#afroasiatic

[tyrannoninja]

Annoyed Natufian Woman

A Natufian woman from the Mesolithic Fertile Crescent rests on a log, sulking in an annoyed mood. I drew this to cope with my own irritated mood after encountering yet another example of ignorance online, and it turned out to be quite therapeutic indeed.

[geoazie]

Aesthetic of the languages on earth : Amharic

Amharic is a Semitic language spoken by 57 million people in Ethiopia. It is an official language in Ethiopia.

[nonenglishsongs]

Imarhan - Tarha Tadagh (Tuareg)

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The mind-boggling complexities of Africa's 1,500 languages were clarified by Stanford University's great linguist Joseph Greenberg, who recognized that all those languages fall into just five families (see Figure 19.2 for their distribution). Readers accustomed to thinking of linguistics as dull and technical may be surprised to learn what fascinating contributions Figure 19.2 makes to our understanding of African history. (...) Concealed at the top of Figure 19.2 is our first surprise, a big shock for Eurocentric believers in the superiority of so-called Western civilization.

The next surprise in Figure 19.2 is a seeming detail on which I didn't comment when I just told you that distinct peoples tend to have distinct languages. (...) The fragmented distribution of Nilo-Saharan languages in Figure 19.2 similarly implies that many speakers of those languages have been engulfed by speakers of Afroasiatic or Niger-Congo languages. (...) If you look again at Figure 19.2, you'll see that the Niger-Congo language family is distributed all over West Africa and most of subequatorial Africa, apparently giving no clue as to where within that enormous range the family originated.

"Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years" - Jared Diamond

[nonenglishsongs]

Elyanna - Sokkar (Arabic)

[tenth-sentence]

Thus, the evidence derived from plant names in modern African languages permits us to glimpse the existence of three languages being spoken in Africa thousands of years ago: ancestral Nilo-Saharan, ancestral Niger-Congo, and ancestral Afroasiatic.

"Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years" - Jared Diamond

[leroibobo]

some of the architecture of zinder, niger. zinder rose from a small hausa village into an important center of trans-saharan trade during the 18th century, culmunating in it becoming the capital of the sultanate of damagaram in 1736.

[thesoftestcowboy]

I'm curious about something... (and fucked up the last poll. if u saw no u didnt)

*As in, you enjoy listening to it, like it aesthetically, think of it as attractive, whatever. This is NOT about whether or not you understand the language or if you like whatever you associate with it or whether or not it's "useful" (e.g. If you do not speak a single word of japanese but really love how it sounds, vote for it. if you think italian sounds sexy but don't really care about visiting Italy, vote for it. If you like the look of the hebrew alphabet but not how it sounds, DONT vote for that. It's about the sound.)

Before you come at me: These categories are not perfect. Some of them are sub-categories of a bigger family (Indo-European), some languages are in the same category but sound really different etc etc. I had to leave out or group some of these together in a way that I felt made most sense for what I wanna know & the demographics of this site. I'm not a linguistics expert.

Feel free to share your thoughts in comments or tags! 👍

[geoazie]

Aesthetic of the languages on earth : Sudanese Arabic

Sudanese Arabic is a group of Semitic vernicular dialects of Arabic spoken by 41 million people. It is spoken in Sudan, and parts of Egypt, Chad, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

[nonenglishsongs]

Top 40 Tuesday - #2 on the MENA Chart | Tamer Ashour - Haygeley Mwgoa3 (هيجيلي موجوع) (Arabic)

[duct-taping-zhenguo]

Jesus Christ was an Aramaic-speaking Jew and not an Arab, let alone a Palestinian.

