South Cushitic is one of the branches of Cushitic whose unity has been repeatedly debated. Last fall I have taken an initial stance in favor of continuing to recognize at least the wider Rift family, and that also Rift-like features in Ma’a and Dahalo could very well be their real genealogical stratum, opposed to some contact influence from East Cushitic (and not the inverse). There might be however also a different problem to tackle: is “South Cushitic” really a member of Cushitic? After all, Cushitic is itself not a primary language family but, most likely, only a branch of the wider Afrasian / Afro-Asiatic, so even finding some parallels with Cushitic that would point to relationship does not necessarily have to mean membership in it. We also have a very similar research-historical parallel that difficulties in demonstrating the membership of “West Cushitic” was initially resolved by promoting it into “Omotic”, an independent Afrasian subfamily, and concluding that its similarities with Cushitic mainly result from contact. It also helps that the remainder of Cushitic is itself widespread / diverse enough that it has been easy to notice that several “Cushomotic” features are not well-distributed in the subfamily, not even in the closest-by East Cushitic, but rather concentrate in the third-order subgroups in closest contact with Omotic (mostly in Highland East Cushitic = HEC and in Oromoid).

Basically the same procedure has brought me to today’s idea. For the last year I’ve been going on and off thru the scattered literature on Cushitic reconstruction, starting from the large East Cushitic. Its reconstruction efforts have naturally relied more on the bigger and more accessible languages, that were documented in some detail earlier than others, e.g. Saho–Afar, Somali, Oromo, Konso, Sidamo, Hadiyya. A stroll through newer data e.g. on the smaller group of Arboroid languages in the far southwest (Arbore, El Molo, Daasanach), comparing their data with already extant PEC reconstructions as you go, still though reveals unreported but obvious cognates by the dozens. This is about what I would expect: good distribution (≈ early reconstructibility) within a given subset of related languages predicts also good distribution in relatives outside of it, especially relatives that descend from the same proto-language, but often also in external relatives. Brief initial ventures, though I don’t have systematic data about this yet, suggests that this pattern would continue even into the more distantly related Agaw languages and Beja. So it seems to me Proto-East-Cushitic was at least close enough to Proto-Cushitic that it had not radically changed all of its core lexicon, and will be thus its best first-order approximation.

(I would hope to show this methodological point also with other data eventually; e.g. within the Finnic or Samic subfamilies, the distribution of Uralic vocabulary seems to me to be on average better than that of vocabulary from external sources or of unknown origin. But this still requires detailed statistical analysis.)

Only some of the third-order subfamilies like HEC then seem to have, probably due to contact effects, lexically diverged yet more radically. Still, there are many enough East Cushitic subgroups (8 or 9 altogether ^[1]) that most of the old native vocabulary would be expected to have been preserved in at least a few of them, and so to remain reconstructible. This is the hypothesis I initially took as my plan for approaching South Cushitic too. Going thru e.g. the entire known Dahalo lexicon, or all the ~2500 existing Proto-West-Rift (PWR) reconstructions, and comparing them with dozens of other Cushitic languages all on equal ground, would be lots of work and would risk false positives. Integrating these into general Cushitic reconstruction should be easier by first taking the 200–400 well-established East Cushitic reconstructions and following thru to see what cognates we will have for them in the proposed SCu. languages; especially since there already exists literature arguing that it might be merely an additional East Cushitic subgroup or a couple of them. An even more specific hypothesis I had sketched (and others have supported too) was indeed that perhaps they don’t even diverge as their own branch entirely, but rather might be derived by heavy relexification from, or close to, some known East Cushitic subgroup? A couple curious cases also exist where SCu. seems to side with Arboroid or Yaaku, two branches right where we want them in the southwest of the ECu. area, in showing some sort of innovative / divergent basic vocabulary. A few examples from Václav Blažek’s 1997 “Cushitic Lexicostatistics: The Second Attempt”:

• ‘bird’: HEC *čʼiiɗa (? < *čʼidʔ-a) ~ PWR *tsʼiraʕa ≠ common EC *kimbir-
• ‘to eat’: Yaaku ɛk- ~ Dahalo ʕag- ~ PWR *ʕag- ≠ common EC *ʕun-; though there is *ʕVg- (HEC *ag-, others *ʕu/ig-) instead for ‘to drink’
• ‘fat’, ‘to be fat’: Yaaku deeʔ-ɛuʔ a. ~ Dahalo ɗeʕʕ-em- v. ~ PWR *duʕ-iya n. ≠ common EC *ħayɗ- a., *kils- n., *-kli/us- v.
• ‘fire’: Yaaku iku ~ Dahalo ʔééga ~ Arboroid *ʔeeg-; ≠ PWR *ʔaɬa; no common EC term. ^[2] Also, an ablaut relationship with ‘eat’ seems conceivable, in which case this would be probably downstream of the ‘drink’ > ‘eat’ shift (…but would also require the Dahalo to be a loan from some different branch to explain *ʕ > ʔ).

Thus, after finally getting my list of the most solid PEC vocabulary into a tentatively workable shape (though much lit. review would also remain to be done), I have simply gone looking up their West Rift equivalents. In work extending existing language families, I find this approach, the “streetlight method” as I call it (a fortified version of the streetlight effect), a preferrable start to following something entirely pre-given like the Swadesh list. If we already know there is no good reconstructed PEC candidate for e.g. ‘green’, and also know there is too a good one for ‘elephant’, then not bothering to look up ‘green’ in any additional relatives we’re surveying either will save work; while checking their words for ‘elephant’ will have good odds of finding additional cognates that a Swadesh list method would miss. There is only a certain size bracket of language families this works well with though. Again, the 2.5k Proto-West Rift reconstructions would be too much to use as a basis for this, while something like Proto-Afrasian with only a dozen or two widely accepted proto-etyma would be too little. But since Proto-East Cushitic comes out with a well-suited count of a couple hundred strong reconstructions, let’s run with those.

