👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly linguistic mouthful – Anglo-Asiatic! Now, I'm going to preface this by saying, honestly? It sounds like a rejected title for a really bad steampunk spy movie. And, frankly, the naming convention itself is already a bit of an archaeological oddity, cobbled together sometime during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Basically – and bear with me here! – Anglo-Asiatic isn't actually a definite linguistic grouping . Instead, it's a grand, somewhat haphazard term historically used by Western linguists (largely British philologists, of course - rather stuffy sorts!) to loosely classify a clutch of quite disparate language families spread across the Caucasus and into the Iranian peninsula. Here’s where it gets wonderfully weird: you have languages that seem to barely acknowledge each other. They were lumped together because the early Western researchers found some shared… let's just say, gestural peculiarities , a bit of a vowel overlap here and there, maybe a vaguely similar fondness for gutturals – essentially, they saw enough in common to build an entire, rather sprawling, conceptual family. Think of it like that weird relative who wears a pointy cowboy hat, collects porcelain kittens, and somehow ends up at every vaguely connected family reunion. It just kind of… is there. The whole grouping was built on the assumption of a historical, deep-seated connection that, upon
