HAMITIC LANGUAGES. This important family of Af rican languages is now definitely affiliated with the Semitic lan guages ; they constitute a separate division thereof. A brief sum mary of the facts upon which this conclusion is based is given in Les Longues du Monde (Meillet and Cohen, 19 24, p. 84, sqq.) .
This group is spoken in Northern Africa and is divided into three sub-groups, Berber, Libyan and Cushite. The Berber group comprises Kabile and Guanche, now obsolete. To the Libyan group belong Siwah, Libyan and Coptic. The Cushite group consists firstly of the languages spoken by mixed tribes in the Sudan, Adamawa, Bisharin, together with Somali and Galla. In the second group fall Kuhama and one or two smaller lan guages spoken in the same area. Masai and Nama belong to this group. Both have been influenced by other languages, Nama, now spoken in the southern extremity of Africa, largely by Hottentot and Bushman speech while Masai contains elements derived from the former population. The influence of Hamitic speech upon Amharic (q.v.) has been considerable. Although Hamites form an important element in the populations of Uganda and that area generally, in which as elsewhere they form the dominant group, the Bantu language of the people must be regarded as distinct.
In these inflecting languages nouns usually express number, gender and case by suffixes. Verbs use both prefixes and suffixes to form conjugation, voices, moods and tenses. The verb has intensive, reflective, attributive and causative forms. Some languages are more copious and developed than others. The influence of Arabic is found in tense formation, which normally expresses completion or incompletion of action rather than time. Attention must be drawn to the different kinds of plu rals of the nouns. There is a distributive plural in which each of the objects mentioned is regarded as still individual, a collective plural where they form a unity, and generic plurals used of things which appear in mass, such as grass, water, swarms of insects. In some languages, e.g., Masai, gender distinguishes size and strength rather than sex. The relation of plural forms to singular is con ditioned by what Meinhof calls the "law of polarity," according to which fields of perception were originally divided into two groups, persons and things, and there are only two classes of genders, one for persons, the other for things. A person therefore, belongs to one or other of the two classes. Persons in the plural are distinguishable from the person regarded as an individaal. The person class may be first regarded as male. What, therefore, is not male, belongs to the other or thing class which, therefore, in time adopted the feminine gender. Therefore nouns, which in the singular belong to one gender utilize in the plural the form of plural appropriate to the other gender.
and Cohen, quoted above; W. Schmidt, Bibliography.--Meillet and Cohen, quoted above; W. Schmidt, Sprachenfamilien and Sprachenkreise (1927) ; Carl Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten, Hamburg (1912) ; Oric Bates, The Eastern Libyans (An Essay) , London (1914) ; E. F. Gautier, Le Sahara, Paris (1923) ; Rene Basset, Manuel de Langue Kabyle (Paris, 1887) ; E. Doutte et E. F. Gautier, Enquete sur la dispersion de la langue berbere en Algerie (Algeria, 1913) ; John Abercromby, A Study of the Ancient Speech of the Canary Islands, Harvard African Studies, I. (Cambridge, 1917) ; Frank Praetorius, Die Hamitischen Sprachen Ostrafrikas, Beitrage zur Assyriologie II. (1894) ; Zur Grammatik der Gallasprache (Berlin, 1893) ; Enrico Cerulli, The Folk-Literature of the Galla of Southern Abyssinia, Harvard African Studies II. (Cambridge, 1922).