The initial results turned out baffling. Little of the solidly PEC reconstructions seem to have equivalents in PWR (be it as descendants or cognates); and a decent number of what turns up is hardly core vocabulary, instead things like PEC *bohl- ~ PWR *bohooŋʷ ‘hole’, PEC *fuučʼ- ~ Iraqw fuutɬʼ- ‘to whistle’. ^[3] The haul does not give the appearence of a set of cognates as much as an oldish set of loanwords. This I guess accords also with one stance by Kießling & Mous (K&M) in their book on Proto-West Rift, in their discussion of external connections: that a few clearly related and clearly widespread-in-Cushitic terms like *ʔaf- ‘mouth’, *ʔil- ‘eye’ look “too similar” and could be suspected of also being loans rather than real cognates. I would find (did find) this claim ill-founded if (West) Rift were simply a sister or niece branch to East Cushitic, even more so if it were a slightly disguised daughter: there is no rule that real cognates must look obscure, and many simple root structures can easily persist for millennia without major change (they do just that within ECu. itself). Dahalo then turns up somewhat more reflexes of PEC roots, but it seems some of these have to be recent loans already for phonological reasons. Old word-initial *w-, for example, is normally reflected in Dahalo as v- (in cases like vatɬʼ- ‘to return’ ~ PWR *watɬʼ- ‘to return home’), and yet for PEC *waraab- ‘hyena’, *warħan- ‘spear’ we find wáraaba, waraħa (probably from some Somaloid variety, e.g. Rendille has waraba, warħan); this already covers two of just four words documented by Tosco as beginning with w-. ^[4]

Is there not a “South Cushitic”?

What if this is simply an Omotic-like situation all over again? That is, we are rather dealing with a family distinct from Cushitic — to establish some distance, let’s call it formulaically “Rift–Dahalo” (RD) for now — which has however been its neighbor for millennia. I would think Proto-RD, irrespective of if it is Cushitic or not, was spoken in the ballpark of 4000–5000 years ago somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Turkana, from where the Rift branch spread southwards along the titular Rift Valley, while pre-Dahalo went instead east, over the valley’s escarpments and then roughly downstream along either the Tana, or maybe already the through the deserts of today’s northern Kenya and its intermittent rivers draining into the Jubba (cf. map at Wikipedia); this same approximate sort of route was probably also followed later on by pre-Somali (ca. 2000–3000 years ago) and still later by southern Oromo varieties (< 1000 years ago). The dispersal of RD might well have been also itself driven by the (gradual?) arrival or expansion of some East Cushitic group(s) in its former homeland. The current geographic gap between the Rift languages in central Tanzania and East Cushitic in Ethiopia + Northern Kenya then most likely just results from their intermediate contact zone having been run over by Nilotic “recently” (ca. 1000 years ago), but Cushitic material in RD & RD material in e.g. Arboroid would still testify for their former status as neighbors. Still, perhaps not as any kind of close relatives! This is why we would find parallels mainly in somewhat marginal vocabulary, or with somewhat marginal East Cushitic distribution. Even *ʔaf- ‘mouth’ could be easily chalked as a Wanderwort, since it has after all also gotten into all three Omotic families and Ethiopian Semitic. (This was, I suspect, likely driven by its use also for ‘language’.)

The idea that RD could be its own Afroasiatic branch actually does not even appear to be new — overview literature refers to this having been suggested in passing already in a 1983 in a paper by Fleming, that I have not yet seen. However, it is difficult to find either any follow-up on this idea, or clear critiques of it, and the idea seems to have been left basically ignored for four decades now.

As outlined when I first aired my suspicions on Twxttxr a few weeks back, this hypothesis would clearly be testable in various ways. If Proto-RD still comes from the milieu of modern Ethiopia, as is corroborated also by other lines of evidence like genetics and archeology, and with suggestions even in Iraqw oral history, we would probably expect contacts not just with rump Cushitic but also (the various components of) Omotic. My currently also ongoing collection of Aroid etymologies should thus be a good dataset to compare with as well. If RD were still a part of Cushitic, we’d definitely want to find more (e.g.) Rift–ECu. etymologies than Rift–Aroid etymologies; a few of which are already noted by K&M too. Also the other, definitely non-Eastern parts of Cushitic would make good control groups, now in the other direction. If those few RD ~ PEC comparisons that cannot be critiqued by any distributional grounds, the couple things like *ʔil- ‘eye’, were an older inherited Proto-Cushitic layer, then we should find signs of this layer also in Agaw and Beja, even some stuff that had been mostly or entirely lost in ECu. while still surfacing in SCu. Ehret’s first-pass Proto-Cushitic reconstruction provides in fact many contenders for this already. These would have to be critically reviewed though, already due to the many uncertainties of his SCu. reconstruction or his freestyling attitude to semantics. To pick an example at random, he compares Beja lekik ‘to lose, misplace’ with Iraqw ɬaq- ‘to fail, be unable’ and nothing in-between; in K&M’s reconstruction however this shows up only as a medial derivative *ɬaaqʼat- ‘to be tired, unable’. This suggests ‘to fail’, if this is a real meaning, doesn’t come from the direction of Ehret’s proposed PCu. meaning ‘to miss’, but instead from ‘to be to tired to manage’… and overall I would hesitate to take this as a reliable etymology. The idea I’ve seen recently that RD *ɬ doesn’t correspond to ECu. *l but *š could also point to comparing instead HEC *šakkʼ- ‘to tire, become tired’ (plausibly a similar medial derivative as in Rift: < *šakʼ-ɗ- < *šakʼ-at-), which will be now again a comparison within geographic reach of being due to borrowing rather than inheritance.

