text
stringlengths
9
2.4k
It was an ancestral custom among the Leukadians to fling a criminal from this rock every year at the sacrifice performed in honor of Apollo for the sake of averting evil. However, a number of men would be stationed all around below rock to catch the criminal and take him out of the borders in order to exile him from th...
Cyrene was a Thessalian princess whom Apollo loved. In her honor, he built the city Cyrene and made her its ruler. She was later granted longevity by Apollo who turned her into a nymph. The couple had two sons, Aristaeus, and Idmon. Evadne was a nymph daughter of Poseidon and a lover of Apollo. They had a son, Iamos. D...
Thero, daughter of Phylas, a maiden as beautiful as the moonbeams, was loved by the radiant Apollo, and she loved him in return. Through their union, she became the mother of Chaeron, who was famed as "the tamer of horses". He later built the city Chaeronea. Hyrie or Thyrie was the mother of Cycnus. Apollo turned both ...
Dryope, the daughter of Dryops, was impregnated by Apollo in the form of a snake. She gave birth to a son named Amphissus. In Euripides' play "Ion", Apollo fathered Ion by Creusa, wife of Xuthus. He used his powers to conceal her pregnancy from her father. Later, when Creusa left Ion to die in the wild, Apollo asked He...
Another male lover was Cyparissus, a descendant of Heracles. Apollo gave him a tame deer as a companion but Cyparissus accidentally killed it with a javelin as it lay asleep in the undergrowth. Cyparissus was so saddened by its death that he asked Apollo to let his tears fall forever. Apollo granted the request by turn...
When Admetus wanted to marry princess Alcestis, Apollo provided a chariot pulled by a lion and a boar he had tamed. This satisfied Alcestis' father and he let Admetus marry his daughter. Further, Apollo saved the king from Artemis' wrath and also convinced the Moirai to postpone Admetus' death once. Branchus, a shepher...
The sons of Apollo who participated in the Trojan War include the Trojan princes Hector and Troilus, as well as Tenes, the king of Tenedos, all three of whom were killed by Achilles over the course of the war. Apollo's children who became musicians and bards include Orpheus, Linus, Ialemus, Hymenaeus, Philammon, Eumolp...
He also had a son by Agathippe who was named Chrysorrhoas who was a mechanic artist. His other daughters include Eurynome, Chariclo wife of Chiron, Eurydice the wife of Orpheus, Eriopis, famous for her beautiful hair, Melite the heroine, Pamphile the silk weaver, Parthenos, and by some accounts, Phoebe, Hilyra and Scyl...
Daphne was a nymph who scorned Apollo's advances and ran away from him. When Apollo chased her in order to persuade her, she changed herself into a laurel tree. According to other versions, she cried for help during the chase, and Gaia helped her by taking her in and placing a laurel tree in her place. According to Rom...
Bolina was admired by Apollo but she refused him and jumped into the sea. To avoid her death, Apollo turned her into a nymph, saving her life. Castalia was a nymph whom Apollo loved. She fled from him and dove into the spring at Delphi, at the base of Mt. Parnassos, which was then named after her. Water from this sprin...
Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, rejected both Apollo's and Poseidon's marriage proposals and swore that she would always stay unmarried. In one version of the prophet Tiresias's origins, he was originally a woman who promised Apollo to sleep with him if he would give her music lessons. Apollo gave her her wish, but ...
Hecate. Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and magic, is the chthonic counterpart of Apollo. They both are cousins, since their mothers – Leto and Asteria – are sisters. One of Apollo's epithets, "Hecatos", is the masculine form of Hecate, and both names mean "working from afar". While Apollo presided over the prophetic...
As patrons of arts, Apollo and Athena were companions of the Muses, the former a much more frequent companion than the latter. Apollo was sometimes called the son of Athena and Hephaestus. In the Trojan War, as Zeus' executive, Apollo is seen holding the aegis like Athena usually does. Apollo's decisions were usually a...
