#buudaa

[possessivesuffix]

Still more!

First, a quick lookover of HEC in comparison with the basic vocabulary of Somali (just from Wiktionary's Swadesh list, I'm not assuming it's high quality but that'll do for a first rough pass). It's obvious that Somali + Oromo, both in putative Lowland East Cushitic, share the largest proportion of common material; consider e.g the following O = S ≠ HEC comparisons:

'bird': šimbira, simbir, *čʼiiɗa

'bone': lafee, laf, *mikʼe

'five': šan, šan, *omute

'four': afur, afar, *šoole

'horn': gaafa, gees, *buudaa

'name': maqaa, magaʕ, *sumˀa (or < *su-mʔa < *su-makʼa ??)

'stone': ɗagaa, ɖagaħ, *kin

Explicit common innovations aren't that easy to find just off the cuff though. An example in my material might be 'knee': HEC *gilube, but in O and S with palatalization: jilbe, jilib. Kind of trivial alas! I would not want to rule out entirely the option that HEC is just lexically divergent within (East?) Cushitic. We could point out other fairly simple innovations also in other directions, e.g. loss of pharyngeals in HEC and O but not S (e.g. *arrabo, arraba, ʕarab 'tongue').

Probably more telling is that it seems basically impossible to find HEC + Somali isoglosses that wouldn't occur also in Oromo. The only clear case is Burji ɗikʼ- 'to wash' ~ Somali ɖiq-… and this could be a loanword, Burji is the southern-most HEC language and spoken almost up to Somalia. (Indeed partly in Kenya, in contact with the smaller Somaloid languages like Rendille, see map below; maybe it's from those and not from Somali proper.)

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A second lookover: South Omotic / Aroid, on the basis of Tsuge (1996): On the Consonant Correspondences of South Omotic Languages.

To be sure, I think I'd prefer to consult data on North Omotic / "Omotic proper" which is geographically even closer nearby, right between the two really. For an illustration, here's an excerpt from a map of the languages of Africa; Highland East Cushitic underlined, North Omotic highlighted in yellow, Aroid highlighted in red (note also the surrounding "sea" of Oromo in the lowlands):

…But this Aroid paper is one I had around already, and it's a pretty short one, so let's see what comes up. (All Aroid pseudo-reconstructions given here are mine.)

An unsurprizing result is general-Cushitic or general-Ethiopian vocabulary appearing even in Aroid, most probably just loans into it:

'coffee': HEC *buna, Aroid #buna, O. buna, Amh. bunna

'horse': HEC *farado, Aroid #parda, O. farda, Amh. färäs

'mouth': HEC *afaʔo, Aroid #apa, O. afaan, Som. af, Amh. af

'two': HEC *lamo, Aroid #lama, O. lama, Som. laba

'six': HEC *leho, Aroid #lex, Som. liħ — and e.g. Iraqw lahhooʔ (Oromo jaʔa could be a cognate too but I'm not swearing on that, e.g. why -ʔ- and not the expected -h-?)

'hundred': HEC *tʼibbe, Aroid #ta/ebi, O. ɗibba (probably not HEC–O cognates but a loan, since they diverge heavily on the lower numerals)

One case does somewhat "smell like substrate": HEC *ona, O. onaa, Amh. ona 'empty, abandoned house' — but Aroid #ono 'house' as a general term! Anything getting all the way from Aroid to Amharic as substrate must be unlikely, however.

The language best-positioned to have newer Aroid loans into it is again Burji, but the only example of that distribution that I can find is 'salt': B. sogoddi (≠ other HEC *matʼine) ~ Aroid #sooqi, and this could well be a Wanderwort from somewhere else entirely still, or simply an accident, since I have no especial reason to think that Burji g will correspond with Aroid #q (probably <*kʼ as also elsewhere in Ethiopia, per Tsuge it's indeed still phonetically variable [kʼ ~ qʼ ~ q] in the titular Aari).

There is instead a number of comparable vocabulary attested in all or most of both HEC and Aroid though! Some of the better cases are:

'to bite': HEC *gamˀ-, Aroid #gaʔ- (if *mˀ < *ʔm; there's a common HEC verb suffix *-(a)m-)

'to eat': HEC *it-, Aroid #its-

'lion': HEC *dzoobba, Aroid #zobo

'seed': HEC *witʼa, Aroid #ɓeeta ("glottalization metathesis"?)

'tree, wood': HEC *hakkʼa, Aroid #haaka

Would be interesting to know if the words of this type further occur in North Omotic too.

