Where do Central Cushitic ejectives come from?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5751

Keywords:

Central Cushitic, ejectives, historical linguistics, historical reconstruction, sound change, phonological typology

Abstract

This paper examines and accounts for the origin and presence of ejectives in Central Cushitic (CC) languages. Appleyard (2006) claimed that most occurrences of ejectives are due to borrowing from the Ethiosemitic languages. This is certainly true for all ejectives in Kemantney, and some in Blin and Xamtanga. However, examination of Appleyard’s data shows that only 37% of ejectives in Blin and 25% of ejectives in Xamtanga are found in borrowings. Most ejectives in CC in these two languages are therefore “of indubitable Agaw origin”, which suggests that ejectives are from the proto-language rather than through sound change. This paper analyzes the distribution of ejectives in Appleyard’s data and re-examines the consequences for reconstructed forms and probable sound changes.

Author Biography

  • Paul D. Fallon, University of Mary Washington

    Associate Professor of Linguistics

    Dept. of English and Linguistics

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Published

2024-06-26

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2024): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Paul D. Fallon

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Fallon, Paul D. 2024. “Where Do Central Cushitic Ejectives Come From?”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9 (1): 5751. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5751.