One reason this nut is so hard is that Berber is so tightly-packed a language. The family is like Romance or Slavic in that respect. If Qeheq, old Numidian, and Canarian were Berber-like, they were all swamped by later Berber (and Arabic and Spanish). That means we know much about what Berber looked like in AD 450 but not 1950 BC. Another problem is that Cushitic hasn't been as well studied as the big three Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber. One more: shared attributes between Egyptian, Cushitic, and Semitic (and maybe Berber) could be Sprachbund.
There is linguistic and genetic evidence to strongly suggest that Berber arose just west of the Nile around the time that the camel was domesticated and then rapidly expanded to the West. It is very likely the youngest of the Afro-Asiatic languages. There may be some pre-Afro-Asiatic substrate influence in Berber from previous North Africans however, as suggested by ergative tendencies in some Berber languages (deeper in the Sahara).
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One reason this nut is so hard is that Berber is so tightly-packed a language. The family is like Romance or Slavic in that respect. If Qeheq, old Numidian, and Canarian were Berber-like, they were all swamped by later Berber (and Arabic and Spanish). That means we know much about what Berber looked like in AD 450 but not 1950 BC.
Another problem is that Cushitic hasn't been as well studied as the big three Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber.
One more: shared attributes between Egyptian, Cushitic, and Semitic (and maybe Berber) could be Sprachbund.
There is linguistic and genetic evidence to strongly suggest that Berber arose just west of the Nile around the time that the camel was domesticated and then rapidly expanded to the West. It is very likely the youngest of the Afro-Asiatic languages. There may be some pre-Afro-Asiatic substrate influence in Berber from previous North Africans however, as suggested by ergative tendencies in some Berber languages (deeper in the Sahara).
Prior posts on Berber origins at https://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=berber
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