General overview of Ethiosemitic

Abstract Several theories were suggested as to the origin of Ethiosemitic, ranging from the immigration by one or several waves of speakers of Semitic from South Arabia to the Western coast of the Red Sea and up to the designation of East Africa as the original habitat of Semites in general. Ethiosemitic, at all its stages, conforms to the basic structure of Semitic with discontinuous consonantal roots providing the basic meaning and fixed patterns of vowels, inserted between them, rendering the grammar and lexicon. Modern Ethiosemitic is characterized by phonemization of labialized velar consonants; by the presence of palatalization; by the reduction of short i and u to zero or to the central short vowel ǝ; by the creation of a plethora of new verb stems through reduplication of one of the syllables of the basic verb; by the creation of a copula replacing nominal sentences and, under the influence of co-territorial Cushitic, by an overall change of word order running gradually from the relatively less important information to the most important, namely to the main predicate and the negation, both placed at the end of the sentence.