Comparative-historical Afro-Asiatic linguistics has undergone a significant development
over the past half century, since the appearence Essai comparatif sur le vocabulaire et
la phonétique du chamito-sémitique (1947) by Marcel Cohen. This revolutionary and
fundamental synthesis concluded the second great period of the comparative research
on Afro-Asiatic lexicon (the so-called „old school”, cf. EDE I 2-4). During the third
period (second half of the 20th century), whose beginning was hallmarked by the names
of J.H. Greenberg and I.M. Diakonoff, a huge quantity of new lexical material (both
descriptive and comparative) has been published, including a few most recent attempts
(either unfinished or rather problematic) at compiling an Afro-Asiatic comparative
dictionary (SISAJa I-III, HCVA I-V, HSED, Ehret 1995).
During my current work on the Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian (EDE), I have
collected a great number of new AA parallels, which – to the best of my knowledge –
have not yet been proposed in the literature or was observed independently from me1.
Along the EDE project (and the underlying „Egyptian etymological word catalogue”),
I have started collecting AA roots (not attested in Egyptian) for a separate Afro-Asiatic
root catalogue in late 1999
