South Cushite languages

The Südkuschitischen languages , even after the Great African grave breach or Rift Valley Rift languages called, are a group of languages spoken in small areas in the north of Tanzania are spoken. They belong to the Cushitic languages , a primary branch of the Afro-Asian language family . The most important South Kushitic language is Iraqw with almost half a million speakers. Gorowa , Alagwa and Burunge each have tens of thousands of speakers, Aasáx and Kw'adza are now extinct. Mbugu / Ma'a and the Dahalo spoken in Kenya , whose assignment to South Cushite is controversial, are considered endangered.

The speakers of South Kushitic languages ​​are considered to be the second oldest population class in East Africa after the khoisan-speaking ethnic groups ( Hadza , Sandawe ) and before the South Nilots and Bantu . These languages ​​should therefore originally have been spoken in larger areas. Their speakers are each made up of ethnic groups of the same name, such as Iraqw , Gorowa and Assa .

Research and classification history

Leo Reinisch classified Iraqw, Gorowa, Alagwa and Burunge for the first time as " Hamitic " (Afro-Asian) languages at the beginning of the 20th century . Carl Meinhof also classified Burunge and Mbugu / Ma'a as Hamitic in 1906 and recognized their relationship to the ( East Cushitic ) Somali . Archibald N. Tucker and Margaret Bryan (1957, 1966), however, ignored the arguments in favor of an Afro-Asian assignment and viewed Iraqw, Gorowa, Burunge and Alagwa as isolated "Iraqw languages". WH Whiteley shared their view. In 1963 Joseph Greenberg classified these four languages ​​as South Kushite within the Kushitic branch of Afro-Asian languages.

In 1980, Christopher Ehret worked out the division into Rift languages ​​(with eastern and western branches) plus Mbugu / Ma'a and Dahalo. However, some researchers classify the Dahalo as an East Cushite language. The classification of Mbugu / Ma'a is difficult for theoretical reasons, as it is a mixed language of a Bantu language and a Cushitic language. In 1980, Robert Hetzron proposed that the South Cushite languages ​​be classified as part of the East Cushite languages ​​for morphological reasons.

classification

• Afro-Asian
  • Cushy
    • South Kushite
      • ? Dahalo
      • ? Mbugu / Ma'a
      • Rift languages
        • East Rift
          • Kw'adza (Qwadza)
          • Aasáx (Asa, Assa)
        • West Rift
          • South-West Rift: Burunge
          • North West Rift
            • Alagwa
            • Iraqwoid
              • Gorowa (Gorwaa)
              • Iraqw

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Summary on Roland Kießling ( memento of January 13, 2006 in the Internet Archive ): The Reconstruction of the South Kushitic Languages ​​(West-Rift) , Kuschitische Sprachstudien 19, 2002, ISBN 978-3-89645-066-1
2. ↑ Maarten Mous: A grammar of Iraqw , Kuschitische Sprachstudien 9, Buske Verlag 1993, ISBN 9783875480573 (p. 3f.)

literature

• Václav Blažek: Current progress in South Cushitic Comparative Historical Linguistics , in: Folia Orientalia 42/1, 2005, pp. 177–224
• Roland Kießling, Maarten Mous: The Lexical Reconstruction of West-Rift Southern Cushitic , in: Kuschitische Sprachstudien 21, 2003, ISBN 978-3-89645-068-5
• Roland Kießling: Tonogenesis in Southern Cushitic (Common West Rift) , in: Rose-Juliet Anyanwu (Ed.): Stress and Tone. The African Experience , Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blätter 15, 2004, pp. 141–163
• Roland Kießling: Infix genesis in Southern Cushitic. In: Lionel M. Bender , Gabor Takacs & David Appleyard (Eds.): Selected Comparative-Historical Afrasian Linguistic Studies in Memory of Igor M. Diakonoff . Munich 2003, pp. 109–122.
• Roland Kießling: Will, initiation and control: on the morphosemantics of experimental verbs in South Kushitic , in: Theda Schumann, Mechthild Reh, Roland Kießling and Ludwig Gerhardt (eds.): Current research on African languages ​​(proceedings of the 14th African Resident Day ) , p. 171 -192, 2002
• Roland Kießling: Verbal Inflectional Suffixes in the West Rift Group of Southern Cushitic , in: C. Griefenow-Mewis and RM Voigt (eds.): Cushitic and Omotic Languages , Cologne 1995, pp. 59-70
• Roland Kießling: Some salient features of Southern Cushitic (Common West Rift) , in: Lingua Posnaniensis 42, 2000, pp. 69-89
• Roland Kießling: South Cushitic links to East Cushitic , in: Andrzej Zaborski (Ed.): New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics. Robert Hetzron in memoriam , Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2001, 95-102.
• Christopher Ehret: The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cushitic Phonology and Vocabulary , in: Kölnerbeitrage zur Afrikanistik , 1980