Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I am an idiot, I confess it.  When Alice Faber and Benji Wald attributed
to, respectively, a false notion of a
"Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" and racism the fact that
Nostraticists have sought to connect Afro-Asiatic to Indo- European rather
than to Nilo-Saharan, I said many things, especially about the intolerable
racism charge, which, while true, missed the point that in fact
Nostraticists HAVE looked at Nilo-Saharan.  I do not know who precisely
but Shevoroshkin (1989:3) and Kaiser and Shevoroshkin (1988:310) include
not just Nilo-Saharan but also Niger-Kordofanian (another group of
languages spoken by people whom racists call Fblack' rather than Fwhite'
or something in between) in Nostratic and allude to work which has
established it. As I recall, I objected to including this statement in the
paper I coauthored with Shevoroshkin (see below) in 1991 because he could
not provide me with a copy of the relevant literature.  I suspect it was
something never published at all or only samizdated, but I do not know
that for a fact.

This I think closes the case. But an apology or two would still be nice.
And, think, called for even if no such work had ever been by any
Nostraticist.

Kaiser, Mark; and Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1988. "Nostratic". Annual Review
of Anthropology 17: 309-329.

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1989b. "Methods in Interphyletic Comparison".
Ural-Altaische Jahrbu"cher 61: 1-26.

Shevoroshkin, Vitaly; and Manaster Ramer, Alexis. 1991. "Some Recent Work
on the Remote Relations of Languages".  In: Lamb, Sydney M.; and Mitchell,
E. Douglas (eds.), Sprung from some common source, 178-199.  Stanford:
Stanford University Press.