There remains to my eyes good evidence that the RD family is still a member of Afroasiatic in general though (as far as anything is), in their general grammar and, I suppose also, typology; e.g. distinctive markers in phonology include the ejectives, pharyngeals and at least traces of ablaut. Ejectives may count as just some sort of an old East African areal feature (also found in all of Omotic and Koman–Gumuz), but the other two have been for long taken as at least probable AA markers (even their lack has been used for arguing against Omotic being in AA…). Perhaps also some of the lexical evidence that has been presented in Proto-AA reconstructions, at times drawn only from RD but not (the rest of?) Cushitic, is worth something. A couple random examples of this from Ehret that do not look immediately terrible:

• Egyptian ibw ‘refuge, shelter’ ~ PSCu. *yab- (Dahalo jab- ‘to save’ + PWR *yab- ‘to fence in’; Ehret also tries to include Kʼwadza yabo ‘bow’ by some just-so-story);
• Eg. wħʕ ‘to investigate’ ~ PSCu. *waħ- (Da. vaħ- ‘to see’ + uncertain-looking Ma’a data; Blažek adds also Yaaku -wax- ‘to see’) ~ Chadic *w- ‘to see’;
• Eg. rḫs ‘to slaughter’ ~ PSCu. *raaxʷ- (PWR *daaxʷ- ‘to draw blood from cattle’ + Ma’a ráo ‘arrow for drawing blood from cattle’);
• Coptic [which variety?] hmom ‘to be hot’ ~ Arabic √ħmm ‘to be warm, to bathe, etc.’ ~ PSCu. *ħam- (Da. ħanṯið- < *ħam-t-is- ‘to warm oneself’ + ? PWR *haam- ‘to be hot’ with irregular *h-).

It’s also interesting to notice that many of these have parallels in Egyptian in particular, and this trend seems to continue further too. Now, the subgrouping of Afroasiatic is anything but settled, and Cushitic gets placed sometimes closer to Semitic and Berber, sometimes closer to Chadic (which is itself often placed close to Egyptian) … in theory this instability, too, could be due to Cushitic being really two branches, such that RD is the older Ethiopian branch that groups with Egyptian and/or Chadic, while mainline Cushitic could have arrived from Arabia along the same path as Ethiopian Semitic later did, thus grouping with Semitic? If we remove RD from consideration, the mainline Cushitic maximum of diversity is clearly in Eritrea (between Beja, Bilin and Saho), which could suggest a homeland along the Red Sea coast; perhaps even the Arabian coast rather than the African; with Agaw and East Cushitic later expanding south and inland independently, and at least the latter running there into Rift–Dahalo.

Grammatical-typological notes

Moving briefly from lexicon to grammar, a general weakness is that no such thing as Proto-Cushitic or even Proto-East Cushitic grammar has been reconstructed, and comparative work remains at comparing the various shallow third-degree branches among each other. At least one discussion of the grammatical evidence for Cushitic subclassification, Kießling (2001), ^[5] interestingly underlines thruout that many ECu. and SCu. grammatical parallels are either definitely or at least possibly already PAA archaisms. This angle would probably require yet more serious consideration. He also notes that some other parallels, such as a handful of plural suffixes (which are remarkably numerous across Cushitic), are concentrated in Omo–Tana; i.e. in Arboroid + Somaloid, i.e. the two language groups that, before the Oromo expansion, seem to have formed the southern fringe of East Cushitic… are your language contact senses not tingling yet? In another discussion, Tosco (2000), ^[6] Rift and Dahalo are assigned as independent entities under East Cushitic, but not much is given to motivate its own unity (some scarcer parallels crisscrossing its members clearly demand at least part of them to be arealisms). Also, for the overall unity of Cushitic, he refers mainly to the suffix conjugation. But then how sure are we to treat it as an innovation rather than archaism, and if still that, as a localized rather than areal innovation? I must remind as a warning that all of Omotic, too — if any of it is really Afrasian — is suffix-conjugating; thus suggesting also either 1) a retention, pointing to an Ethiopian origin of Afrasian in general; 2) the ability of suffix-conjugation to develop in multiple lineages in parallel, thus maybe also independently in RD; or maybe 3) returning to some sort of a “Macro-Cushitic” theory, where we merely demote Omotic to the first offshoot of Cushitic overall.

My sympathies are on the 2nd of these options. My experience with various close dives to the dialectology of well-documented modern languages has taught me above all that syntax and “pure” structural morphology spread very freely areally among close relatives or tight language areals, and are close to worthless for family subclassification; phonology is at times better but, especially in its major outlines, also often weak to arealisms; small details of lexicology and morphophonology, fully arbitrary single features free from roaming systemic pressures, provide the real gold standard results. Though since innovations of these sorts will be in turn vulnerable to secondary losses, some of them also to accidental similarities, even here only statistically compounding evidence can be, well, statistically significant. It will be very rare to find any “silver bullet” features, sharply and deeply cutting enough that they could cleanly establish a subgroup all by themselves, not just initially but for all time. All this might sound slightly backwards to people who have been taught repeatedly only about the value of paradigmatic morphology for language classification — but there is no contradiction here; we are simply talking about different meanings of “classification”! Paradigmatic morphology is standard proof for the existence of relationships between languages, but is not much evidence about their closeness. Pick twenty modern and ten older Indo-European languages between several branches, then try to classify them just by their nominal case systems; would you ever be able to find that Modern English, with its zero cases, has any particular relationship even with just Old English, let alone with e.g. any stage of German? Or consider the recent case of an alleged “Rung” subgroup of Sino-Tibetan, a concept set up for various languages clearly sharing much paradigmatic morphology, but which failed to take heed of widespread later drift across ST towards isolating grammar (i.e. loss of morphology), thus leaving the system to be more likely a shared archaism from somewhere close to Proto-ST than an exclusively shared innovation. Its disproof, too, has come precisely from what I call above “small arbitrary features”.

