I suppose it would not be good if I didn't write a little thread about the obscure South Semitic languages.
Starting with the Ethiosemitic branch, and then the Old South Arabian branch (which it is contested whether it is Central Semitic or South Semitic but I'll include it)
Firstly, let's talk about Amharic, an Ethiosemitic language. Notice that there are "/p/, /t/, /k/" sounds but also ejective "/p'/, /t'/, /k'/. It's kind of like you make a "uh" sound after the consonant but much less pronounced.
I believe it could be because of the Cushitic substratum. Since, take Oromo for example, a Cushitic language related to Amharic but very distantly, also spoken in the Horn of Africa. You can see it has ejectives as well!
But it could well be proto-Semitic since it has them too, though it is a proto-language and no one knows how people spoke it.
Now, onto Old South Arabian. Some people think Sabaean had a /ɬ/ sound, others think that it had an /s/. This was (apparently) for the letter "samekh".
Also, the abjad that Old South Arabians used was eventually molded into the Ge'ez abugida used by the aforementioned Amharic people, among others.
Now, there are poorly attested Yemeni languages, which are Razihi and Faifi. People presume they're Old South Arabian, but since they are poorly attested, no one knows for sure.
Now, in my introduction I forgot to include Modern South Arabian. These are languages spoken in the southern part of the Arabian peninsula, and to me they're weird in that I would've thought their speakers assimilated to speaking Arabic. But apparently not.
Here're the Hobyot language's consonants. It's the most spoken Modern South Arabian language. Some of these are wacky, at least to me, an Arabic L1 speaker. Like the [ʁ~q] sound, and the [θˤ~θʼ] which I'd think is like an Arabic Dhad (this one, ظ) sound but voiceless.
But what I really think is weird is Hobyot's first-person pronoun. In Hebrew it would be "ani", in Arabic, "ana", (I'm not using IPA here), in Amharic (a language closer to Hobyot than Hebrew or Arabic), "ǝne", but in Hobyot.. it's "hoh". I'm not sure how this came to be.
Maybe it comes from the same word that Arabic "huwa" or "he" comes from but I'm not sure. Anyways, that's about it for this thread. Thanks for reading.
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