Roman Apollo. The Roman worship of Apollo was adopted from the Greeks. As a quintessentially Greek god, Apollo had no direct Roman equivalent, although later Roman poets often referred to him as Phoebus. There was a tradition that the Delphic oracle was consulted as early as the period of the kings of Rome during the r...
Festivals. The chief Apollonian festival was the Pythian Games held every four years at Delphi and was one of the four great Panhellenic Games. Also of major importance was the Delia held every four years on Delos. Athenian annual festivals included the Boedromia, Metageitnia, Pyanepsia, and Thargelia. Spartan annual f...
Homer and Porphyry wrote that Apollo had a hawk as his messenger. In many myths Apollo is transformed into a hawk. In addition, Claudius Aelianus wrote that in Ancient Egypt people believed that hawks were sacred to the god and that according to the ministers of Apollo in Egypt there were certain men called "hawk-keepe...
In literary contexts, Apollo represents harmony, order, and reason—characteristics contrasted with those of Dionysus, god of wine, who represents ecstasy and disorder. The contrast between the roles of these gods is reflected in the adjectives Apollonian and Dionysian. However, the Greeks thought of the two qualities a...
Apollo in the arts. Apollo is a common theme in Greek and Roman art and also in the art of the Renaissance. The earliest Greek word for a statue is "delight" (, "agalma"), and the sculptors tried to create forms which would inspire such guiding vision. Maurice Bowra notices that the Greek artist puts into a god the hig...
Archaic sculpture. Numerous statues of male youths from Archaic Greece exist, and were once thought to be representations of Apollo, though later discoveries indicated that many represented mortals. In 1895, V. I. Leonardos proposed the term "kouros" ("male youth") to refer to those from Keratea; this usage was later e...
Classical sculpture. The famous Apollo of Mantua and its variants are early forms of the Apollo Citharoedus statue type, in which the god holds the cithara, a sophisticated seven-stringed variant of the lyre, in his left arm. While none of the Greek originals have survived, several Roman copies from approximately the l...
Modern reception. Apollo often appears in modern and popular culture due to his status as the god of music, dance and poetry. Postclassical art and literature. Dance and music. Apollo has featured in dance and music in modern culture. Percy Bysshe Shelley composed a "Hymn of Apollo" (1820), and the god's instruction of...
Andre Agassi Andre Kirk Agassi ( ; born April 29, 1970) is an American former professional tennis player. He was ranked as the world No. 1 in men's singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) for 101 weeks, including as the year-end No. 1 in 1999. Agassi won 60 ATP Tour-level singles titles, including eigh...
Agassi is regarded by many as one of the greatest tennis players of all time. He was the first man to win all four singles majors across three different surfaces (hard, clay and grass), and remains the most recent American man to win the French Open (in 1999) and the Australian Open (in 2003). During his 20-plus year t...
At the age of 12, Agassi and his good friend and doubles partner, Roddy Parks, won the 1982 National Indoor Boys 14s Doubles Championship in Chicago. Agassi describes memorable experiences and juvenile pranks with Roddy in his book "Open". When he was 13, Agassi was sent to Nick Bollettieri's Tennis Academy in Florida....
In addition to not playing the Australian Open (which later became his best Grand Slam event) for the first eight years of his career, Agassi chose not to play at Wimbledon from 1988 through 1990 (although he first played there in 1987, only to lose in the first round to Henri Leconte) and publicly stated that he did n...
In 1991, Agassi reached his second consecutive French Open final, where he faced fellow Bollettieri Academy alumnus Jim Courier. Courier emerged the victor in a five-set final. The Las Vegan was a set and 3–1 up when came the rain. The rain delay proved to be a confidence builder for Courier. Agassi decided to play at ...
In 1993, Agassi won the only doubles title of his career, at the Cincinnati Masters, partnered with Petr Korda. He missed much of the early part of that year due to injuries. Although he made the quarterfinals in his Wimbledon title defense, he lost to eventual champion and No. 1 Pete Sampras in five sets. Agassi lost ...