One more argument for my idea for an independent RD family is itself somewhat typological but is hopefully not particularly weak to arealisms. Contact-induced relexification is possible, not even particularly extraordinary; in Cushitic we already have Highland East Cushitic as a fairly clear example, although that too seems to be less thorough than what would have to be assumed under a hypothesis of Rift-as-East-Cushitic. But relexification is a process we expect to leave some sort of a phonological signal, if our starting language family and its new linguistic neighborhood are itself phonotypologically distinct to begin with. In Afroasiatic, we do have unique markers that will serve for this! The most conspicuous are the pharyngeal consonants *ħ, *ʕ (or perhaps really epiglottals *[ʜ], *[ʡ]; beside the point though) — highly rare worldwide, but regardless maintained in e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Somali, Dullay, Dahalo and Rift for not just a couple thousands of years since their recent branchings in their immediate family tree, but probably for the whole whopping 10,000+ years since Proto-Afrasian. I believe they will thus make particularly good examples of what I call “inheritance phonemes“. And yes, e.g. corresponding to ? Proto-RD *ʕag- ‘to eat’, PEC *ʕVg- ‘to drink’ noted above, we can indeed find confirmation for deep native origin also in Arabic √ʕǧm ‘to chew, bite’ (even if evidence elsewhere seems lacking and perhaps this is ultimately not quite PAA, but something like a loan between pre-Cushitic and pre-Semitic). If we assume relexification in HEC, or even if we went back to assuming any given bit of Omotic to be still close to Cushitic and just massively relexified, we expect this process to probably eliminate or marginalize pharyngeals. Disappear they do, actually soundlawfully entirely; the one trace of former pharyngeals in HEC is probably word-medial *-ʔ-, which reflects all three of PEC *-ʔ-, *-ʕ-, *-ħ- ^[7] and is mostly found in native Cushitic roots. The novel, non-PEC vocabulary of HEC is instead full of very generic-looking roots like *bululo ‘ash’, *buudaa ‘horn’, *gooba ‘neck’, *ibibe ‘louse’, *kin- ‘stone’, that you might run into in practically any language family in the world. Their respective PEC equivalents *darʕ-, *gaas-, *lukʼm-, *ʔingir-, *ɗagħ- meanwhile already demonstrate one of each pharyngeal among them (duly preserved in e.g. Tsʼamakko darʕo, East Dullay tarʕo, Somali ɖagaħ).

The Rift languages & Dahalo do not work like this! They not only preserve pharyngeals putatively inherited from Proto-Cushitic, but also seem retain them as “productive” in their own vocabulary. Running into some is indeed so easy, that for demonstration — let’s look up the exact same Swadesh-100 concepts again in these, although I just now picked them only from my HEC lexical database without looking at wider Cushitic:

• ‘Ash’: Da. ʔíívu ~ ʔííbu, PWR *ʔura, *daʕaraa (the latter of course akin to PEC *darʕ-)
• ‘Horn’: Da. tumpi, PWR *xadaaŋʷ
• ‘Neck’: Da. ɗááʕeero, PWR *ʔisa
• ‘Louse’: Da. ʔítta, PWR *ʔitinoo (mutual cognates)
• ‘Stone’: Da. máve (← Swahili ma-we pl.), PWR *tɬʼaaʕa

Thus, whatever is the pre-Cushitic source of all the divergent South Cushitic vocabulary, clearly it itself already had an Afroasiatic look to it, as we can see in examples like Dahalo ɗááʕeero ‘neck’ (or also e.g. ʕani ‘head’ ≠ PEC *matħ-), West Rift *tɬʼaaʕa ‘rock’ ^[8] (or also e.g. *tsʼigaħa ‘four’ ≠ PEC *ʔafar-).

(No clear cognates for these in Beja or Agaw either. Awngi yíntí ‘louse’, ≠ South Agaw *bɨtt-, is noted by Blažek to have some similarity to RD *ʔit(t)-, but then this would to my eyes come also about as close to PEC *ʔingir-. The one definite Proto-Cushitic item for this mini-list is rather Agaw *kɨrm- ~ Konsoid *kʰolm- ~ ? Beja kokelem for ‘neck’, from which we find also some divergent reflexes like Somali kolon ‘dewlap’, Kʼwadza kolima ‘nape’.)

My proposal of the independence of RD can be thus also restated as follows:

1. the source of their non-Cushitic vocabulary not just looked like but was/is Afrasian;
2. it is not any hypothetical lost family, but simply just the still-extant Rift-Dahalo family itself, which already existed before eventually coming under major East Cushitic influence.

Sanity checkpoint: what’s the previous evidence?

Before I go too wild with all this, we should also pause to check what really is the prior argument for the Cushitic membership of Rift & co. A consistent research-historical claim (thus also Kießling & Mous) attributes this classification having been established “by” or “since” Greenberg, with the precise reference varying slightly, between his original 1950 Hamito-Semitic article, its reappearence in the 1955 collection Studies in African Linguistic Classification, and its 1963 revision as a chapter in The Languages of Africa (in the last, Ma’a and Dahalo now appear in SCu. also). This is surely correct in that the classification as South Cushitic has persisted as received knowledge since then. But did Greenberg really show this classification, or merely assert it? His classification work is after all not very careful at, or reliable for, distinguishing these two. Even many of his entirely novel details are given with only passing comment. E.g. the theory of Omotic membership of Aroid has its origins in his footnote III.14 (as of the 1963 book), which I quote here in full: “Bako [= Aari; J.P.] and the languages closely related to it were left unclassified in SALC because of lack of evidence. Material now available shows that these languages are without doubt Western Cushitic.” ^[9] On South Cushitic we can find a more promising assertion in footnote III.12; “I do plan, however, to publish separately the evidence for the affiliation of Southern Cushitic to the rest of Cushitic“. Alas no trace of such a work seems to be found cited in later literature or to appear in a purportedly complete bibliography of his. ^[10]

The Iraqw grammar by Mous adds a little more detail on the early history of classification of SCu., referring also to the proposal having been first made already by good old Reinisch (in some unspecified source) and elaborated further by lexical comparison by Meinhof “in 1906”, again uncited, but this probably refers to an article “Linguistische Studien in Ostafrika, XI: Mbulungwe” (= on the Rift language Burunge, its name here in a Bantu-adopted form ^[11]). If lexical comparison was the main evidence cited there, as well as only concluding more vaguely in favor a “Hamitic” affinity (however, unclear to me from Mous’ wording if at least Reinisch might have asserted them being indeed Cushitic), I will probably not miss anything too major by restricting my discussion mainly to what is presented by Greenberg.

