BEJA AS A CUSHITIC LANGUAGE

David Appleyard (SOAS, London)

1. Introduction

The mythology of Beja as somehow having a special relationship with Ancient Egyptian was long ago dispelled by Vycichl [1960], and in the same artide he demonstrated that the dosest relatives of Beja were the Cushitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The general acceptance of Beja as a Cushitic language, however, has not in the meantime gone completely unquestioned. Linguists working in the field of Cushitic will be familiar with Hetzron's [1980: 78-101] arguments for setting Beja apart from Cushitic: 'Beja, even though obviously Mro• asiatic, cannot be proven to have any special genetic affinity with Cushitic' [ibid., 101]. Hetzron's arguments, prompted by what Zaborski famously called a 'dassical rumour' [1997a: 49, also 1987: 133, 1989: 574], have not gene rally been accepted, and most linguists today are content to indude Beja in the Cushitic family, albeit as a distinct branch. Nonetheless, the dassificatory position of Beja does not remain without its problems, and there has been some debate in the academic press in the years since Hetzron's study appeared between two scholars in particular, Voigt [1988, 1996, 1998] and Zaborski [1988, 1997 a, 1997b], centring around one particularly important question: the ori• gin of the stern of the [New] Present of prefix-inflecting verbs of the type ?a-danbiil. Voigt essentially sees the nasal infix in the stern of the singular of these verbs as an archaism, a dissimilation from an inherited pre-Cushitic geminate consonant. Zaborski, however, sees this stern pattern as an innovation arising from the incorporation of an auxiliary verb in * Vn. The question is seen as a very relevant one for the dassification of Beja [Tosco 2000: 91-92], as the dissimilation theory would at most place Beja on a lateral branch to Cushitic "proper", whilst the auxiliary theory simply implies that Beja inno• vated at a later stage than "Proto-Cushitic". In fact, as both Voigt and Zaborski themselves have shown, the question is not as simple as outlined here, and I will return to it below. However, I want to 176 DAVID APPLEYARD move away from a discussion of this particular feature and try and look at a wider bundle of factors that argue for the inclusion of Beja within Cushitic, and not as a parallel branch to Cushitic. In addition, therefore, there are both several other morphological features in which Beja differs, or appears to differ from what has been termed "nuclear" Cushitic, namely Central Cushitic (or Agaw) and East Cushitic (Lowland and Highland), 1 and, equally, there is also a couple of important morphological features which Beja shares with nuclear Cushitic. If these are to be diagnostic in the classification of Beja, we have to determine what are innovations proper to Cushitic and what are archaisms retained from an earlier stage within the his tory of Mroasiatic. This is by no means an easy task as the discus• sion of the internal groupings of the phylum is still in a fluid state. One picture that does seem to be emerging, based on morphological criteria, is the relative closeness of the Semitic, Berber and Cushitic families within Mroasiatic. If this is areal construct, then features that Beja shares with nuclear Cushitic that are also found in either or both Berber and Semitic cannot, of course, be used as decisive factors in the argument. Since my intention here is to examine the arguments for including Beja within the Cushitic family, the first step will be to identify those features which mark Cushitic as distinct from the other members of the phylum, in the first place, and then from Berber and Semitie. I shall [oeus on morpho10giea1 features, not only for reasons of space, but also because I am convinced of the primacy of morphology-not merely patterns but actual mor• phemes-as the major diagnostic tool in classification. Phonology is in this context too small a field, and indeed Beja lacks some of the principal segmental phonological features that are often thought of as typical of Cushitic, especially East Cushitic: pharyngeals (h, f) contrasting with glottals (h, ?), a special se ries of coronal and velar obstruents with originally probably glottalised articulation (t', k', p', s', c' .. l constrasting with simple ones. Syntactic patterns are also not the best criteria to use in classification because of the relatively greater ease of borrowing and the effect of contact between lan-

I I shall retain the term "nuclear Cushitic" here, simply as shorthand to describe Cushitic without Beja, in particular to denote the construct for which "Proto• Cushitic" reconstructions have usually been made. 2 Beja voiced retroflex ci and its rarer voiceless pair t are the correspondents of some of the glottalised coronals in East Cushitic.