In 1995, Agassi shaved his balding head, breaking with his old "image is everything" style. He competed in the 1995 Australian Open (his first appearance at the event) and won, beating defending champion Sampras in a four-set final. Agassi and Sampras met in five tournament finals in 1995, all on hardcourt, with Agassi...
In 1998, Agassi began a rigorous conditioning program and worked his way back up the rankings by playing in Challenger Series tournaments, a circuit for pro players ranked outside the world's top 50. After returning to top physical and mental shape, Agassi recorded the most successful period of his tennis career and al...
Agassi followed his 1999 French Open victory by reaching the Wimbledon final, where he lost to Sampras in straight sets. He rebounded from his Wimbledon defeat by winning the US Open, beating Todd Martin in five sets (rallying from a two sets to one deficit) in the final. Overall during the year Agassi won 5 titles inc...
Agassi opened 2001 by successfully defending his Australian Open title with a straight-sets final win over Arnaud Clément. En route, he beat a cramping Rafter in five sets in front of a sell-out crowd in what turned out to be the Aussie's last Australian Open. At Wimbledon, they met again in the semi-finals, where Agas...
In 2003, Agassi won the eighth (and final) Grand Slam title of his career at the Australian Open, where he beat Rainer Schüttler in straight sets in the final. On April 28, 2003, he recaptured the No. 1 ranking to become the oldest top-ranked male player since the ATP rankings began at 33 years and 13 days. The record ...
In 2004, Agassi began the year with a five-set loss in the semi-finals of the Australian Open to Marat Safin; the loss ended Agassi's 26-match winning streak at the event. He won the Masters series event in Cincinnati to bring his career total to 59 top-level singles titles and a record 17 ATP Masters Series titles, ha...
Agassi's 2005 was defined by an improbable run to the US Open final. After beating Răzvan Sabău and Ivo Karlović in straight sets and Tomáš Berdych in four sets, Agassi won three consecutive five-set matches to advance to the final. The most notable of these matches was his quarterfinal victory over James Blake, where ...
Agassi had a short, but dramatic, run in his final US Open. Because of extreme back pain, Agassi was forced to receive anti-inflammatory injections after every match. After a four-set win against Andrei Pavel, Agassi faced eighth-seeded Marcos Baghdatis in the second round who had earlier advanced to the 2006 Australia...
The 1990 US Open was their first meeting in a Grand Slam tournament final. Agassi was favored as he was ranked No. 4 at the time, compared to the No. 12 ranking of Sampras and because Agassi had defeated Sampras in their only previously completed match. Agassi, however, lost the final to Sampras in straight sets. Their...
In the following three years, while Sampras continued winning Grand Slam titles every season, Agassi slumped in the rankings and struggled in major competitions. The next time Sampras and Agassi met in a Grand Slam final was at Wimbledon in 1999, where Sampras won in straight sets. For both, it was considered a career ...
Their last meeting was the final of the 2002 US Open, which was their third meeting in a US Open final, but the first since 1995. The match was also notable because they had defeated several up-and-coming players en route to the final. Sampras had defeated No. 3 Tommy Haas in the fourth round and future No. 1 Andy Rodd...
Agassi won the first four matches including a straight-set victory in round 16 of the 1988 US Open and defeating Chang, the defending champion, in the 1990 French Open in a four-set quarterfinal. Arguably their best match took place in the round of 16 of the 1994 US Open. While both players presented high-quality shot-...
Agassi vs. Rafter. Agassi and Pat Rafter played fifteen times with Agassi leading 10–5. The rivalry has been considered special and delivered memorable encounters, because of the players' contrasting styles of play, with Rafter using traditional serve-&-volley methods against Agassi's variety of return of serves an...