For the second half of this blog post, let us thus go over the SCu. material that incidentally appears in Greenberg’s discussion of Afroasiatic, to find out if later researchers have been justified in taking him at his word on this. Greenberg’s discussion on demonstrating the AA origin of Chadic grammatical elements already covers some Cushitic material, but there the only example language he cites repeatedly is Beja; single apparences also by Oromo, Sidamo, and several Agaw varieties; but nothing SCu. We’ll have to turn to his list of 78 Afroasiatic cognate sets to find any concrete South Cushitic data. I will stick to discussing the Cushitic parallels, since again, I am not planning on questioning Rift-Dahalo being still ultimately Afroasiatic.

1. ‘Antelope’: Beja garuwa; East: Sidamo gedimo; Iraqw gwarɛħi ‘dikdik’ (+ Chadic)
K&M confirm PWR *gʷareeħa ‘dikdik’, as well as have a very similar-looking *gʷareʕáy ‘gazelle sp.’, which probably allows segmenting off *gʷaree- ‘antelope’. No term for ‘antelope’ appears in Hudson’s Proto-HEC reconstructions, nor is Greenberg’s Sidamo word recorded by Hudson, though it seems to be akin to his Gedeo gadansa ‘antelope’, Burji gadama ‘kudu’. Sasse’s An Etymological Dictionary of Burji (1982) adds further Oromo gadamsa and proposes that this might be a loan into Burji. At least the Gedeo form clearly is (reflecting the exclusively Oromo development of the feminine singular ending *-tV to -sV after a sonorant). Consistent medial *-d- in these would be compatible with WR *-r-, but is not so with Beja. Hudson has however also a more promising-looking synonym from Sidamo: sg.m. gaarraančo, pl. gaarraano, and perhaps Burji gargulaččo ‘Ethiopian duiker’ could be related to this too. There is a lack of any explicit labial element here though that could account for PWR *gʷ-, but maybe -rr- represents assimilation from something like *garw- (and is the Beja then too from this by epenthesis to *garuw-?). All in all, I could buy this comparison… Still, distribution in East Cushitic is very spotty and checking additional data fails to turn up anything in the neighborhood of #g⁽ʷ⁾ar- either (e.g. Daasanach has ðeere ‘kudu’, gini ‘gazelle’, nooto ‘dikdik’; Arbore for the same species respectively serem, ʔizze, tarri; Tsʼamakko has mirža ‘kudu’, sawro ‘dikdik’; Gawwada has katinko ‘greater kudu’, illikakko ‘lesser kudu’, mirkiya ‘gazelle’, sawro ‘dikdik’, the first of which does match Oromo-HEC *gadVm- though). I can’t really rule out any of accidental similarity, external substrate origin, or a loan between HEC and RD. Also, outside Cushitic entirely, Hadza has geweda-ko for ‘dikdik’, and also the borrowing of this into pre-WR could probably yield at least *gweda- > *gʷar- (I cannot tell if the *-ee- adds more difficulty).

21. ‘Cow’: Beja šaʔ; East: Somali saa; Burungi [sic] se ‘ox’ (+ Chadic, Berber)
A solid Cushitic and ECu. etymology (PEC *šaʕ-, reflected in all branches other than Yaaku and Dullay ^[12]). The Burunge word seems like a mis-citation of WR ⁽*⁾ɬee ‘cow’. However, if this is related (through an *š > *ɬ shift — and not to PEC *loʔ ‘cattle’), lack of *ʕ and the *e-vocalism probably suggests an old borrowing from (pre-)Arboroid; cf. Arbore, Daasanach seʔ. If this is not mis-cited, and rather a word found in Burunge only (K&M have no trace of it), then we have clearly a still more recent loan from the same source.

22. ‘Day’: Ma’a azi; Yemsa aši ‘now’ (+ Chadic, Berber)
Way too spotty evidence to trust an ounce on, and note that Yemsa is North Omotic rather than Cushitic proper. Elsewhere we have clearly unrelated words for ‘day’ like PWR *lalaʔoo, Oromoid+Dullay *guyy-, HEC *barra (< PEC *barr- ‘some time period’), Agaw *gärk-. If Bender is to be trusted, the Yemsa word is rather akin to Bench haši ‘now’, and probably further to Proto-Ometo *hat(s)ʼi id., with no signs of coming from a meaning ‘day’ at any reconstructible time-depth.

28. ‘Egg’: Agaw: Bilin kaɣaluuna, Chamir qaluuna; East: Saho unkualale; Iraqw qanhi (+ Chadic, Berber)
The first two come clearly from some Proto-Agaw root at least, though Appleyard notes reconstruction is difficult (with other data he gets together *qäɣal- ~ *qʷäräɣ-). The Saho word must be just a loan from Amharic ɨnkʼwɨlal, which has also been borrowed into other Agaw varieties such as Awngi ɨnkʷlal. The Iraqw, properly qanħi, is per K&M rather cognate to Gorowa qanħaa ‘germinated grains’, but it looks like the semantic shift here is by bleeding from PWR *qʼanaʔoo ‘eggs’ (or are they perchance both from a common verb root meaning ca. ‘hatch, sprout, spawn’?) … still, I do not think sharing *kʼa- + some resonant gives sufficient grounds to reliably compare it with Agaw.

