Arabic and IE

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, bwald wrote:

> AMR writes in reply to Alice Haber's message (which I commented on in my
> last posting)
>
> >This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all
> >but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic..
>
> What kind of interest have Nostraticists shown in Nilo-Saharan since?
There has been almost no serious published research into Nostratic
since the pioneering days by the Moscow school. Bomhard's school
consists of one man who works full time outside of academia and
yet does more than most linguists working on the inside (though
having said that I STILL do not like most of what he has done,
but I could be wrong).  Greenberg's Eurasian (his version of
Nostratic) has not been published as far as I know.  Of
what may perhaps be called the revisionist school, Peter
Michalove has only recently joined work on Nostratic, is
not a linguist at all by background, and has an even worse
job situation than Bomhard, and I (the other member of this
"school") work in computer science full time except that I
have been ill for the last several years and do no work except
with the help of other people under doctors' orders, and of
course Nostratic is a minor area of research for me.  In any
event, my first priority has been to see if there is any
merit to Nostratic at all and trying to extent it surely
is not the most obvious way to do that.  To my mind, you
start out by checking the IE-Uralic-Altaic connection out.
Kartvelian comes next.  I have not even done any serious
work on whether AA is likely to be related to these.

But we do not own Nostratic.  People who are interested
are free to work Nilo-Saharan and Nostratic w/o having
to wait for us or our permission.

>
> To get back to racist theories that were discredited by GREENBERG's
> establishment of the Nilo-Saharan (and Niger-Congo) families, while AMR is
> quite right, in pre-Greenbergian times when a Nostratic was conceived that
> included Semitic and Indo-E, various Nilo-Saharan languages were indeed
> known to linguists and were classified, along with other languages (which
> turned out to be Niger-Congo) as "Nilo-HAMITIC" and such.  The concept
> "Hamitic" by itself was applied to languages now classified as
> (non-Semitic) Afro-Asiatic (since Greenberg).  PEDERSEN himself devotes a
> SINGLE section 5. to "Semitic and Hamitic" in his Chapter (V) on "the study
> of non-Indo-European languages", and notes the likelihood that Semitic and
> Hamitic are genetically related (as now accepted).
Yes, but he hardly did any WORK if at all on these languages.  He
was an IEnist only.

> He does not treat
> "Nilo-Hamitic" and such, so I am not sure how aware he was of them, but
> contemporaneous with him were such influential Africanists as Carl MEINHOF,
> who supposed that Nilo-Hamitic was a mixture of "Negro" and "Hamitic", a
> proposal that expanded among Africanists throughout Europe and remained
> until Greenberg, who specifically went after Meinhof and bashed the racist
> basis of his ideas.
>
Again, since Pedersen did no original work of his own, all this is
purely academic.

> (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of
> denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he
> spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial"
> classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas --
> currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.)
>

I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist.  What you mention
does not prove that he was.

> The effects of the racism were recently seen in the 1994 Ruanda genocide.
> Under the kinds of historical notions that associated Hamitic with Semitic
> speakers, as "racially non-Negro" peoples of "superior culture" (including
> advanced militarism), the Belgian colonial administration classified a
> certain Ruandese group called "Tutsi" (popularly known as the Watusi in
> early to mid 20th c Western culture) as of "Hamitic" origin, as evidenced
> by their domination of the "Bantu" (= "Negro") Hutu (even though the Tutsi
> had adopted the same "Negro" language as the Hutu).

This however is not the fault of the Nostraticists. Blame the
bicyclists (as in the famous, I hope it IS famous, joke).

Note that the spectacular failure of the West to assist the Tutsi
(even to the trivial extent that we "assist" the Bosniaks or
the Kosovars) means that no one now here considers the Tutsi any less
"negro" than the Hutu.

[snip]
>
> My guess is that Pedersen was quite aware of the "Hamitic-Negro" "mixture"
> theories, and may even have accepted them, but shunned them for the
> pedagogical purposes of his book dedicated to conventional GENETIC
> relationships and families.

I am sure he was aware them but I think he shunned them because
he did not approve of them or at least suspected that they were
untenable.  He WAS after all one of the best linguists of all time.
>
> In view of continued interest in historical-cultural interest in the
> implications of linguistic classification, it is best to remember the
> history of historical linguistics, to probe the motives underlying current
> controversies, and to keep trying to establish STRICT CONTROLS on
> classificatory/reconstructive METHODOLOGY -- and, of course, on
> cultural-historical interpretation of the results.

If this is intended to suggest that Nostraticists in general or
I in particular are either racists or follow a nonstrict
methodology, I would ask for specifics which can be refuted.

AMR