Paul Fallon Presents on Historical Linguistics of the Horn of Africa

On March 10, Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented a paper at the joint conference of the 2013 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. He also presented at the 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC from March 7-10, 2013 that was attended by scholars from around the U.S. and from over 25 countries. His paper, “Coronal Ejectives and EthioSemitic Borrowing in Proto-Agaw,” argued that the Central Cushitic (or Agaw) languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea originally had ejectives (a type of consonant with glottal constriction) and are not simply the result of borrowing from neighboring EthioSemitic languages such as Ge‘ez, Tigré, Tigrinya, and Amharic.