dancinlab/anima-corpus-5lang-unified huggingface dataset:
Chadic
Chadic languages number between 150 and 190, making Chadic the largest family in Afroasiatic. The Chadic languages are typically divided into three major branches, East Chadic, Central Chadic, and West Chadic. Most Chadic languages are located in the Chad basin, with the exception of Hausa. Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria. It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers. Eight other Chadic languages have around 100,000 speakers; other Chadic languages often have few speakers and may be endangered of going extinct. Only about 40 Chadic languages have been fully described by linguists.
Cushitic
There are about 30 Cushitic languages,  more if Omotic is included, spoken around the Horn of Africa and in Sudan and Tanzania. The Cushitic family is traditionally split into four branches: the single language of Beja (c. 3 million speakers), the Agaw languages, Eastern Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic. Only one Cushitic language, Oromo, has more than 25 million speakers; other languages with more than a million speakers include Somali, Saho-Afar, Hadiyya, and Sidaama. Many Cushitic languages have relatively few speakers. Cushitic does not appear to be related to the written ancient languages known from its area, Meroitic or Old Nubian. The oldest text in a Cushitic language probably dates from around 1770; written orthographies were only developed for a select number of Cushitic languages in early 20th century.
Egyptian
The Egyptian branch consists of a single language, Ancient Egyptian, which was historically spoken in the lower Nile Valley. Egyptian is first attested in writing around 3000 BCE and finally went extinct around 1300 CE, making it the language with the longest written history in the world. Egyptian is usually divided into two major periods, Earlier Egyptian (c. 3000–1300 BCE), which is further subdivided into Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian, and Later Egyptian (1300 BCE-1300 CE), which is further subdivided into Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Coptic is the only stage written alphabetically to show vowels, whereas Egyptian was previously written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which only represent consonants. In the Coptic period, there is evidence for six major dialects, which presumably existed previously but are obscured by pre-Coptic writing; additionally, Middle Egyptian appears to be based on a different dialect than Old Egyptian, which in turn shows dialectal similarities to Late Egyptian. Egyptian was replaced by Arabic as the spoken language of Egypt, but Coptic continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
Omotic
The c. 30 Omotic languages are still mostly undescribed by linguists. They are all spoken in southwest Ethiopia except for the Ganza language, spoken in Sudan. Omotic is typically split into North Omotic (or Aroid) and South Omotic, with the latter more influenced by the Nilotic languages; it is unclear whether the Dizoid group of Omotic languages belongs to the Northern or Southern group. The two Omotic languages with the most speakers are Wolaitta and Gamo-Gofa-Dawro, with about 1.2 million speakers each.
Semitic
There are between 40 and 80 languages in the Semitic family. Today, Semitic languages are spoken across North Africa, West Asia, and the Horn of Africa, as well as on the island of Malta, making them the sole Afroasiatic branch with members originating outside Africa. Arabic, spoken in both Asia and Africa, is by far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language today, with around 300 million native speakers, while the Ethiopian Amharic has around 25 million.
Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic, the Canaanite languages (including Hebrew), as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Ge'ez and Amharic. The classification within West Semitic remains contested. The only group with an African origin is Ethiopian Semitic.  The oldest written attestations of Semitic languages come from Mesopotamia, Northern Syria, and Egypt and date as early as c. 3000 BCE.
Other proposed branches
There are also other proposed branches, but none has so far convinced a majority of scholars:
 Linguist H. Fleming proposed that the near-extinct Ongota language is a separate branch of Afroasiatic; however, this is only one of several competing theories. About half of current scholarly hypotheses on Ongota's origins align it with Afroasiatic in some way.
 Robert Hetzron proposed that Beja is not part of Cushitic, but a separate branch. The prevailing opinion, however, is that Beja is a branch of Cushitic.
 The extinct Meroitic language has been proposed to represent a branch of Afroasiatic. Although an Afroasiatic connection is sometimes viewed as refuted, it continues to be defended by scholars such as Edward Lipiński.
 The Kujarge language is usually considered part of the Chadic languages; however, Roger Blench has proposed that it may be a separate branch of Afroasiatic.