Agassi vs. Lendl. Agassi and Ivan Lendl played eight times, and Lendl led their head-to-head series 6–2. Agassi vs. Edberg. Agassi and Stefan Edberg played nine times, and Agassi led their head-to-head series 6–3. Post-retirement: Exhibition appearances. Since retiring after the 2006 US Open, Agassi has participated in...
In 2012, Agassi took part in five tournaments, winning three of those. In November, at first he won BILT Champions Showdown in San Jose, beating John McEnroe in the final. The following day, he defended his title of the CTCA Championships, while defeating Courier in the decisive match. In the series season finale, he b...
He returned to the tour in May 2017 in the position of coach to Novak Djokovic for the French Open. Agassi announced the end of the partnership on March 31, 2018, stating that there were too many disagreements in the relationship. Legacy. Considered by numerous sources to be one of the greatest tennis players of all ti...
Playing style. Early in his career, Agassi would look to end points quickly by playing first-strike tennis, typically by inducing a weak return with a deep, hard shot, and then playing a winner at an extreme angle. On the rare occasion that he charged the net, Agassi liked to take the ball in the air and hit a swinging...
Agassi was raised on hardcourts, but found much of his early major-tournament success on the red clay of Roland Garros, reaching two consecutive finals there early in his career. Despite grass being his worst surface, his first major win was at the slick grass of Wimbledon in 1992, a tournament that he professed to hat...
Agassi and Graf formed a company called Agassi Graf Holdings. They invested in PURE, a nightclub at Caesars Palace, which opened in 2004, and sold it to Angel Management Group in 2010. In August 2006, Agassi and Graf developed a joint venture with high-end furniture maker Kreiss Enterprises. They launched a furniture l...
IMG managed Agassi from the time he turned pro in 1986 through January 2000 before switching to SFX Sports Group. His business manager, lawyer and agent was childhood friend Perry Rogers, but they have been estranged since 2008. In 2009, he and Graf signed with CAA. Equipment and endorsements. Agassi used Prince Graphi...
Agassi and his mother appeared in a Got Milk? advertisement in 2002. Agassi has appeared in many advertisements and television commercials with Graf. They both endorsed Deutsche Telekom in 2002, Genworth Financial and Canon Inc. in 2004, LVMH in 2007, and Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit U and Longines in 2013. In popular cult...
Agassi's charities help in assisting children reach their athletic potential. His Boys & Girls Club sees 2,000 children throughout the year and boasts a world-class junior tennis team. It also has a basketball program (the Agassi Stars) and a rigorous system that encourages a mix of academics and athletics. In 2001...
In 2007, along with several other athletes, Agassi founded the charity Athletes for Hope, which helps professional athletes get involved in charitable causes and aims to inspire all people to volunteer and support their communities. He created the Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund, now known as the Turner-Ag...
On April 2, 2023, Agassi participated with Michael Chang, Andy Roddick and John McEnroe in the first live airing of Pickleball on ESPN in the Million dollar Pickleball Slam at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Fla. Personal life. Relationships and family. In the early 1990s, after dating Wendi Stewart, Agassi dated Am...
His mother is a breast cancer survivor. Long-time trainer Gil Reyes has been called one of Agassi's closest friends; some have described him as being a "father figure" to Agassi. In 2012, Agassi and Reyes introduced their own line of fitness equipment, BILT By Agassi and Reyes. In December 2008, Agassi's childhood frie...
There is also mention in the book of using and testing positive for methamphetamine in 1997. In response to this revelation, Roger Federer declared himself shocked and disappointed, while Marat Safin argued that Agassi should return his prize money and be stripped of his titles. In an interview with CBS, Agassi justifi...
Austroasiatic languages The Austroasiatic languages ( ) are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority populations scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos...
"Ethnologue" identifies 168 Austroasiatic languages. These form thirteen established families (plus perhaps Shompen, which is poorly attested, as a fourteenth), which have traditionally been grouped into two, as Mon–Khmer, and Munda. However, one recent classification posits three groups (Munda, Mon-Khmer, and Khasi–Kh...
