| has gloss | eng: Charles Ferguson first proposed the Ethiopian Language Area (1970, 1976). (Various scholars may also use the terms Sprachbund or "Linguistic Area".) He posited a number of phonological and morpho-syntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia (which included Eritrea at that time), including the Ethio-Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages, (though it did not include the Nilo-Saharan languages). Since then, others have pointed out smaller areas of shared features within this larger area, (Appleyard 1989, Breeze 1988, Sasse 1986, Tosco 1994, Wedekind 1989). One of the strongest features of the Ethiopian Language Area seems to be the use of the verb "say" as an inflected dummy element for an uninflected lexical base (Appleyard 2001, Cohen et al. 2002). |