Fallon Publishes Paper on Origin of Central Cushitic Ejectives

Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon recently published a paper in the 2024 Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America entitled, “Where do Central Cushitic ejectives come from?” The paper examines words with ejectives, a type of sound made by raising the larynx, in a small family of four languages spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia. One leading expert, David Appleyard, claimed that almost all words in these languages with ejectives were loanwords resulting from contact with EthioSemitic languages such as Ge‘ez, Tigrinya, and Amharic. While this is true of Xamtanga, Fallon found that only 37% of ejectives in Blin were from borrowings, and in Xamtanga, only 25%. Fallon suggests that the remainder of words in the lexicon were of Central Cushitic origin and therefore it is likely that ejectives should be included in a historical-comparative reconstruction of Proto-Central Cushitic.