Lecture | This Time for Africa! series
Phonological and Lexical Reconstruction of Proto South Omotic (PSO): Some of Proto South Omotic Phonological Systems Which Support the Omotic Hypothesis
- Date
- Friday 27 June 2025
- Time
- Series
- This Time for Africa! series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Abstract
The South Omotic encompasses a group of languages spoken in the southwest part of Ethiopia. Although these languages are categorized under the Omotic family of the Afroasiatic phylum, there have been debates with regard to their genetic affiliation to Omotic in particular (Yigezu, 2015), and to the Afroasiatic phylum in general (Theil, 2008). The idea of proposing to remove the South Omotic languages from the Omotic family were drawn due to certain features which are considered not Omotic, and more of associated with the neighboring Nilotic languages. Yet the attestation of non-Omotic features, such as contrastive advanced tongue root and the phonemic velar nasal, which were mentioned in previous studies seem to raise question with regard to whether they are phonemically contrastive. Having this in mind, over eight hundred lexical data was gathered from six South Omotic languages, and a comparative analysis methodology was employed. The findings revealed that the South Omotic languages have fairly distributed consonant phonemes such as the bilabial and alveolar implosives, the alveolar affricate, the alveolar fricative-ejective, and palatal affricate-ejectives which are typical to Omotic than the adjacent Nilotic languages. Apart from this, the analysis has also explicated the uncertainty concerning the phonological vowel systems and the phonetic advanced tongue root contrast which was language-specific; thus, it is confirmed that the South Omotic languages have five vowel systems. These findings, in many ways, reveal that it is difficult to trace any genetic relationship between the Proto South Omotic and the adjacent Nilotic languages; rather, it shows that these languages have genetically shared phonological features with the Proto-Koman, which was reconstructed from the farthest sister Omotic languages. Further lexical reconstruction of the proto form from the existing lexemes in these languages is crucial in order to have a full insight on the genetic affiliation of these languages.