Recycling Roots in South Cushitic: An account of a prolific creative process

It has been observed that, compared with cognates shared across other branches of Cushitic, the South Cushitic languages share comparatively fewer cognates with wider Cushitic. This has been often examined through appealing to language contact: the South Cushitic languages share fewer cognates with wider Cushitic because South Cushitic has borrowed forms from non-Cushitic languages including Nilotic, Bantu, as well as various members of the disparate and archaic group Early East African.

This talk looks at another source of this mismatch, that being prolific word formation via other roots. Noted throughout Kießling and Mous (2003), and examined in Harvey (2018), the South Cushitic languages share fewer cognates with wider Cushitic because a large volume of its lexical forms are based upon the same root. This talk 1) provides the basic pattern for such word formation, 2) displays numerous examples, and 3) entertains some practical ramifications of this creative process.