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.

Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented his research to the North American Association of the History of Linguistics (NAAHoLS) on Jan. 5, 2024. His talk, “The undead nature of the term ‘Hamito-Semitic’,” presented qualitative and quantitative research over the decades on the varying names of the Afroasiatic phylum of languages.

Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented research at the Centennial Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in New York City, on Jan. 6, 2024. His poster, “Where Do Central Cushitic Ejectives Come From?,” documented that contrary to previous scholarship, the majority of ejective sounds in the Central Cushitic languages Blin (63%) and Xamtanga (75%) are found in native roots, not in borrowings from EthioSemitic languages. This finding makes it more likely that ejectives may be reconstructed for Proto-Central Cushitic.

Associate Professor Paul D. Fallon of the Department of English and Linguistics was invited to review The Oxford Handbook of African Languages, edited by Rainer Vossen & Gerrit Dimmendaal, and published by Oxford University Press in 2020. His review appears online in The Linguistic List vol. 33, number 2209. The Linguist List is a major online linguistic resource and listserv with thousands of subscribers worldwide.

Associate Professsor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented at the 47th North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL), held in Paris from June 24-26, 2019. His paper, entitled “An assessment of Bender’s Proto-Cushitic,” was a scholarly evaluation of the late M. Lionel Bender’s unpublished reconstruction of the ancestral language of many of the languages of the Horn of Africa, including Somali, Oromo and Blin, Dr. Fallon’s special area of focus. His work was supported by a Faculty Research Grant.