Common trends in proposals as of 2019 include using common or lacking grammatical features  to argue that Omotic was the first language to branch off, often followed by Chadic. In contrast to scholars who argue for an early split of Chadic from Afroasiatic, scholars of the Russian school tend to argue that Chadic and Egyptian are closely related, and scholars who rely on percentage of shared lexicon often group Chadic with Berber. Three scholars who agree on an early split between Omotic and the other subbranches, but little else, are Harold Fleming (1983), Christopher Ehret (1995), and Lionel Bender (1997). In contrast, scholars relying on shared lexicon often produce a Cushitic-Omotic group. Additionally, the minority of scholars who favor an Asian origin of Afroasiatic tend to place Semitic as the first branch to split off. Disagreement on which features are innovative and which are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic produces radically different trees, as can be seen by comparing the trees produced by Ehret and Igor Diakonoff.
Responding to the above, Tom Güldemann criticizes attempts at finding subgroupings based on common or lacking morphology by arguing that the presence or absence of morphological features is not a useful way of discerning subgroupings in Afroasiatic, because it cannot be excluded that families currently lacking certain features had them in the past; this also means that the presence of morphological features cannot be taken as defining a subgroup. Peust notes that other factors that can obscure genetic relationships between languages include the poor state of present documentation and understanding of particular language families (historically with Egyptian, presently with Omotic). Gene Gragg likewise argues that more needs to be known about Omotic still, and that Afroasiatic linguists have still not found convincing isoglosses on which to base genetic distinctions.
One way of avoiding the problem of determining which features are original and which are inherited is to use a computational methodology such as lexicostatistics, with one of the earliest attempts being Fleming 1983. This is also the method used by Alexander Militarev and Sergei Starostin to create a family tree. Fleming (2006) was a more recent attempt by Fleming, with a different result from Militarev and Starostin. Hezekiah Bacovcin and David Wilson argue that this methodology is invalid for discerning linguistic sub-relationship. They note the method's inability to detect various strong commonalities even between well-studied branches of AA.
Classification history
A relationship between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and the Berber languages was perceived as early as the 9th century CE by the Hebrew grammarian and physician Judah ibn Quraysh, who is regarded as a forerunner of Afroasiatic studies. The French orientalist Guillaume Postel had also pointed out similarities between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic in 1538, and Hiob Ludolf noted similarities also to Ge'ez and Amharic in 1701. This family was formally described and named "Semitic" by August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781. In 1844, Theodor Benfey first described the relationship between Semitic and the Egyptian language and connected both to the Berber and the Cushitic languages (which he called "Ethiopic"). In the same year T.N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and the Hausa language, an idea that was taken up by early scholars of Afroasiatic. In 1855, Ernst Renan named these languages, related to Semitic but not Semitic, "Hamitic," in 1860 Carl Lottner proposed that they belonged to a single language family, and in 1876 Friedrich Müller first described them as a "Hamito-Semitic" language family. Müller assumed that there existed a distinct "Hamitic" branch of the family that consisted of Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic. He did not include the Chadic languages, though contemporary Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius argued for the relation of Hausa to the Berber languages. Some scholars would continue to regard Hausa as related to the other Afroasiatic languages, but the idea was controversial: many scholars refused to admit that the largely unwritten, "Negroid" Chadic languages were in the same family as the "Caucasian" ancient civilizations of the Egyptians and Semites.
An important development in the history of Afroasiatic scholarship – and the history of African linguistics – was the creation of the "Hamitic theory" or "Hamitic hypothesis" by Lepsius, fellow Egyptologist Christian Bunsen, and linguist Christian Bleek. This theory connected the "Hamites", the originators of Hamitic languages, with (supposedly culturally superior) "Caucasians", who were assumed to have migrated into Africa and intermixed with indigenous "Negroid" Africans in ancient times. The "Hamitic theory" would serve as the basis for Carl Meinhof's highly influential classification of African languages in his 1912 book . On one hand, the "Hamitic" classification was justified partially based on linguistic features: for example, Meinhof split the presently-understood Chadic family into "Hamito-Chadic", and an unrelated non-Hamitic "Chadic" based on which languages possessed grammatical gender. On the other hand, the classification also relied on non-linguistic anthropological and culturally contingent features, such as skin color, hair type, and lifestyle. Ultimately, Meinhof's classification of Hamitic proved to include languages from every presently-recognized language family within Africa.
