Asa and Aramanik: Gushitie hunters in Masai-Land

A few years ago Greenberg (1963b) called attention to the probability that the Mogogodo language, spoken by a broken pastoral people living in the foothills just north of Mt. Kenya, belonged to the Cushitic family of Hamito-Semitic (Afroasiatic) and showed special affinities with the Galla- Konso division of East Cushitic. In so doing he greatly strengthened the evidence linking the main mass of Cushitic languages in Ethiopia-Somalia and the several Cushitic outliers in Tanzania (Iraqw, Mbugu, etc.). Shortly before this, Greenberg (1962, 1963a: 49) and the present writer had inde¬pendently come to the conclusion that the Sanye language of coastal Kenya recorded by Dammann (1950) was in fact South Cushitic, rather than a “Bushman” language as some scholars had imagined.2 With Mogogodo in central highland Kenya and Sanye in the Kenya coastal lowlands, the previous sizable gap between East and South Cushitic has been appreciably bridged