Omotic languages

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The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region and southeastern Sudan in Blue Nile State. The Geʽez 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 7.9 million speakers.^[1] The group is generally classified as belonging to the Afroasiatic language family, but this is disputed by some linguists.

Four separate "Omotic" groups are accepted by Glottolog 4.0 and Güldemann (2018): North Omotic, Dizoid (Maji), Mao, and Aroid ("South Omotic").^[2]

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:

Apart from terminology, this differs from Fleming (1976) in including the Mao languages, whose affiliation had originally been controversial, and in abolishing the "Gimojan" group.^{[clarification needed]} There are also differences in the subclassification of Ometo, which is not covered here.

Hayward (2003) separates out the Mao languages as a third branch of Omotic and breaks up Ometo–Gimira:

Blench (2006) gives a more agnostic classification:^[3]

Bosha† is unclassified; Ethnologue lists it as a dialect of Kafa but notes it may be a distinct language.

Omotic is generally considered the most divergent branch of the Afroasiatic languages. In early work up to Greenberg (1963), the languages had been classified in a subgroup of Cushitic, called most often "West Cushitic". Fleming (1969) argued that it should instead be classified as an independent branch of Afroasiatic, a view which Bender (1971) established to most linguists' satisfaction,^[4] though a few linguists maintain the West Cushitic position^[5][6] or that only South Omotic forms a separate branch, with North Omotic remaining part of Cushitic.^{[citation needed]} Blench notes that Omotic shares honey-related vocabulary with Cushitic but not cattle-related vocabulary, suggesting that the split occurred before the advent of pastoralism.^[7] A few scholars have raised doubts that the Omotic languages are part of the Afroasiatic language family at all,^[8][9] and Theil (2006) proposes that Omotic be treated as an independent family.^[10] However, the general consensus, based primarily on morphological evidence, such as pronominal prefixes, grammatical number and plural form, as well as prefix conjugation is that membership in Afroasiatic is well established.^[11][12][13]

The Aroid (South Omotic) languages were first included in "West Cushitic" by Greenberg; they were excluded from earlier classifications by Italian Cushiticists such as Enrico Cerulli and Mario Martino Moreno,^[5] and their inclusion in Omotic remains contested.

Hammarström, et al. in Glottolog does not consider Omotic to be a unified group, and also does not consider any of the "Omotic" groups to be part of the Afroasiatic phylum. Glottolog accepts the following as independent language families.

• Ta-Ne-Omotic
• Dizoid (Maji)
• Mao
• Aroid (Ari-Banna; "South Omotic")

These four families are also accepted by Güldemann (2018), who similarly doubts the validity of Omotic as a unified group.^[2]

The Omotic languages have a morphology that is partly agglutinative and partly fusional:

• Agglutinating: Yem am-se-f-∅-à go+plural+present+3. Person+Femininum “they go”^[14]
• Fusional: Aari ʔíts-eka eat+3. Person Pl. Converb “by eating”^[15]

Inflection through suprasegmental morphemes is found in individual languages such as Dizi and Bench; Historically, these are partly reflexes of affixes:

• Bench sum˩ "name", sum-s˦ "to name"

The nominal morphology is based on a nominative-accusative-absolutive system; For verbal morphology, a complex inflection according to categories such as tense/aspect, interrogative - declarative and affirmative - negative as well as agreement is more predicative characterizing forms with the subject. In syntax, the word order subject-object-verb (SOV) is generally valid; Postpositions are used, which can be considered typical for both SOV languages in general and for the Ethiopian region.