The first scholar to question the existence of "Hamitic languages" was Marcel Cohen in  1924, with skepticism also expressed by A. Klingenheben and Dietrich Westermann during the 1920s and '30s. However, Meinhof's "Hamitic" classification remained prevalent throughout the early 20th century until it was definitively disproven by Joseph Greenberg in the 1940s, based on racial and anthropological data. Instead, Greenberg proposed an Afroasiatic family consisting of five branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic. Reluctance among some scholars to recognize Chadic as a branch of Afroasiatic persisted as late as the 1980s. In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that a group of languages classified by Greenberg as Cushitic were in fact their own independent "Omotic" branch—a proposal that has been widely, if not universally, accepted. These six branches now constitute an academic consensus on the genetic structure of the family.
Greenberg relied on his own method of mass comparison of vocabulary items rather than the comparative method of demonstrating regular sound correspondences to establish the family. An alternative classification, based on the pronominal and conjugation systems, was proposed by A.N. Tucker in 1967. As of 2023, widely accepted sound correspondences between the different branches have not yet been firmly established. Nevertheless, morphological traits attributable to the proto-language and the establishment of cognates throughout the family have confirmed its genetic validity.
Origin
Timeline
There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant is , after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary. The estimations offered by scholars as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary widely, ranging from 18,000BCE to 8,000BCE. An estimate at the youngest end of this range still makes Afroasiatic the oldest proven language family. Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact, with the evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples.
Location
Likewise, no consensus exists as to where proto-Afroasiatic originated. Scholars have proposed locations for the Afroasiatic homeland across Africa and West Asia. Roger Blench writes that the debate possesses "a strong ideological flavor", with associations between an Asian origin and "high civilization". An additional complicating factor is the lack of agreement on the subgroupings of Afroasiatic (see Further subdivisions) – this makes associating archaeological evidence with the spread of Afroasiatic particularly difficult. Nevertheless, there is a long-accepted link between the speakers of Proto-Southern Cushitic languages and the East African Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (5000 years ago), and archaeological evidence associates the Proto-Cushitic speakers with economic transformations in the Sahara dating c. 8,500 ago, as well as the speakers of the Proto-Zenati variety of the Berber languages with an expansion across the Maghreb in the 5th century CE.
En 1889, il est major de l'agrégation de grammaire. En 1891, il fait son premier séjour en Arménie, notamment à Etchmiadzin ; son projet est d'apprendre l'arménien moderne et d'étudier d'anciens manuscrits.
À son retour, il assure à la suite de Saussure le cours de grammaire comparée, qu'il complète à partir de 1894 par une conférence sur les langues persanes.
Carrière 
En 1902, il succède au linguiste Auguste Carrière à la chaire d'arménien de l'École des langues orientales. En 1906, à la suite de Michel Bréal, il prend la chaire de grammaire comparée du Collège de France, où il consacre ses cours à l'histoire et à la structure des langues indo-européennes ; il abandonne alors son enseignement à l'École des langues orientales et se consacre désormais à la linguistique comparée au Collège de France, ainsi qu'à l'École pratique des hautes études.
Il a formé toute une génération de linguistes français, parmi lesquels Émile Benveniste, Marcel Cohen, Georges Dumézil, Lilias Homburger, André Martinet, Aurélien Sauvageot, Lucien Tesnière, Joseph Vendryes, ainsi que le japonisant Charles Haguenauer. Antoine Meillet devait diriger la thèse de Jean Paulhan sur la sémantique du proverbe et c'est lui qui découvrit Gustave Guillaume.
Études arméniennes 
 1891 : une mission de trois mois dans le Caucase lui permet d'apprendre l'arménien moderne.
 1902 : il obtient la chaire d'arménien de l'École des langues orientales.
 1903 : nouvelle mission en Arménie russe, il publie son Esquisse d'une grammaire comparée de l'arménien classique, qui demeure une référence en linguistique arménienne et indo-européenne jusqu'à ce jour. L'un de ses étudiants, Hratchia Adjarian, devient le fondateur de la dialectologie arménienne. C'est également sous les encouragements de Meillet qu'Émile Benveniste étudie la langue arménienne.
