Маъсул муҳаррир: Филология фанлари доктори, профессор: Г. Х. Боқиева Тақризчилар

The Afro-Asiatic Family of Languages
The Afro-Asiatic Family is dominated by Arabic, an important modern and classical language. It is the language of the Quran and of Islam.
The other languages in the Semitic Branch of this family are Maltese which is written in the Latin script because the Maltese are Catholic. Hebrew is another important classical language with its own script. It is the language of Judaism and of the Old Testament of the Bible. By the 1st Century BC it had become a liturgical language for Judaism. A modern form was revived and is now spoken in Israel where it is called Ivrit.
Amharic is the language of Ethiopia and has its own script. Tigrinya is spoken in the Horn of Africa. Many important ancient languages belong to this branch. Akkadian (the language of the Assyrian Empire) used the Cuniform writing system to write pre-Biblical flood and creation stories. Phonoecian and its closely related relatives Ugaritic (for which the alphabet was invented) and Punic (the language of Carthage). Nabatean, an ancestor of Arabic spoken in Petra. Syriac, a liturgical language of the early Christian church. The most interesting is Aramaic, once the administrative language of the Perisan Empire, later the language of Palestine during Roman times. It now survives in small pockets in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
The Berber Branch is spoken in the hills of North Africa by the Berbers (Tuareg, KabyIE). Also in the branch was Guanch, spoken on the Canary Islands until becoming extinct in the 16th Century.
People in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia speak languages of the Cushitic Branch (Somali, Galla, Beja, Afar).
Hausa, the most important member of the Chadic Branch, is the main language of Nigeria. It was once written in the Arabic script but now uses the Latin alphabet. The Chadic Branch contains 600 languages spoken in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon.
The Egyptian Branch contains Egyptian the language of Ancient Egypt written in hieroglyphics. Coptic is the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church. It uses a Greek based alphabet. It is extinct as a spoken language.
These languages have grammars based on consonant clusters. Arabic uses clusters of three consonants. For example, in Arabic, the Letter triplet KTB has to do with writing. KiTaB is book. Plurals are all irregularly formed and the usual way is to change the vowels. KuTuB is books. Other words with the KTB root have something to do with writing: KaTaBa - to write, KaTtaBa - to make someone to write (i.e. to teach), maKTaB - office, KaaTiB - writer, maKTaBa - library, miKTaB - typewriter, KuTuBii ­bookseller, maKTuuB – fate, letter ("that which is written"). The consonants give the root meaning while the vowels, suffixes and prefixes give the grammatical meaning.
The Arabic alphabet mainly uses consonants because the reader can supply the correct vowels from the context. The first Alphabets were invented by speakers of Semitic languages and so had no vowels. Unusually for this family, Somali has 20 separate vowel sounds. It also has four tones which indicate gender, number and case.
This language family originated in the Sahara area before it became a desert and spread to the Horn of Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. During the 7th Century AD, Arabic spread from the Arabian Peninsula with Islam to cover most of North Africa and the Middle East.