Also interesting is 'cat', another concept that's likely to involve old Wanderwörter. Hudson reconstructs PHEC *adurine, but this seems like just a compromise between Gedeo and Sidamo adurre (and Oromo adurree), versus Hadiyya aduuna : sg. adun-čo, Kambaata adan-ita : sg. adan-ču (btw note nouns having number-unmarked basic forms versus morphologically marked singulatives). In Aari, however, 'cat' is urro. Does this suggest the G + S + O words to be actually compounds, *adV + urre? Sidamo even has two further synonyms for 'cat' that could work with this: basu, basurre! — There are, though, even more animal names in Sidamo that end in this, e.g. čʼaaččʼurre 'chick'. Probably this *urrV would have to have been not a noun meaning 'cat' specifically, but one meaning something like 'a small animal' — which then coincidentally specializes as 'cat' in Aari. Still speculative, but a fun idea maybe.

My latest in trawling thru semi-random comparative etymological dictionaries: Hudson (1989) on Highland East Cushitic. He gets together 767 reconstructions, a decent amount on a group of relatively little-studied languages. A nice chunk of vocabulary can be reconstructed especially for the major crop of the area, the enset tree (*weesa), its parts (e.g. *hoga 'leaf', *kʼaantʼe 'fibre', *kʼalima 'seed pod', *mareero 'pith', *waasa 'enset food') and tools for processing it (*meeta 'scraping board', *sissa 'bamboo scraper).

There surely has to be material among the reconstructions though that represent newer spread, most clearly the names of a few post-Columbian-exchange foodstuffs: *bakʼollo 'maize', *kʼaaria 'green chili' — same terms also e.g. in Amharic: bäqollo, qariya (Hudson kindly provides Amharic and Oromo equivalents copiously). (Note btw a vowel nativization rule appearing in these: Amharic a → HEC aa, but ä /ɐ/ → HEC a [a~ɐ~ə], as if undoing the common Ethiosemitic shift *aa *a > a ä.) Slightly suspicious are also a few names of trade items and cultural vocabulary / Wanderwörter like *gaanjibelo 'ginger', *loome 'lemon' (at least the latter could be again plausibly fairly recent loans from Amharic lome) but these could well have reached southern Ethiopia even already in antiquity.

In terms of root structure, interesting are two monoconsonantal roots: *r- 'thing, thingy, thingamajig' (segmentable from a diminutive *r-iččo and from Sidamo ra) and *y- 'to say'. Otherwise verb roots are the usual Cushitic *CV(C)C-, clusters limited to geminates and sonorant + obstruent; with several derivative extensions such as *-is- reflexive, *-aɗ- causative. *ɗ actually occurs almost solely in the last, I would suspect it's from one of the well-attested dental stops *t / *d / *tʼ with post-tonic lenition. Long vowels also seem to occur fairly freely in the root syllable with even several "superheavy" roots like *aanš- 'to wash', *feenkʼ- 'to shell legumes', *iibb- 'to be hot', *maass-aɗ- 'to bless', *uuntʼ- 'to beg'; *boowwa 'valley', *čʼeemma 'laziness', *doobbe 'nettle', *leemma 'bamboo', *mooyyee 'mortar'… A ban on CCC consonant clusters does seem to hold however, apparently demonstrated by *moočča ~ *mooyča 'prey animal', which probably comes from an earlier *moo- + the deminutive suffix *-iččV; resulting **mooyčča would have to be shortened in some way, either by degemination or by dropping *-y-.

In V2 and later positions there seems to be morphological conditioning of vowel length, cf. e.g. *arraab- 'to lick' : *arrab-o 'tongue'; *indidd- 'to shed tears' : *indiidd-o 'tear' (and not **arraabo, **indiddo). And as in these examples, also many basic nouns appear to be simple "thematizations" of verbs, similarly e.g. *buur- 'to anoint, smear', *buur-o 'butter'; *fool- 'to breathe', *fool-e 'breath'; *kʼiid- 'to cool', *kʼiid-a 'cold (of weather)'; *reh- 'to die', *reh-o 'death'. I don't actually see a ton of logic to what the "nominalizing vowel" ends up being though and maybe it's sometimes an original part of the stem, not a suffix. Quite a lot of unanalyzable nouns on the other hand are actually fairly long, e.g. *finitʼara 'splinter', *hurbaata 'dinner', *kʼorranda 'crow', *kʼurtʼumʔe 'fish', *tʼulunka '(finger)nail'.

Further phonologically interesting features include apparently a triple contrast between *Rˀ (glottalized resonants) and both *Rʔ and *ʔR clusters [edit: no, it's just very inconsistent transcription]; also ejective *pʼ is established even though plain *p is not (that has presumably become *f).

Lastly here's a some etyma I've found casually amusing:

*bob- 'to smell bad': take note, any Roberts planning on travelling to southern Ethiopia

*buna 'coffee': yes yes, this is the part of the world where you cannot assume 'coffee' will look anything like kafe

*mana 'man': second-best probably-coincidence in the data

*raar- 'to shout, scream' 🦖 [and looks like maybe a variant of *aar- 'to be angry?]

*sano 'nose': "clearly must be" cognate with PIE *nas- with metathesis :^>

*ufuuf- 'to blow on fire', oh yeah I've needed that verb sometimes

*waʔa 'water': Cushitic With British Characteristics

[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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[buudaa420]

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