Arabic and IE

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I dont know how much longer this has to go on, but:

On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, bwald wrote:

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I wrote:
>
> >> (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.)
>
> AMR replied:
>
> >I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist.  What you mention
> >does not prove that he was.
>
> I am not interested in labelling Pedersen one way or another in this
> regard.  What he wrote was simply an uncredited report on the opinion of
> others, which reflects the ideologically inspired institutional racism of
> his time.

That is untrue. He was critical (I think you meant "unCRITICAL")
on almost every page, and the views he endorses or even those he
recognized as merely possible or plausible are in no single
instance racist.

>  I did not think I had to spell out the point.  Although he was
> relying on the opinion of others, he did a common academic thing of simply
> asserting it without characterising it as an opinion or crediting it to
> anyone else.

That too in untrue.  He refers to specific authors repeatedly, e.g.,
Lepsius.

> Even post-colonial work of political analysis still referred
> to the Tutsi as being of "Ethiopid origin" (avoiding the antiquated term
> "Hamitic") and down-played the role of the German and then Belgian colonial
> authorities in promoting the caste system which they exploited in colonial
> times.

This has nothing to do with Pedersen.

>Just to spell out the implications of Pedersen's (no doubt
> unthinking) acquiescence to insitutional racism, it is thaty there is a
> (natural?) pecking order (Indo-)European over (Semito-)Hamite over "black"
> African.

He did not state or imply anything of the sort.

>  In the 19th c there was much concern in institutional racism to
> remove the Egyptians from "black" ancestry.  Somehow, by Pedersen's time
> that had been extended to the Nubians.

Again nothing to do with Pedersen.

> That is logical according to
> institutional racism since the Nubians were literate before the Europeans,
> and even had some late pharoahs over Egypt (in the late dynastic times
> called "decadent" by Western historians -- having it both ways apparently.
> NB: in Western popular culture the Nubians were black and "slaves" of the
> Egyptians, cf. the black actor playing a explicitly labelled "NUBIAN" slave
> of the "Mummy", played by (white) Boris Karloff in 1933).
>
No Pedersen here either.

> Whatever Pedersen's personal feelings about black people, his acceptance of
> the solemn authority of those who distinguished "Nubians" from "negroes"
> would certainly preclude it occurring to him that Semitic and Hamitic might
> have an African rather than a Eurasian linguistic alignment, andthe
> intellectual climate of the times would discourage him from looking to
> Africa for the antecedents of Semito-Hamitic (or Hamito-Semitic).
>
This is completely untrue.  He specifically explains his view
about the fact that not enough was known to know which languages
were "Hamitic" and which not.  If he had been using race
as a criterion, he could not have said this, because he
was (at least acc. to Benji) in no doubt about the racial
divisions.

I do think that accusations of racism should be based on
SOMETHING.  Benji's is based on NOTHING.  Worse, I have cited
specific evidence that Pedersen was NOT using race directly
or indirectly to guide his linguistic classifications, and
was in fact vociferously condemning those who did.