Proto-Berber language
[1] Proto-Berber shows features that clearly distinguish it from all other branches of Afroasiatic, but modern Berber languages are relatively homogeneous.
[5] The fact that there are reconstructions for all major species of domestic ruminants but none for the camel in Proto-Berber implies that its speakers bred livestock and were pastoralists.
[6] Another dating system is based on examining the differences that characterize ancient stages of Semitic and Egyptian in the third millennium BC.
Many researchers[7] have estimated the differences to have taken 4,000 years to evolve, resulting in breaking this language family in six distinct groups (Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic) in the eighth millennium BC.
Proto-Afroasiatic is thus from the tenth millennium since it took at least 2,000 years before it reached the stage where these different branches of this language family evolved.
[8] Roger Blench (2018)[9] suggests that Proto-Berber speakers had spread from the Nile River valley to North Africa 4,000–5,000 years BP due to the spread of pastoralism, and experienced intense language leveling about 2,000 years BP as the Roman Empire was expanding in North Africa.
Hence, although Berber had split off from Afroasiatic several thousand years ago, Proto-Berber itself can only be reconstructed to a period as late as 200 AD.
Some earlier attempts to derive the phonemic inventory of Proto-Berber were heavily influenced by Tuareg because of its perception of being particularly archaic.
(This change also occurs in varieties including the Central Atlas Tamazight dialect of the Izayan, Nafusi, and Siwi.)
[24] The relics of the ancient morphological segments preserved in the modern varieties, in the Libyan inscriptions and in the ancient toponymical strata show that the basis of word formation is a monosyllabic lexical unit (vc, cvc) whose vowels and consonants are part of the root.
[27] The composition and the reduplication/doubling process whose traces are preserved in all the Afroasiatic branches, including Semitic where they are fossilized in the quadrilaterals and quintiliterals, constitute the type of word formation at that stage of Berber.
[28] These remains also show that agglutination is the Proto-Berber mode of the grammatical adjunction of morphemes whose placement was not fixed in relation to the elements that they determine (cf.
Similar elements attested in Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic, and remains preserved in Semitic drove Diakonoff to postulate the same type of syntactic construction for proto-Semitic and proto-Afroasiatic (cf.
