Cushites. This original biblical genealogy reflected political rather than linguistic realities: thus the Canaanites are descendants of Ham, although their language is closely related to Hebrew, and the Elamites are descendants of Shem, although their language is not related to Hebrew at all. The term Semitic had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer, following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710. Hamitic was coined by Ernest Renan in 1855, to refer to languages that seemed similar to the Semitic languages, but were not themselves provably a part of the family. Several issues with the label "Hamito-Semitic" have led to its decline in use by later scholars. For example, the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests the existence of a monophyletic "Hamitic" branch alongside Semitic. Additionally, Joseph Greenberg argued that "Hamitic" has racial connotations, and that the name "Hamito-Semitic" overstates the centrality of the Semitic languages within the family. Victor Porkhomovsky suggests that the label "Hamito-Semitic" is at this point simply convention and no more implies an opposition between Semitic and "Hamitic" languages than "Indo-European" implies a "European" and an Indic branch. Greenberg reintroduced the name "Afroasiatic" in 1960, a name seemingly coined by Maurice Delafosse (as French ) in 1914. The name refers to the fact that this is the only major language family with members in both Africa and Asia. Because the term "Afroasiatic" could be taken to mean that the family includes all the languages of Africa and Asia, the term "Afrasian" is sometimes used instead; this name was proposed by Igor Diakonoff (1980) and is mostly used by Russian scholars. The alternative name "Lisramic" is based on the AA root *lis- ("tongue") and the Egyptian word rmṯ ("person"). Distribution and branches Scholars generally consider Afroasiatic to have at least five and as many as eight separate branches, with the five universally agreed upon branches consisting of the Berber (also called "Libyco-Berber"), Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic. Additionally, a majority of specialists consider the Omotic languages to constitute a sixth branch. Berber The Berber (or Libyco-Berber) languages are spoken today by perhaps 16 million people. They are often considered to constitute a single language with multiple dialects. Other scholars, however, argue that they are a group of around twelve languages, about as different from each other as the Romance or Germanic languages. In the past, Berber languages were spoken throughout North Africa except in