[nonenglishsongs]

רביד פלוטניק - כל הזמן הזה

Ravid Plotnik - All This Time (Hebrew)

So I'm starting a new corner on my blog which is Hebrew songs i like and the lyrics translation for those that want them This is the song "All this time" by Ravid Plotnik, and I'll note that although the song is sung by a male singer, the grammar of the lyrics is that of a female speaker. [Chorus] And all of this time, i was alone All of this time. Every day over again all of this time, i was alone All of this time. i was alone [1st house] Say, do you remember the gang? do you remember the apartment, the laughs? You told me you're in love with me after barely two and a half days. In inner rooms we cried and outside we laughed to the skies. You told me i have a blessing and kissed my hands You said there are no friends in this world, man to man are wolves. How you brought me into your world, and loved me till it hurt. A lot more from all your exes, with whom you were before me. Do you remember Yafo D. left, and a sea of tears in both my eyes I don't know what I don't know why [Chorus] But for all of this time, i was alone all of this time, every day over again [2nd house] Do you remember sitting on the grass on Cirkin? and backpack rides in the rain to the car? Happy with all we have, denying all that isn't good I was Zina the warrior princess, you were Avi "offended"y I would hear Nina simon sing "you don't know what love is" When i tried changing for you, and be the women of your dreams. When you wanted Classy i was Beyoncé, when you wanted hood i was a bimbo When we dreamed to travel the world, if we'd only survive crises, When you told me how your mom went from hospital to hospital to hospital. I don't know what, i don't know why

[Chorus] But for all of this time, i was alone all of this time, every day over again Say do you remember the good? Remember hugs, remember kisses? Because yes there were moments, rare minutes of heartbeats and passions. Now seriously, do you remember the anger, the fights? do you remember walking down the street angry looking jealously at loving couples? remember the good words? how you hoped to hear 'thank you'? remember i cried quietly in the corner of the room hidden and nobody knew? they talk to you about me, all your family and friends I know you loved me, you loved you never did before but life is stronger than us, and you let that bridge fall you talked like an angry and fucked up kid, when you were jealous and insecure. There's no mom and dad, not in the mood for anything, just weed and cigs and I'm getting myself a puff every night like my life is great I was looking for the way to leave you, without being hurtful. Remember panic attacks and sleepless nights where i thought i was going crazy? I loved you at every given moment, even when you were childish i cured your broken heart, and you in return disappeared. [Chorus]

[wawazaba]

🐸✏️🇪🇹🇪🇷 "እንቁርዖብ" [ʾənḳurʿob]

[hbmmaster]

how many grammatical genders are there across all languages? this is a surprisingly hard question to answer.

the main thing that makes this weird is how there isn't really a good way to determine when genders in two different languages are "the same gender". famously (to some), the indo-european paradigm of feminine masculine and neuter isn't fully preserved in all indo-european languages, and different languages in the family collapse the three-way distinction in different ways. so like, is feminine (spanish gender) the same gender as feminine (german gender)?

and that's with related languages! is it reasonable to count the genders in afroasiatic languages as the same as the corresponding indo-european genders that have the same names? ie. is feminine (arabic gender) the same gender as feminine (spanish gender)?

and all that's before you even get to the cool stuff. lots of languages have animate and inanimate as their genders, which tend to be assigned much less arbitrarily than the genders in indo-european languages. on the other end, bantu languages have so many genders (usually around ten) that linguists don't even always call them "gender". even more extreme, some sources claim (but I'm not sure if this is true) that the language tuyuca has upwards of 140 genders (!!). counting how many distinct genders are collectively represented by these languages is probably not possible.

[leroibobo]

another script/language post to go along with my samaritan and aramaic ones. this time, about the coptic language and script:

the coptic alphabet is mostly used to write the coptic language, the most recent development of the egyptian language (yes, the one that hieroglyphs were used to write). coptic along with previous iterations of the language belong to the egyptian branch of the afroasiatic family, of which they're the only members. once commonly spoken, coptic is mostly used as a liturgical language by coptic churches today, though copts have started revival movements. the church uses the bohairic dialect of coptic specifically, which has differences in pronunciation and grammar. modern revitalization efforts are also based in this dialect.

coptic has had a notable impact on general arabic and hebrew; for example, timsah - crocodile in arabic and one of the words for crocodile in hebrew (since palestine used to have crocodiles) - comes from coptic "emsah". it's also had a smaller impact on european languages via greek ("barge" and "skete" come from coptic). its biggest impact on a language is its significant impact on egyptian arabic.

