É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.
JUNGRAITHMAYR, Hermann: Hamitosemitic Features of Chadic
HAMITOSEMITIC FEATURES OF CHADIC Prefix /m-/ Ron (Daffo) Akkadian ma-wet 'hiding-place' ma-skan-um 'dwelling-place' Ron (Sha) Akkadian mä-fö ' 'night' mu-nattu 'early morning' etc. When I finished presenting my paper I vividly remember the reaction of one of the great Semitists, Prof. Wolf Leslau, to these surprising and for him obviously irritating parallels. His remark uttered with a mixture of doubt and surprise was short: "This is too good to be true!" This, of course, disturbed me as well as pleased me at the same time. Leslau was well known - at least in those days - for his strong and determined opposition to the idea of including Chadic into the Hamitosemitic/Afroasiatic phylum. As Paul Newman put it: "Many of these denying scholars, Leslau (1962) for example, have simply chosen to ignore Chadic as ifit did not exist, and have described Afroasiatic as consisting of four groups only, namely Semitic, Egyptian, Berber and Cushitic (...)." (Newman 1980: 6). I think we ought to have some understanding for the immense problems a student especially of Semitic languages must have had - and very often continues to have up to now - in recognizing the Hamitosemitic character, nature and features of a Chadic language and subsequently of the entire Chadic language group. There can be no doubt that this family of about 150 languages, many of which are extremely different from each other, has been exposed to profound turbulences which led to the fact that many of them can hardly be identified as Hamitosemitic any more. They rather look on their surface - like Niger-Congo or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken today in their immediate vicinity. Following is a random sample of lexemes taken from two neighbouring languages in northeastern Nigeria, Tangale (Chadic) and Waja (Adamawa, Niger-Congo): Tangale Waja 'hair' wook kuu 'head' kii dwii 'ear' kumo twiyau 'belly' ago pwii "breast' widi riyii 'ash' duka baro 'know' poni soma 'night' sum kwne The phonological structure and make-up, which are practically identical in the two languages, do not betray their total genetic distinctiveness. The present Chadic languages obviously being of a highly mixed nature are indeed the products of intensive struggles between two polar linguistic communities 145
