Hamitic - Hamitic Language Group

Hamitic Language Group

These racial theories were developing alongside models of language. The term "Hamitic" was used for the first time in connection with languages by the German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–1881), but in the traditional biblical sense to refer to all languages of Africa spoken by African people deemed "black".

Friedrich Müller named the traditional Hamito-Semitic family in 1876 in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and defined it as consisting of a Semitic group plus a "Hamitic" group containing Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; he excluded the Chadic group. It was the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) who restricted it to the non-Semitic languages in Africa which are characterized by a grammatical gender system. This "Hamitic language group" was proposed to unite various, mainly North-African languages, including the Ancient Egyptian language, the Berber languages, the Cushitic languages, the Beja language, and the Chadic languages. Unlike Müller, Lepsius considered that Hausa and Nama were part of the Hamitic group. These classifications relied in part on non-linguistic anthropological and racial arguments. Both authors used the skin-color, mode of subsistence and other characteristics of native speakers as part of their arguments that languages should be grouped together.

In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen Der Hamiten (The Languages of the Hamites) in which he expanded Lepsius's model, adding the Fula language, Maasai language, Bari language, Nandi language, Sandawe language and Hadza language to the Hamitic group. Meinhof's model was widely supported into the 1940s. Meinhof's system of classification of the Hamitic languages was based on a belief that "speakers of Hamitic became largely coterminous with cattle herding peoples with essentially Caucasian origins, intrinsically different from and superior to the 'Negroes of Africa'." However, in the case of the so-called Nilo-Hamitic languages (a concept he introduced), it was based on the typological feature of gender and a "fallacious theory of language mixture." Meinhof did this in spite of earlier work by scholars such as Lepsius and Johnston demonstrating that the languages which he would later dub "Nilo-Hamitic" were in fact Nilotic languages with numerous similarities in vocabulary with other Nilotic languages.

Leo Reinisch (1909) already proposed linking Cushitic and Chadic, while urging a more distant affinity with Egyptian and Semitic, but his suggestion found little resonance. Marcel Cohen (1924) rejected the idea of a distinct "Hamitic" subgroup, and included Hausa (a Chadic language) in his comparative Hamito-Semitic vocabulary. However, it was Joseph Greenberg (1950) whose work led to widespread scholarly rejection of "Hamitic" as a category. Greenberg refuted Meinhof's linguistic theories, and rejected the use of racial and social evidence. In dismissing the notion of a separate "Nilo-Hamitic" language category in particular, Greenberg was actually "returning to a view widely held a half century earlier." He consequently rejoined Meinhof's Nilo-Hamitic languages with their Nilotic siblings. He also added (and sub-classified) the Chadic languages, and proposed the new name Afroasiatic for the family. Almost all scholars have accepted this classification.

Greenberg's model was fully developed in his book The Languages of Africa, in which he reassigned most of Meinhof's additions to Hamitic to other language families, notably Nilo-Saharan. Following Isaac Schapera and rejecting Meinhof, he classified the Hottentot language as a member of the Central Khoisan languages. To Khoisan he also added the Tanzanian Hadza and Sandawe, though this view remains controversial since some scholars consider these languages to be linguistic isolates. Despite this, Greenberg's model remains the basis for modern classifications of languages spoken in Africa in which the Hamitic category (and its extension to Nilo-Hamitic) plays no part.