the coptic script we have today developed between the 6th century bce and 2nd century ce, when greek was used to transcribe demotic texts. the script is a variation of the greek alphabet with all of its characteristic attributes (alphabet, written left-to-right, contains upper and lower case letters) with influences from demotic (written right-to-left, no cases) which were used to transcribe sounds/letters that aren't in greek (like Ϩ/ϩ, derived from demotic (which is not inscribed in unicode), which is "h"; greek has an "h" sound included in some letters but not just one letter for "h"). you can use coptic to write greek without any new letters to account for sounds, but lower-case coptic letters are just smaller versions of the upper-case ones with no modifications, so coptic and greek speakers may struggle to read the other's alphabet.

like greek, coptic also has its own numerals made from letters. (ⲁ = 1, ⲃ = 2, ⲓ = 10, ⲣ = 100, etc). also like greek, a line is drawn above them to distinguish them from the regular text. a formatted version of this numeral system influenced by arabic was used by egyptians of all religions along with the standard arabic one (and the hebrew one by jews) for a long time.

sample text (article 1 of the universal declaration of human rights in bohairic coptic):

Ⲉ̀ⲫ̀ⲟⲩⲁⲓ ⲥⲉⲙⲓⲥⲓ ⲣⲉⲙϩⲉⲩ ⲛⲉⲙ ⲉⲧϣⲱϣ ⲉ̀ ⲁⲝⲓⲁ ⲛⲉⲙ ⲇⲓⲕⲁⲓⲟⲥⲩⲛⲏ. Ⲛ̀ⲑⲱⲟⲩ ⲥⲉⲉⲣϩ̀ⲙⲟⲧ ⲅⲛⲱⲙⲏ ⲛⲉⲙ ⲥⲩⲛⲏⲇⲏⲥⲓⲥ ⲟⲩⲟϩ ⲙ̀ⲡⲉⲛⲑⲣⲉⲩⲁⲣϣⲏⲧ ⲙ̀ⲙⲉⲧⲣⲱⲙⲓ ϩⲓⲛⲁ ⲛ̀ⲑⲱⲟⲩ ⲙ̀ⲫ̀ⲣⲏϯ ⲛ̀ⲥ̀ⲛⲏⲟⲩ.

transliteration:

Ephouai semisi remheu nem etshōsh e axia nem dikaiosunē. Enthōou se’erehmot gnōmē nem sunēdēsis ouoh empenthreuarshēt em’metrōmi hina enthōou emephrēti enesnēou.

english:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

a formatted version of coptic script is also sometimes used to write some nubian languages (which are not afroasiatic) like nobiin. the script includes influence from the meroitic script, itself a development of demotic. (one is the letter ⳣ, "w", which comes from this letter.) usage of the coptic script for these languages was more common historically to write old nubian. most nubian languages use arabic or latin scripts today.

the nubian script adapted for nobiin:

sample text (john 11:41 in old nubian):

ⲕⲧ̅ⲕⲁ ⲅⲉⲗⲅⲟ̅ⲥⲛ ⲓ̈ⲏ̅ⲥⲟⲩⲥⲓ ⲛⲁⳡⲁⲛ ⲧⲣⲓⲕⲁ, ⲇⲟⲗⲗⲉ ⲡⲟⲗⲅⲁⲣⲁ ⲡⲉⲥⲥⲛⲁ: ⲡⲁⲡⲟ, ⲥ̅ⲕⲟⲉⲗⲙ̅ⲙⲉ ⲉⲕ̅ⲕⲁ.

transliteration:

Ephouai semisi remheu nem etshōsh e axia nem dikaiosunē. Enthōou se’erehmot gnōmē nem sunēdēsis ouoh empenthreuarshēt em’metrōmi hina enthōou emephrēti enesnēou.

some coptic-learning links:

copticforall.com

coptic.net pdf

so, you want to learn coptic? (about boharic coptic)

r12a - resources on how different scripts in all languages work, good resource for languages/scripts in general.

the youtube channel ilovelanguages also has a few videos on coptic, you can find the playlist here.

[japhugmafia]

Easy way to differentiate between ablaut and vowel alternation:

The difference between ablaut and vowel alternation is if it's Indo-European it's ablaut if it's Afroasiatic it's vowel alternation