29. ‘Eye’: Beja lili; East: Somali il; Agaw: Quara (y)il; Iraqw ila (+ Chadic, Egyptian, Berber)
Solid pan-Cushitic *ʔil-, as already noted, continues to be widely recognized as PAA too.

41. ‘Knee’: Beja gunba; East: Saho guluub, Somali jilib; Agaw: Bilin girib; Iraqw guruŋgura (+ Chadic, Berber)
A solid Cushitic etymology; Proto-Agaw *gɨrb, PEC *gi/ulb- (I have been suspecting primarily *i, with an umlaut *gilub > *gulub in some consonant-stem reflexes), Dahalo gilli sg. : gillibe pl., PWR *guruguunda ~ *guruŋguuda (borrowed apparently also into Hadza: gurunguri). The *r/*l discrepancy seems to rule out borrowing from ECu. into Rift (OTOH might point to borrowing into Dahalo), and probably it is rather a real cognate; but it equally well seems to rule out Rift as a low-level member of ECu.

51. ‘Mouth’: Beja yaf; East: Somali af; Iraqw aafa (+ Chadic, Semitic)
Solid pan-Cushitic *ʔaf-, as already noted, again widely recognized as an already PAA root.

74. ‘Tree’: East: Somali ged; Ma’a m-xatu (+ Chadic, Egyptian, Akkadian)
The Ma’a is compared by Ehret with PWR *xaʔi ‘trees’ (sg. *xaʔi-noo), which would alas show that -tu is a suffix and lead to problems with all other cognates proposed by Greenberg. Ehret instead adduces Agaw *kan- ‘tree’, but this also ends up requiring ad hoc sound correspondences and Appleyard is not in support. Even Ehret leaves Somali (properly geed) off as well, since a Rendille cognate gey known by now shows that this rather comes from Proto-Somaloid *geyz. Thus no good cognates for SCu. to be found in this entry. A better-established Cushitic term for ‘tree’ is PEC *kʼor- (also in Dahalo: kʼoro).

78. ‘Woman’: East: Daasanach minne, Sidamo menti; Bench main; Iraqw ameni (+ Chadic)
The Sidamo has cognates all across HEC (and all with the feminine singular suffix); they probably reflect metathesis from PEC *nVm- ‘person’. The Bench (in North Omotic!) is presumably in origin a loan from this, though Proto-Ometo *ma(č)čʼ- is not dissimilar either (could this lexeme have somehow triggered metathesis in HEC?). It’s conceivable that the Daas. word shows that a metathesized form of the root used to occur also more widely across ECu. — it is not cognate with Arbore saallé, El Molo sáále for ‘woman’, but these seem to be innovative anyway. The precise Iraqw word here doesn’t seem to appear in K&M but would look like some sort of derivative from PWR *ʔaama ‘mother, old woman’. If so, it is then clearly not compareable (not analyzable as **a-men-) and instead a typical nursery term, worse yet of a type that’s not itself common in Cushitic (for ‘mother’, PEC has parallel variants *ʔaayy-, *yaayy-). — Also worth noting that metathesis and semantic shift from older *nVm- seems to further shoot down the Chadic comparison, too.

…and there we have it: Greenberg’s total provided evidence that might be in favor of thinking that the Rift languages are Cushitic; just nine etymologies, of which by my tally ‘day’ is immediately rejectable, ‘tree’ and ‘woman’ also rejectable after consideration, and ‘antelope’, ‘egg’ probably wrong too; while ‘cow’ is likely a loan. ‘Eye’, ‘mouth’ and ‘knee’ remain, but these for one do not provide much reason to think they’re specifically Cushitic (being decently represented also wider across AA), and for the first two, we could indeed also think they are loans from East Cushitic rather than cognates. Probably some more data could have been dug up from the Rift records available already in the 1950s–60s to supplement some of Greenberg’s other AA etymologies too (he has some Cushitic reflexes given for 40 more of them, many of them representing what we can today identify as generally solid PEC or Proto-Agaw etymologies). But if this kind of basic work has not been done, perhaps we should just default to the weaker position: there is no evidence from Greenberg to think RD is Cushitic.

Substantially more RD data has been involved in further Cushitic comparative work since the 60s, but I believe basically all of this should be re-looked over also with the hypothesis of an unrelated or only distantly related neighboring family in mind. A starting assumption that a relationship does exist often leads to proposing etymological connections that otherwise would not have been made, or which would have otherwise been taken as loan relationships, especially in the hands of Ehret-like etymological optimists. E.g. it seems to me there are good odds that the HEC word for ‘bird’ and the Yaaku words for ‘eat’, ‘fat’ just derive as “einzelzweiglich” loans from RD, back when it used to still be distributed up to Ethiopia. Inversely, even a quick glance again over Blažek’s Cushitic lexicostatistic data shows that many parallels in the extinct-ish and more poorly attested RD languages (Kʼwadza, Aasax, Ma’a), that have been assumed to be cognates, probably show just the effects of (East) Cushitic contact. If we find e.g. Ma’a i-tirao ‘liver’, which matches PEC *tir(-aw) excellently but neither PWR *daʔayee nor Dahalo mákko at all, we will have now good grounds to analyze it as a relatively recent loanword rather than any kind of an archaism (and should probably forget all about trying to treat PWR *rararaʔoo ‘spleen’ as a semantically and phonetically divergent cognate). In this case we awkwardly cannot get together any proper Proto-RD term either, but keeping on sifting the mess that is current RD comparative work beyond West Rift might eventually reveal cases of this, of e.g. a shared native term in West Rift + Dahalo that contrasts with an intrusive Cushitic term in Kʼwadza or Aasax.

