Afro-asiatic languages

From UniLang Wiki

The Afro-Asiatic, or Hamito-Semitic, family is spoken in northern Africa and western Asia. It shows a distant relationship to the Dravidian languages.

The branches are

Semitic languages

Egyptian language (extinct)

Berber languages

Cushitic languages (and Omotic, which some consider separate)

Chadic languages

Proto-Afro-Asiatic seems to have been spoken at a much earlier date than Proto-Indo-European and its reconstruction is much less certain. Characteristic features which can be reconstructed include

• three grades of stops, typically voiceless, voiced, and glottalised
• masculine and feminine (marked by -t) gender
• verbs taking personal prefixes if they indicate an action, but suffixes when they indicate a state
• inflection by vowel change
• lack of compounds