 1919 : il est cofondateur de la Société des études arméniennes avec Victor Bérard, Charles Diehl, André-Ferdinand Hérold, H. Lacroix, Frédéric Macler, Gabriel Millet, Gustave Schlumberger.
 1920 : le , il crée la Revue des études arméniennes avec Frédéric Macler.
Études homériques 
À la Sorbonne, Meillet supervise le travail de Milman Parry. Meillet offre à son étudiant l'opinion, nouvelle à cette époque, que la structure formulaïque de l'Iliade serait une conséquence directe de sa transmission orale. Ainsi, il le dirige vers l'étude de l'oralité dans son cadre natif et lui suggère d'observer les mécanismes d'une tradition orale vivante à côté du texte classique (l'Iliade) qui est censé résulter d'une telle tradition. En conséquence, Meillet présente Parry à Matija Murko, savant originaire de Slovénie qui avait longuement écrit sur la tradition héroïque épique dans les Balkans, surtout en Bosnie-Herzégovine. Par leurs recherches, dont les résultats sont à présent hébergés par l'université de Harvard, Parry et son élève, Albert Lord, ont profondément renouvelé les études homériques.
Principaux ouvrages 
 Études sur l'étymologie et le vocabulaire du vieux slave. Paris, Bouillon, 1902-05.
 Esquisse d'une grammaire comparée de l'arménien classique, 1903.
 Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes, 1903 ( éd.), Hachette, Paris, 1912 ( éd.).
 Les dialectes indo-européens, 1908.
 Aperçu d'une histoire de la langue grecque, 1913.
 Altarmenisches Elementarbuch, 1913. Heidelberg (en français : Manuel élémentaire d'Arménien classique, traduction de Gabriel Képéklian, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2017 )
 Caractères généraux des langues germaniques, 1917, rev. edn. 1949.
 Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, 1921 (le tome II est paru en 1936 ; les deux tomes ont été réunis chez Lambert-Lucas, Limoges, 2015).
 Les origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs, 1923.
 Traité de grammaire comparée des langues classiques, 1924 (avec Joseph Vendryés).
 La méthode comparative en linguistique historique, 1925, Oslo, Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning (réimpr. Paris, Champion, 1954).
 .
 Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, 1932 (en collab. Avec Alfred Ernout (1879-1973), éd. augmentée, par Jacques André (1910-1994), Paris : Klincksieck, 2001,  
 Meillet en Arménie, 1891, 1903, Journaux et lettres publiés par Francis Gandon, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2014, .
Liens externes 
Linguiste français
Philologue français
Slaviste
Personnalité liée à la langue kurde
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales
Arménologue français
Indo-européaniste
Étudiant de l'université de Paris
Membre de l'Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres
Membre de la Société des africanistes
Agrégé de grammaire
Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur promu en 1933
Naissance en novembre 1866
Naissance à Moulins (Allier)
Décès en septembre 1936
Décès à 69 ans
Décès dans le Cher
Personnalité inhumée à Moulins (Allier)
Auteur publié par les éditions Klincksieck
Histoire 
L'algèbre linéaire est initiée dans son principe par le mathématicien perse Al-Khwârizmî qui s'est inspiré des textes de mathématiques indiens et qui a complété les travaux de l'école grecque, laquelle continuera de se développer des siècles durant. Elle a été reprise par René Descartes qui pose des problèmes de géométrie, comme la détermination de l'intersection de deux droites, en termes d'équation linéaire, établissant dès lors un pont entre deux branches mathématiques jusqu'alors séparées : l'algèbre et la géométrie. S'il ne définit pas la notion de base de l'algèbre linéaire qu'est celle d'espace vectoriel, il l'utilise déjà avec succès, et cette utilisation naturelle des aspects linéaires des équations manipulées demeurera utilisée de manière ad hoc, fondée essentiellement sur les idées géométriques sous-jacentes. Après cette découverte, les progrès en algèbre linéaire vont se limiter à des études ponctuelles comme la définition et l'analyse des premières propriétés des déterminants par Jean d'Alembert.