Possible future directions

(Remember when I wrote a dozen or so paragraphs ago, “before I go too wild with all this…”?)

This reanalysis gives also new openings for the study of other East African straggler languages, as we should expect of any new language family proposal. My thoughts turn first of all to Yaaku, which per received knowledge is also supposed to be a very distinct language that retains fairly little inherited East Cushitic material. In fact it seems to me to be about the same proportion as we find also in Dahalo altogether. As already demonstrated above, it also sides with Dahalo and/or West Rift on at least a few interesting isoglosses. Earlier theories that place it as a heavily divergent member of either Dullay or Arboroid also seem to me to not really hold up, and rather there would seem to have been some secondary contacts between Yaaku and both of these subgroups. Perhaps these would be even enough to accommodate for most or all specifically East Cushitic material found in it? Perhaps it, too, is not actually Cushitic in origin, but an additional branch of Rift-Dahalo which was also heavily Cushitized, in a different fashion, sometime in its earlier history? It is not obvious to me if this is ruled out.

A second, more adventurous target could be Hadza: notoriously a click language, which again since Greenberg at least, has been mainly compared with the Khoisan languages. This does not have to be fatal though, since the third central–eastern African language with clicks is indeed Dahalo! In the absense of reasons to think there ever were clicks in Proto-Cushitic, let alone Proto-Afrasian, the consensus has always been that the Dahalo click vocabulary would represent recent substrate influence from some sort of a Paleoafrican hunter-gatherer language (perhaps simply the current speakers’ former language, partly preserved through language shift). If we now opt to derive Dahalo rather from a proto-language in common only with Rift, this is no longer obvious. Moreover, Kießling & Mous have already proposed that also the disproportionately high frequency of the ejective affricates *tsʼ, *tɬʼ in PWR could result from some sort of Paleoafrican substratum (they do write “Khoisan”, but this does not seem to carry any claim of an observable relationship with the languages this usually covers), whose clicks were mapped to these consonants. On a very quick initial partial look-over, I have not yet found any likely-looking West Rift cognates for click vocabulary in Dahalo; the closest find was PWR *ɬanú ~ Da. ⁿǀéénu ‘python’, but this turns out to have an even closer but clickless match in Hadza: ɬanó ‘python’. But even the initial setting-up of a hypothesis that maybe Proto-Rift-Dahalo already had clicks, which were then lost in Rift by sound change rather than sound substitution, gives good reasons to extend this exploration also further into Hadza; spoken not far to the west of Iraqw, and quite a few Rift–Hadza parallels are known (a few already came up naturally above). Regardless fieldworkers report there is close to no contact between their speakers, either ongoing or within living memory, and that all such parallels would have to derive from some earlier period in history. It would be again good to even check that we’re not dealing with outright a relationship.

Hadza was, incidentally, already compared with Afroasiatic in general in some detail just last year by Militarev… he leaves all click vocabulary outside consideration, but still finds an interestingly high proportion of core vocabulary similarities with Dahalo in particular (though still a smaller percentage than what we have between Dahalo and PEC), say Ha. mitɬʼa ~ Da. mittɬʼo ‘bone’. ^[13] A reserved but not entirely negative review by Starostin also notes that Militarev’s hypothesis currently has too many degrees of freedom due to comparison with all too many Afrasian languages or branches at once, and that one way of getting more believable results could be to not leave Hadza as a complete loose cannon in the giant AA family tree, but put a foot down to analyze it as something like a highly divergent Chadic or Cushitic offshoot. Alright, may I sell you gentlemen a brand-new seventh branch of Afrasian, located right next door, which also happens to already have clicks in it…? Honestly though this sounds too perfect; it would be kind of a miracle if it turned out there actually were identifiable click cognates to be found between Hadza and Dahalo, and just the “Khoisan” vs. “Afrasian” conceptual firewall had prevented everyone from finding them so far; but again, needs to be actually checked! ^[14] — Perhaps also Sandawe, click language “number two” of the region, could have something to contribute to all this, e.g. some confirmation on what exactly happens to different click types in Rift. But this I do not think has much odds at all of being a part of RD, given that the quite distinct Khoe–Kwadi (Central Khoisan) family seems to remain its best candidate for relatives.

I don’t think I need to start underlining too hard other possible corollaries such as, if there is an independent RD family, it might also have had extinct branches spoken elsewhere yet, and that this could help explain various phenomena…; since at this point it seems further work will be limited most of all by working out its own overall reconstruction beyond where Ehret had left it. Of course, also the safety checks I propose above, of seeing how will West Rift and Dahalo compare with e.g. Aroid or Agaw, or indeed why not e.g. Egyptian or Semitic, would be helpful in any case, whatever that then turns up. But I think I have at least managed to sound an alarm, at the very minimum for myself, that some things have to be in fact checked here in more detail.

