Sumerian, Manding, Somali, and "whatever"

[Gonzalo Rubio]

Well, just to keep the record straight and spend some spare time, let's go
through Mr. Winters' "Sumerian evidence":
 
        - bir does not mean "to heat", but "to scatter, disperse".
 
        - there is no "bur" meaning "to free", there are several "bur", but
meaning "(stone) bowl", "food offering", and others attested in few texts,
and whose meaning is very obscure.
 
        - bun doesn't mean "to blow", but "nose" and "breath".
 
        - his "baba-a" (actually ba-ba-a), meaning "old man" is a hapax
legomenon, attested ONLY in one syllabic vocabulary from Ugarit (AS 16:
36, ba-ba-a = pur-$u-mu).
 
        - bar does not mean "town", but "outside, side, back, edge, etc.",
and there is other bar meaning "liver", but no town, no town.
 
 
I could go on, and on, and on for ever ("manus" is munus; he ignores the
"numbers" of the signs, so "ruler" is bara2, not "bara"; "eye" is igi in
Sumerian --his "ini, en" is obviously Semitic, cf. Akkadian i:nu, e:nu,
etc., etc., etc...). Most of the words (almost all) in Mr. Winters'
"Sumerian"  column happen not to exist, are absolutely wrong, or mean
completely different things.
 
I'd like to be very respectful and there is nothing personal in this, but
Mr. Winters' list illustrates *nothing* but the fact that he doesn't know
Sumerian at all, and his "methodology" is anything but methodology.
 
Moreover, I do not understand his mixing terms concerning ethnicity, race
(whatever that is), and language, as in "Black African Languages".  Somali
is an East Cushitic language (concretely, Lowland East Cushitic), like
Oromo, Bayso, Boni, etc. East Cushitic languages belong to the Afroasiatic
macro-family. I'm afraid, Mr. Winters is far from being familiar with any
scholarship on Cushitic (Ehret, Diakonoff, Dolgopolskij, Gragg, etc.).
 
Furthermore, the way he uses the term "Manding" is misleading, and against
all the current stuff about Mande studies (Dwyer, Mukarovsky, Welmers, De
Wolf, etc.). I dare suggest he should look at two very basic overviews:
 
D. J. Dwyer. "Mande". In _The Niger-Congo Languages_, ed. J.
Bendor-Samuel.  Pp. 47-65. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America,
1989.
 
P. P. De Wolf. "Das Niger-Congo (ohne Bantu)". In _Die Sprachen Afrikas_,
ed. B. Heine et al. Pp. 45-76. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1981.
 
I'm sorry if I sound rude, and I have no intention of hurting Mr.
Winters' feelings --I'm sure he is a respectable and decent person.
However, it is rather disappointing when someone tries to present that
kind of marginal and amateurish stuff as a sort of "scientific truth".
 
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Gonzalo Rubio
Near Eastern Studies
Johns Hopkins University
gonzalor at jhu.edu
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