Ce n'est qu'au  que l'algèbre linéaire devient une branche des mathématiques à part entière. Carl Friedrich Gauss trouve une méthode générique pour la résolution des systèmes d'équations linéaires et Camille Jordan résout définitivement le problème de la réduction d'endomorphisme. En 1843, William Rowan Hamilton (inventeur du terme vector) découvre les quaternions (extension de degré 4 du corps des nombres réels). En 1844, Hermann Grassmann publie son traité Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre, La théorie de l'extension linéaire, qui est la première tentative de formalisation générale de la notion d'espace vectoriel. Si son œuvre reste grandement inaperçue, elle contient l'essentiel des idées modernes de l'algèbre linéaire, et cette étape fondamentale dans le développement de l'algèbre linéaire est reconnue comme telle tant par Hamilton que par Giuseppe Peano, qui axiomatise entièrement la théorie en 1888. Les espaces vectoriels deviennent alors une structure générale omniprésente dans presque tous les domaines mathématiques, notamment en analyse (espaces de fonctions).
Intérêt 
Sous leur forme la plus simple, les applications linéaires dans les espaces vectoriels représentent intuitivement les déplacements dans les espaces géométriques élémentaires comme la droite, le plan ou notre espace physique. Les bases de cette théorie remplacent maintenant la représentation construite par Euclide au  La construction moderne permet de généraliser la notion d'espace à des dimensions quelconques.
Présentation élémentaire 
L'algèbre linéaire commence par l'étude de vecteurs dans les espaces cartésiens de dimension 2 et 3. Un vecteur, ici, est une classe d'équivalence de bipoints qui unifie les segments de droite caractérisés à la fois par leur longueur (ou norme), leur direction et leur sens : deux bipoints représentent un même vecteur si le quadrilatère formé sur les quatre points est un parallélogramme. Les vecteurs peuvent alors être utilisés pour représenter certaines entités physiques comme des déplacements, additionnés entre eux ou encore multipliés par des scalaires (nombres), formant ainsi le premier exemple concret d'espace vectoriel.
L'algèbre linéaire moderne s'intéresse beaucoup aux espaces de dimension arbitraire, éventuellement infinie. La plupart des résultats obtenus en dimension 2 ou 3 peuvent être étendus aux dimensions finies supérieures, ce qui permet une interprétation géométrique de listes de nombres (une liste de n nombres s'interprétant comme un vecteur d'un espace à n dimensions).
Quelques théorèmes 
 Théorème de la base incomplète : soient E un espace vectoriel, G une famille génératrice de E et L une famille libre de vecteurs de E. Alors il existe au moins une base de E formée en prenant la réunion de L et d'une partie de G.
 En particulier, tout espace vectoriel possède au moins une base.
 Toutes les bases d'un même espace vectoriel ont le même cardinal.
 Tout espace vectoriel A possède un espace dual A* ; si A est de dimension finie, A* est de même dimension.
 Formule de Grassmann : Soient  et  deux sous-espaces vectoriels d'un même espace vectoriel. On a alors :
Un théorème intéressant à l'époque des mémoires d'ordinateurs de petite taille était qu'on pouvait travailler séparément sur des sous-ensembles (« blocs ») d'une matrice en les combinant ensuite par les mêmes règles qu'on utilise pour combiner des scalaires dans les matrices (cf. l’article Matrice par blocs). Avec les mémoires actuelles de plusieurs gigaoctets, cette question a perdu un peu de son intérêt pratique, mais reste très prisée en théorie des nombres, pour la décomposition en produit de facteurs premiers avec le crible général de corps de nombres (algorithme de Lanczos).
Utilisations 
Les espaces vectoriels forment le support et le fondement de l'algèbre linéaire. Ils sont aussi présents dans de nombreux domaines distincts. S'il n'est pas possible d'indiquer ici tous les cas d'utilisation, on peut tout de même citer pour les principales structures objet de théories, des exemples significatifs. Leurs rôles dans de vastes théories ne traitant pas d'une structure particulière, comme celles des nombres algébriques ou  de Galois peuvent aussi être évoqués.