Arabic and IE

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
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?

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).  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.

(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.)

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).  The Belgian
authorities reinforced and expanded the caste system that put the "Hamites"
above the "Negroes".  The eventual genocide (Tutsi victims) was quite
comparable in scale and motive to the European Holocaust of the Jews, and
sprang from the SAME political framework of racism with the same
"ethnolinguistic" intellectualised rationale (and in both cases the
majority slaughtered the minority)  All of this, of course, has nothing to
do with scientific basis of classifying languages (although it does have to
do with nationalistic motives that promoted the science in the first
place), but it has to do with how certain Nilo-Saharan languages were
classified before the Nilo-Saharan family was established (to the extent
that it is established) and the HISTORICAL-CULTURAL interpretation (and
POLITICAL use) of the earlier classification.  By the way, such typological
things as having gender (of the m/f variety) were the basis of such
concepts as "Nilo-Hamitic" (now esp the Nilotic branch of Nilo-Saharan,
inter alia).  The idea of language "mixture" was much more often applied to
languages, and particularly various African languages, than is now
permitted, and allowed a rather free hand in historical cultural
interpretation of language relationship, so that it was fairly easy to
associate "original" language family with "race" and allow such things as
Semitic and IE are GENETICALLY related (with racial implications -- for
those who wanted them) without denying linguistic resemblances (due to
"mixture", just as "races" can mix) between (Semito-)Hamites and certain
"black" Africans.  Generally, the assumption (or rationalisation) was that
the groups who exhibited the "imperialistic spirit", demonstrated by
domination over other African groups, were either linguistically and
"racially" "Hamites", related to Semites and superior (more European-like)
to other Africans, or by language shift were only (at least partially)
racially Hamites -- no longer also linguistically "Hamitic".

NB: when the linguistically "Hamitic" speakers dominated other Africans,
this was seen as evidence of the (inevitable?) cultural history of the
Hamites.  When other groups did, they were still assumed to be decendants
of Hamites but had shifted languages.  With such logic, this theory would
not be unduly disturbed by Greenberg's criticism of Meinhof's theory about
the Fulani conquering the Hausa.  Meinhof assumed that the Fulani were
(mixed) "Hamitic" and the Hausa non-Hamitic, whereas Greenberg pointed out
that just the opposite was the case, the Hausa were Hamitic, i.e.,
Afro-Asiatic, and the Fulani were non-Hamitic, i.e., Niger-Congo.  Meinhof
had already died, supporting Hitler as "good for Germany" (get back the
African colonies lost after World War 1?), but he would have had no trouble
reinterpreting the results as indicating that the Fulani had shifted from a
Hamitic to a "Negro-Bantu" language and vice-versa for the Hausa.

(For all his faults, Meinhof was an indefatiguable Africanist, and had
deeply studied and extensively written about all these languages -- without
seeing what is now obvious.)

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.  (Detractors of Greenberg, in reading Pedersen,
will now say that from Hamitic + Semitic to Afro-Asiatic was not so large a
step, or intellectual a feat, but it is the vehemence with which G trashed
the earlier racist theories of African linguistic-cultural relationships
that is really of importance.  He showed how twisted and ideologically
motivated the earlier logic was, twisted in a way that would be immediately
recognised as absurd if applied to Indo-European).  Of course, serious
attention paid to mixed languages has made a comeback in recent times, with
a sounder theoretical basis and undeniable empirical evidence, but the
apparent delight with which the reports of BLONDE corpses in the former
Tokharian-speaking area were received a few years ago seemed to me to be an
echo of an earlier (more naive if you want) age in which "racial mixture"
was assumed (or hoped?) to have a shallow history (at least with respect to
Indo-European and its implications).  Fortunately, we have now rejected
racism (though its former influence lingers in various other fields and
popular culture), but that's about all.  We still seem to have great stakes
in who is culturally related to who at what level, and I view Nostratic
with deep suspicion as motivated (perhaps often unconsciously) by pet
theories of ancient cultural alignments and pedigrees.  That's why I
started out by asking; now that Nilo-Saharan has been posited for almost
half a century, what help have the Nostraticists been doing to help us sort
out the data of that messy and potentially highly controversial family?

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.