📄 Hans G. MUKAROVSKY (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Hamito-Semitic Congress. (Veröffentlichungen der Institute für Afrikanistik und Egiptologie der Universität Wien, 56-57) Wien: Afro-Pub 1991,Volumes I (274 pp.) and II (344 pp.), AS 850.

Summary

This is a short review by Stanisław Piłaszewicz of the two-volume proceedings of the Fifth International Hamito-Semitic Congress. The congress was held in Vienna in 1987, and Hans G. Mukarovsky edited the volumes. The review does not solve a research problem. It walks through the contents and sums up each contribution in a sentence or two.

The convenor gave the meeting an institutional aim: to help comparative Hamito-Semitic (Afroasiatic) linguistics become an established discipline, since no university then had a dedicated chair for it. The papers are grouped by branch:

• Volume I: general Hamito-Semitic, Berber, Chadic.
• Volume II: Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, Semitic.

The topics include:

• reconstruction of Proto-Afrasian consonants, vowels, numerals and cultural vocabulary;
• case, gender and aspect systems;
• loanwords and language contact, such as Songhay–Tuareg and Arabic in Hausa;
• classification disputes, such as the position of Masa and the status of Omotic;
• descriptive studies of individual languages and inscriptions.

The review matters as a map of where Afroasiatic comparative work stood in the late 1980s. It shows which hypotheses were active and who was arguing for them.

Key points

• The congress met in Vienna from 27 September to 2 October 1987. The proceedings appeared in 1991 from Afro-Pub (Veröffentlichungen … 56–57) in two volumes of 274 and 344 pages, priced at AS 850.
• The volumes commemorate Karl Petráček, who died in 1987. The opening and closing material also recalls that Friedrich Müller of Vienna coined the "Hamito-Semitic" notion about a century earlier, and that Johannes Lukas worked in the same city.
• The Chadic phonological inventories vary enormously:
  • vowels range from two (Wandala, Gude) to eight (Mafa, Daba);
  • consonants range from 26 (Masa) to 119 (Higi).
• Tourneux argues that Masa is not a separate Chadic branch but is close to Musgu in Central (Biu-Mandara) Chadic. Zaborski argues that Omotic is really West Cushitic.
• Semitic is the largest section, with fourteen papers. The only Omotic paper (Böhm) links noun end-vowels in Nubian with Omotic.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Loprieno describes Middle Egyptian clauses as having a default, unmarked subject–predicate order, with specific semantic or pragmatic conditions explaining each departure from it. This gives a principled account of word-order variation.
• I2. Hodge re-tests an older etymological collection (Calice, 1936) against a newer, larger body of field data, keeping what holds up and crediting the original insight.
• I3. Comparisons are anchored on small, closed, stable vocabulary sets, such as basic numerals 1–10 and body-part names, before broader claims are made.
• I4. Muhammad Ali treats antonymy in Oromo largely as morphological negation, deriving opposites from a base word by affixation.
• I5. Satzinger analyses the independent personal pronoun as one of three distinct Egyptian pronoun paradigms (suffixal, dependent, independent) and studies the structure of each set separately.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (tree): the parser could record a canonical order per construction and attach an explicit trigger label (topic, focus, question) to every deviation, which keeps fronting and inversion explainable.
• I2 (learn): legacy lexicons and old silver annotations could be re-audited periodically against fresh multi-parser agreement, keeping only entries that the new witnesses confirm.
• I3 (learn): a fixed mini-probe of closed-class items could serve as a cheap regression and negative-control set when comparing parser or tagger versions.
• I4 (world): un-/in-/non- adjectives could be stored as negated states of a base predicate, with a flag for lexicalized cases whose meaning has drifted, so that state reasoning stays consistent.
• I5 (frames): coreference could use the paradigm of a pronoun (subject, object, possessive, reflexive) as an explicit structural cue when linking mentions, rather than treating all pronouns alike.