Typology. Regarding word structure, Austroasiatic languages are well known for having an iambic "sesquisyllabic" pattern, with basic nouns and verbs consisting of an initial, unstressed, reduced minor syllable followed by a stressed, full syllable. This reduction of presyllables has led to a variety of phonological sha...
However, some Austroasiatic languages have lost the register contrast by evolving more diphthongs or in a few cases, such as Vietnamese, tonogenesis. Vietnamese has been so heavily influenced by Chinese that its original Austroasiatic phonological quality is obscured and now resembles that of South Chinese languages, w...
Each family written in boldface below is accepted as a valid clade. By contrast, the relationships "between" these families within Austroasiatic are debated. In addition to the traditional classification, two recent proposals are given, neither of which accepts traditional "Mon–Khmer" as a valid unit. However, little o...
Diffloth (2005). Diffloth compares reconstructions of various clades, and attempts to classify them based on shared innovations, though like other classifications the evidence has not been published. As a schematic, we have: Or in more detail, Sidwell (2009–2015). Paul Sidwell (2009), in a lexicostatistical comparison ...
If this would the case, Sidwell & Blench suggest that Khasic may have been an early offshoot of Palaungic that had spread westward. Sidwell & Blench (2011) suggest Shompen as an additional branch, and believe that a Vieto-Katuic connection is worth investigating. In general, however, the family is thought to ha...
Integrating computational phylogenetic linguistics with recent archaeological findings, Paul Sidwell (2015c) further expanded his Mekong riverine hypothesis by proposing that Austroasiatic had ultimately expanded into Indochina from the Lingnan area of southern China, with the subsequent Mekong riverine dispersal takin...
At 4,500 B.P., this "Neolithic package" suddenly arrived in Indochina from the Lingnan area without cereal grains and displaced the earlier pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer cultures, with grain husks found in northern Indochina by 4,100 B.P. and in southern Indochina by 3,800 B.P. However, Sidwell (2015c) found that iron ...
Roger Blench (2017) suggests that vocabulary related to aquatic subsistence strategies (such as boats, waterways, river fauna, and fish capture techniques) can be reconstructed for Proto-Austroasiatic. Blench (2017) finds widespread Austroasiatic roots for 'river, valley', 'boat', 'fish', 'catfish sp.', 'eel', 'prawn',...
Hence, this points to a relatively late riverine dispersal of Austroasiatic as compared to Sino-Tibetan, whose speakers had a distinct non-riverine culture. In addition to living an aquatic-based lifestyle, early Austroasiatic speakers would have also had access to livestock, crops, and newer types of watercraft. As ea...
John Peterson (2017) suggests that "pre-Munda" (early languages related to Proto-Munda) languages may have once dominated the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain, and were then absorbed by Indo-Aryan languages at an early date as Indo-Aryan spread east. Peterson notes that eastern Indo-Aryan languages display many morphosyntac...
Hmong-Mien. Several lexical resemblances are found between the Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic language families (Ratliff 2010), some of which had earlier been proposed by Haudricourt (1951). This could imply a relation or early language contact along the Yangtze. According to Cai (et al. 2011), Hmong–Mien people are "gen...
suggests that Haplogroup O1b1, which is common in Austroasiatic people and some other ethnic groups in southern China, and haplogroup O1b2, which is common in today's Japanese and Koreans, are the carriers of early rice agriculture from southern China. Another study suggests that the haplogroup O1b1 is the major Austr...
A 2020 study states that present Austroasiatic groups in Mainland Southeast Asia can be modeled as an admixture of Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers and ancestral East Asians associated with the Neolithic farming expansion, with the exception of Kinh and Muong who share more drift with Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien groups. Kinh a...
Afroasiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. Over 500 million people are native ...
Comparative study of Afroasiatic is hindered by the massive disparities in textual attestation between its branches: while the Semitic and Egyptian branches are attested in writing as early as the fourth millennium BC, Berber, Cushitic, and Omotic languages were often not recorded until the 19th or 20th centuries. Whil...
