Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan

[Alice Faber]

----------------------------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.

I'm glad to find that I had been mistaken in my impression that Nilo-Saharan
and other language families had been ignored in long-range language
comparison. I've undergone enough of a career shift since 1988 that I haven't
been able to follow the literature as well as I might have earlier.

As for my assertion that some of those who search out a link between Semitic
and Indo-European being in part motivated by a perspective involving the
Judeo-Christian tradition, I'd like to make clear that I'm not including any
modern investigators of Nostratic here. I'm thinking of folks who simply don't
care (or perhaps don't know) that Hebrew is part of Semitic is part of Afro-
Asiatic, but simply look for superficial similarities between Hebrew, Latin,
and Greek. There's a big difference between saying that Hebrew and Latin are
related and saying that Hebrew and Latin are related because Afro-Asiatic and
Indo-European are part of Nostratic. Both are hypotheses that can be
discussed, and perhaps refuted, but only the latter is consistent with a wide
body of published literature. Many folks who work on the history of Semitic
languages are quite sensitive, perhaps over sensitive to the difference.

Alice Faber