Re: CHAT: New to list

From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>

| A-A has five branches (Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic) according
| to lumpers; splitters like the Ethnologue recognize Omotic as a sixth
| branch.  The best-known languages of the five are Arabic, Egyptian,
| Tamazight, Hausa, Somali respectively; no Omotic language is well-known.
| There is no generally agreed-upon relationship between any subset of the
| five branches.

The most spoken Omotic language is Gamo-Gofa-Dawro, but I think Bench is best
known (it might be the only written language; it uses the Ethiopic
alphasyllabry). Omotic may be a distinct branch of AA, or it may actually be
West Cushitic. All Omotic languages are spoken along the Omo River of
southwestern Ethiopia.

And I was only able to find Swadesh lists on Bench and Wolyatta on the web.
They're like Cushitic in that their "emphatics" are voiceless ejective stops and
affricates, but I couldn't tell if there were tones.