The Omotic languages have on average slightly less than thirty consonant phonemes, which is a comparatively high number, but is also found in other primary branches of Afro-Asiatic. Commonly used are bilabial, alveolar, velar and glottal plosive, various fricative, alveolar affricates and /w/, /y/, /l/, /r/, /m/, /n/. What is typical for the non-glottal plosives is that they are each represented by a voiced, a voiceless, and an ejective phoneme; All three types can also be found in fricatives and affricates. Most Omotic languages have additional consonants. Examples of this are the Implosive in South Omotic (/ɓ/, /ɗ/, /ɠ/) and the Retroflex of the Bench. In some cases, consonants can also occur geminated. Representatives of the Nordomotic and Mao have five to six vowel phonemes, the quantity is partly a difference in meaning; In contrast, much more extensive vowel systems are typical for South Omotic.

All Omotic languages for which sufficient data is available are tonal languages, which usually only distinguish two tones (high and low), some languages have more tones: Dizi distinguishes three, Bench six. Certain Omotic languages such as Aari and Ganza (Mao) have tonal accent systems in which each independent word has exactly one high tone, whereas in most languages the tones are freely distributed.

The Omotic languages distinguish between the nominal categories number, case,^[16] and definiteness. These categories are marked by different suffixes, which can be fusional or analytic depending on the language. The two genders in all omotic languages for which sufficient data are available are masculine and feminine; they essentially correspond to natural gender. The case system distinguishes the omotic languages as accusative languages; other cases form various adverbial determinations. A number of omotic languages have an absolutive case, which marks the citation form and the direct object (examples from Wolaita):^[17]

• Absolute keett-a "the house"
• Nominative keett-i "the house"

Some common case suffixes are:

• Nominative *-i (Gonga-Gimojan, Dizi-Sheko)
• Accusative *-m (South Domotic)
• Genitive *-kV (Gonga-Gimojan, Dizi-Sheko, Mao, Dime)
• Dative *-s (Gonga-Gimojan, Dizi-Sheko, Mao?^[18])

A typological peculiarity, which is also isolated within Omotic, is the person and gender dependency of the nominative in Bench (either -i˧ or -a˧, depending on the person):

• a˦tsin˦-a˧ “a woman” (3rd person sg. femininum)^[19]
• nun˧-a˧ "we" (1st person plural exclusive)^[20]
• nas˦i˧ “a man” (3rd person sg. masculine)^[20]

In most languages, the singular is unmarked, while the plural has its own suffix. It is possible that plural suffixes in some languages arose from a partitive construction. This is supported by the length of certain plural suffixes, formal relationships to the genitive singular and the fact that the determining suffix sometimes comes before the plural suffix, which is typologically unusual:^[21][22]

• Dizi kìan-à-kʾankàs dog+det.+plural “the dogs”^[23]
• Yem ʔasú-nì-kitó human+gene+plural “people”^[24]

The personal pronouns distinguish similar categories to the nouns in most omotic languages; However, the genera are usually only marked in the 3rd person singular. The personal pronouns usually have their own stem for each number-person-gender combination, to which case suffixes are then added, which are the same for all persons. Some of the pronouns show similarities with other Afro-Asian language families and can therefore be traced back to Proto-Afro-Asiatic; Certain South Omotic personal pronouns can be explained as borrowings from the neighboring Nilo-Saharan:^[25]

The case endings of the personal pronouns and the nouns are usually identical:

• Aari: Accusative -m: yé-m "you", fatir-in-ám "the corn"

Possessive pronouns in particular have their own forms:

• Aari: yé "yours," ʔéed-te "a man's"

Bender (1987: 33–35)^[27] reconstructs the following proto-forms for Proto-Omotic and Proto-North Omotic, the latter which is considered to have descended from Proto-Omotic.

Sample basic vocabulary of 40 Omotic languages from Blažek (2008):^[28]

• Languages of Ethiopia

• Bender, M. L. 1975. Omotic: a new Afroasiatic language family. (University Museum Series, 3.) Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University.
• Zaborski, Andrzej. 1986. Can Omotic be reclassified as West Cushitic? In Gideon Goldenberg, ed., Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference pp. 525–530. Rotterdam: Balkema.

• Is Omotic Afro-Asiatic? by Rolf Theil