Name. In current scholarship, the most common names for the family are "Afroasiatic" (or "Afro-Asiatic"), "Hamito-Semitic", and "Semito-Hamitic". Other proposed names that have yet to find widespread acceptance include "Erythraic"/"Erythraean", "Lisramic", "Noahitic", and "Lamekhite". Friedrich Müller introduced the na...
The term "Hamito-Semitic" has largely fallen out of favor among linguists writing in English, but is still frequently used in the scholarship of various other languages, such as German. Several issues with the label "Hamito-Semitic" have led many scholars to abandon the term and criticize its continued use. One common ...
The names "Lisramic"—based on the Afroasiastic root "*lis-" ("tongue") and the Egyptian word "rmṯ" ("person")—and "Erythraean"—referring to the core area around which the languages are spoken, the Red Sea—have also been proposed. Distribution and branches. Scholars generally consider Afroasiatic to have between five an...
There are two extinct languages potentially related to modern Berber. The first is the Numidian language, represented by over a thousand short inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet, found throughout North Africa and dating from the 2nd century BCE onward. The second is the Guanche language, which was formerly spok...
Cushitic. There are about 30 Cushitic languages, more if Omotic is included, spoken around the Horn of Africa and in Sudan and Tanzania. The Cushitic family is traditionally split into four branches: the single language of Beja (c. 3 million speakers), the Agaw languages, Eastern Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic. Only o...
Omotic. The c. 30 Omotic languages are still mostly undescribed by linguists. They are all spoken in southwest Ethiopia except for the Ganza language, spoken in Sudan. Omotic is typically split into North Omotic (or Aroid) and South Omotic, with the latter more influenced by the Nilotic languages; it is unclear whether...
Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language, and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic, the Canaanite languages (including Hebrew), as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Geʽez and Amharic. The classification within West Semitic remain...
Responding to the above, Tom Güldemann criticizes attempts at finding subgroupings based on common or lacking morphology by arguing that the presence or absence of morphological features is not a useful way of discerning subgroupings in Afroasiatic, because it can not be excluded that families currently lacking certain...
Classification history. A relationship between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and the Berber languages was perceived as early as the 9th century CE by the Hebrew grammarian and physician Judah ibn Quraysh, who is regarded as a forerunner of Afroasiatic studies. The French orientalist Guillaume Postel had also pointed out ...
An important development in the history of Afroasiatic scholarship – and the history of African linguistics – was the creation of the "Hamitic theory" or "Hamitic hypothesis" by Lepsius, fellow Egyptologist Christian Bunsen, and linguist Christian Bleek. This theory connected the "Hamites", the originators of Hamitic l...
The first scholar to question the existence of "Hamitic languages" was Marcel Cohen in 1924, with skepticism also expressed by A. Klingenheben and Dietrich Westermann during the 1920s and '30s. However, Meinhof's "Hamitic" classification remained prevalent throughout the early 20th century until it was definitively dis...
Origin. Timeline. There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant is , after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary....
An origin somewhere on the African continent has broad scholarly support, and is seen as being well-supported by the linguistic data. Most scholars more narrowly place the homeland near the geographic center of its present distribution, "in the southeastern Sahara or adjacent Horn of Africa". The Afroasiatic languages ...
A significant minority of scholars supports an Asian origin of Afroasiatic, most of whom are specialists in Semitic or Egyptian studies. The main proponent of an Asian origin is the linguist Alexander Militarev, who argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by early agriculturalists in the Levant and subsequently spread...
Afroasiatic languages share a number of phonetic and phonological features. Syllable structure. Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, Omotic, and most languages in the Semitic branch require every syllable to begin with a consonant (with the exception of some grammatical prefixes). Igor Diakonoff argues that this constraint goes...
Syllable weight plays an important role in Afroasiatic, especially in Chadic; it can affect the form of affixes attached to a word. Consonant systems. Several Afroasiatic languages have large consonant inventories, and it is likely that this is inherited from proto-Afroasiatic. All Afroasiatic languages contain stops a...