[1] North to south by farthest extent: Saho–Afar, Somaloid, Oromo, Highland East, Bayso, Konsoid, Dullay, Arboroid, Yaaku. Oromo+Konsoid are often grouped as Oromoid, which seems likely (strong lexical and “family-typological” similarity), which gives the count of 8; the theory of grouping Somaloid, Bayso and Arboroid as Omo–Tana I don’t think I trust as much, and the theory of combining everything except HEC, Yaaku and maybe Dullay as a single Lowland East Cushitic seems basically unfounded, a research-historical artefact from early understanding of East Cushitic being mostly based on languages of this group. The South LEC theory (LEC minus Saho–Afar = the union of Oromoid and Omo-Tana) could be at least better than either this or Omo–Tana, but here I am in turn afraid it might not represent common inheritance as much as the long-standing contact influence of Somali and Oromo on their neighbors.
[2] Contrast e.g. HEC *giira, Oromoid *abidda (I’d think akin to Arboroid *awat- ‘sun’), Somaloid *dab, Dullay *katte for ‘fire’.
[3] Loss of *-l- and *čʼ ~ *tɬʼ are not grounds for trouble, they do appear regular in light of other parallels. K&M note also e.g. PEC *-kʼsol- ~ PWR *qʼas-aw- ‘to laugh’; PEC *kʼačʼ- ~ PWR *qʼuutɬʼ- ‘to cut’ (relatively basic verbs yes but neither of these especially deep core vocabulary either).
[4] Of the other two, wongo ‘earth’ is stated by Tosco to be a recent Northern Swahili loan; waala ‘rhinoceros’ is probably connected with Somali wiyil id., but I don’t think I like the Proto-Cushitic reconstruction *waɣl- ~ *wiɣl- proposed by Ehret, his *ɣ looks often dubious and reconstructing ablaut from just two reflexes with differing vocalism is definitely bad practice. — Medial -w- could maybe provide similar leverage too for identifying recent loans, but I do not have a structurally-alphabetized rootlist of Dahalo ready to go for easily locating these.
[5] Ronald Kießling (2001): “South Cushitic links to East Cushitic” [I believe to be read as an NP “the links of SCu. to ESc.” and not a full clause “SCu. does link to ECu.”], from the collection New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics. Robert Hetzron in memoriam (ed. Zaborski, pub. Harrassowitz).
[6] Mauro Tosco (2000): “Cushitic Overview”. – Journal of Ethiopian Studies 33/2, 87–121. [It took me actually until the writing of this blog post to get around to this paper, I had been confusing it with a different paper of Tosco’s from 2003 titled “Cushitic and Omotic overview”; which, despite more promises in the title, is actually far shorter and superficial.]
[7] I’m not sure if the last of these correspondences has been explicitly noted in literature (at least Sasse’s 1979 article on PEC does not note it), but cf. HEC *baʔ- ‘to extinguish’ < PEC *baħ- ‘to go out’, Burji naʔ- < PEC *naħ- ‘to fear’, supporting this development at least after *a. More indirectly and speculatively, maybe also HEC *kʼoʔo << PEC *ɗuħ- ‘marrow’, where the onset might be routable by loaning from East Dullay varieties that have *čʼ > kʼ, if this was really rather *čʼ = “*ɗ₁” (but alas the key lexical sources for Dullay do not even document ‘marrow’, and Oromo ɗuha, Konso ɗohota do not support *čʼ either). — Conversely, after *e, again perhaps most laryngeals rather generally merge as *h (HEC *leho < PEC *liħ- ‘six’, but also HEC *reh- < PEC *leʔ- ‘to die’), though there is some inconsistency even within HEC that may suggest more complex history (e.g. -h- in Hadiyya leh-, Kambaata reh- ‘to die’; Burji reeya ~ reeha ‘death’; but Sidamo re- and even Gedeo reʔ- ‘to die’).
[8] There would be some possibility that *tɬʼaaʕa ~ *ɗagħ- are cognates, by cluster simplification *għ > *gʕ > *ʕ; the onsets still cannot match natively. K&M only propose Somali ɖaʕa ‘sound of falling rock’ as a cognate… I’m not sure how much I like the concept of comparing Swadesh-list core vocabulary with ideophones.
[9] A discussion similar to this post on Aroid material appearing in Greenberg’s comparative data would be trivially easy: the total number of concrete Aroid data he cites at any point seems to be zero.
[10] There would be a possibility that some content on the topic appears in his later works on other aspects of Afro-Asiatic, but I’m not going on a wild goose chase for this, especially if professional Cushiticists have apparently not found anything to cite either. — See Greenberg’s article on Wikipedia for the bibliography, attributed there to William Croft who at least seems to have once hosted it, though the document itself (nor Croft’s old webpage on Greenberg) does not tell me anything about who actually assembled it, nor where it might have been published.
[11] Which one, I have no idea. At least Swahili seems to have by now indeed Kiburunge, and would be expected to have rendered at least -r- correctly for long now (though b → mb might be understandable for its own b being typically implosive).
[12] HEC *saʔa (and not **šaʔa) however looks to me like a loan from Oromo saʔa. Also original *saʕ- and, inversely, a loan into Oromo from e.g. HEC or pre-Konso (to explain lack of expected *s > f) could be reconstructed within East Cushitic, but this would be a worse match with both Beja and West Rift.
[13] These are likely further connected with HEC *mikʼe, Tsʼamakko (= West Dullay) meeqʼe, East Dullay *mikʼatte and Yaaku mučo for ‘bone’ (altogether adding up to complementary distribution with “Lowland East Cushitic” *laf-). Even in the absense of Rift cognates, this seems to already pull this word group to Proto-RD. Presumably we have the established *čʼ > *tɬʼ change here that happens at least in Dahalo and Rift, further fed here by some sort of palatalization *-ikʼ- > *-ičʼ-; but what family did this latter change happen in, Cushitic or RD? PWR only has unrelated *fara for ‘bone’. Some relationship with *mitsʼoo ‘calf of the leg’ could be possible though, even if *tsʼ rather than *tɬʼ is awkward.
[14] From some basic wordlists of Hadza and Dahalo at hand, it is at least clear these won’t be turning up by the cartloads. One initial comparison I can note as maybe within speculation distance is Ha. ⁿǀʼóso- ‘to be full’ ~ Da. ǀut- ‘to fill’; does not fill me with confidence though, sure enough both show a dental click, but then not much else directly matches. Nothing good in PWR to bridge the distance either; among several (near-)synonyms, *hatsʼ- ‘to be full’, *hatsʼ-is- ‘to fill’, *niiqʼ- ‘to fill’, *qʼip- ‘to be shut, stuffed, full’, *tip- ‘to fill (a hole)’ are all non-starters.