Lexica Afroasiatica X

Abstract

Comparative-historical Afro-Asiatic linguistics has undergone a significant development over the past half century, since the appearence Essai comparatif sur le vocabulaire et la phonétique du chamito-sémitique (1947) by Marcel Cohen. This revolutionary and fundamental synthesis concluded the second great period of the comparative research on Afro-Asiatic lexicon (the so-called „old school”, cf. EDE I 2-4). During the third period (second half of the 20th century), whose beginning was hallmarked by the names of J.H. Greenberg and I.M. Diakonoff, a huge quantity of new lexical material (both descriptive and comparative) has been published, including a few most recent attempts (either unfinished or rather problematic) at compiling an Afro-Asiatic comparative dictionary (SISAJa I-III, HCVA I-V, HSED, Ehret 1995). During my current work on the Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian (EDE), I have collected a great number of new AA parallels, which – to the best of my knowledge – have not yet been proposed in the literature or was observed independently from me1. Along the EDE project (and the underlying „Egyptian etymological word catalogue”), I have started collecting AA roots (not attested in Egyptian) for a separate Afro-Asiatic root catalogue in late 1999.