A form of long-distance consonant assimilation known as consonant harmony is attested in Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic: it usually affects features such as pharyngealization, palatalization, and labialization. Several Omotic languages have "sibilant harmony", meaning that all sibilants (s, sh, z, ts, etc.) in a...
A set of constraints, developed originally by Joseph Greenberg on the basis of Arabic, has been claimed to be typical for Afroasiatic languages. Greenberg divided Semitic consonants into four types: "back consonants" (glottal, pharyngeal, uvular, laryngeal, and velar consonants), "front consonants" (dental or alveolar ...
Vowel systems. There is a large variety of vocalic systems in Afroasiatic, and attempts to reconstruct the vocalic system of Proto-Afroasiatic vary considerably. All branches of Afroasiatic have a limited number of underlying vowels (between two and seven), but the number of phonetic vowels can be much larger. The qual...
Similarities in grammar, syntax, and morphology. At present, there is no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic grammar, syntax, or morphology, nor one for any of the sub-branches besides Egyptian. This means that it is difficult to know which features in Afroasiatic languages are retentions, and which ...
Most Semitic verbs are triliteral (have three consonants), whereas most Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic verbs are biliteral (having two consonants). The degree to which the Proto-AA verbal root was triliteral is debated. It may have originally been mostly biconsonantal, to which various affixes (such as verbal extensions)...
Reduplication and gemination. Afroasiatic Languages use the processes of reduplication and gemination (which often overlap in meaning) to derive nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs throughout the AA language family. Gemination in particular is one of the typical features of AA. Full or partial reduplication of the ve...
Afroasiatic languages have a variety of ways of marking plurals; in some branches, nouns change gender from singular to plural (gender polarity), while in others, plural forms are ungendered. In addition to marking plurals via a number of affixes (with the suffixes -*uu/-*w and -*n(a) widely attested), several AA langu...
A second category, which partially overlaps with case, is the AA linguistic category of "state". Linguists use the term "state" to refer to different things in different languages. In Cushitic and Semitic, nouns exist in the "free state" or the "construct state". The construct state is a special, usually reduced form o...
Modifiers and agreement. There is no strict distinction between adjectives, nouns, and adverbs in Afroasiatic. All branches of Afroasiatic have a lexical category of adjectives except for Chadic; some Chadic languages do have adjectives, however. In Berber languages, adjectives are rare and are mostly replaced by nouns...
Verb forms. Tenses, aspects, and moods (TAMs). There is no agreement about which tenses, aspects, or moods (TAMs) Proto-Afroasiatic might have had. Most grammars of AA posit a distinction between perfective and imperfective verbal aspects, which can be found in Cushitic, Berber, Semitic, most Chadic languages, and some...
"Suffix conjugation". Some AA branches have what is called a "suffix conjugation", formed by adding pronominal suffixes to indicate person, gender, and number to a verbal adjective. In Akkadian, Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic this forms a "stative conjugation", used to express the state or result of an action; the same...
Verbal extensions. Many AA languages use prefixes or suffixes (verbal extensions) to encode various pieces of information about the verb. Three derivational prefixes can be reconstructed for Proto-Afroasiatic: *s- 'causative', *t- 'middle voice' or 'reflexive', and *n- 'passive'; the prefixes appear with various relate...
Due to its presence in the oldest attested and best-known AA branches, nisba derivation is often thought of as a "quintessentially Afroasiatic feature". Christopher Ehret argues for its presence in Proto-Afroasiatic and for its attestation in some form in all branches, with a shape "-*ay" in addition to -"*iy" in some ...
Numerals. Unlike in the Indo-European or Austronesian language families, numerals in AA languages cannot be traced to a proto-system. The Cushitic and Chadic numeral systems appear to have originally been base 5. The system in Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic, however, has independent words for the numbers 6–9. Thus, it i...