Christopher Ehret, Professor of African History at UCLA, is a major figure in African history and African historical linguistics, particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. His historical books include An African Classical Age, in which he argues for a conception of the period from 1000 BC to 400 AD in East Africa as a "classical age" during which a variety of major technologies and social structures took shape. His linguistic works include reconstructions of Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and on a smaller scale Southern Cushitic. These reconstructions are impeccably Neogrammarian in their insistence on regular sound changes, but have been criticized for frequently postulating surprising semantic shifts.
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