are: *North: Majang (also known as Majangir) *South **Southeast: *** Kwegu (dialects: Yidinich, Mugiji) *** Me'en *** Mursi– Suri (dialects: Tirma, Chai) **Southwest: Didinga– Narim, Murle, Tennet; Kacipo-Balesi The Surmic languages are found in southwest Ethiopia and adjoining parts of southeast South Sudan. In the past, Surmic had been known as “Didinga-Murle” and “Surma”. The former name was too narrow by referring only to two closely related languages and the latter was a label also used to refer to a specific language (Unseth 1997b), so the label “Surmic” is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nilo-Saharan Languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari River, Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the centre; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east. As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile Basin and the Central Sahara Desert. Eight of its proposed constituent divisions (excluding Kunama languages, Kunama, Kuliak, and Songhai languages, Songhay) are found in the modern countries of Sudan and South Sudan, through which the Nile River flows. In his book ''The Languages of Africa'' (1963), Joseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was a genetic (linguistics), genetic family. It contains the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lionel Bender
Marvin Lionel Bender (August 18, 1934 – February 19, 2008) was an American linguist. Life Bender was born August 18, 1934, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He travelled throughout the world, particularly in Northeast Africa, and was an accomplished chess player. Dr. Bender died of complications from a stroke and brain hemorrhage on February 19, 2008 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Career Bender wrote and co-wrote several books, publications and essays on the languages of Africa, particularly those spoken in Ethiopia and Sudan, and was a major contributor to Ethiopian Studies. He did extensive work on the Afro-Asiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages, Nilo-Saharan languages spoken locally. Together with J. Donald Bowen, Robert L. Cooper, and Charles A. Ferguson, Bender carried out the Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching in East Africa, funded by the Ford Foundation in 1968-1970. He later conducted other research sponsored by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Omotic Languages
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have complex tonal systems (for example, the Bench language). The languages have around 6.2 million speakers. The group is generally classified as belonging to the Afroasiatic language family, but this is disputed by some. Four separate "Omotic" groups are accepted by ''Glottolog'' 4.0 and Güldemann (2018): Ta-Ne-Omotic, Dizoid (Maji), Mao, and Aroid ("South Omotic"). Languages The North and South Omotic branches ("Nomotic" and "Somotic") are universally recognized, with some dispute as to the composition of North Omotic. The primary debate is over the placement of the Mao languages. Bender (2000) classifies Omotic languages as follows: *South Omotic / Aroid ( Hamer-Banna, Aari, Dime, Karo) *North Omotic / Non-Aroid ** Mao *** Bambassi * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cushitic Languages
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 the 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, Saho, and Sidama. Official status The Cushitic languages with the greatest number of total speakers are Oromo (37 million), Somali (22 million), Beja (3.2 million), Sidamo (3 million), and Afar (2 million). Oromo serves as one of the official working languages of Ethiopia and is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system including Oromia, Harari and Dire Dawa regional states and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region. Somali is the first of two official languages of Somalia and three official languages of the self declared republic of Somaliland. It also serves as a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
