Clicks

[Eve Danziger]

Well, since you ask for more, isn't it also true that the 
prevailing linguistic view of the use of clicks in non-San 
African  languages is that these are in fact due to contact 
with San speakers? So nothing to do with DNA in that case, 
ancient or otherwise.
And just in case this comes up in the letitor (?), when 
migrating popluations are not representative of the range 
of genetic diversity in the original stay-at-home 
population, I believe it's called "founder's effect", not 
genetic drift.
Eve Danziger


--On Tuesday, March 28, 2006 8:43 AM -0500 Ronald Kephart 
<rkephart at unf.edu> wrote:

> At 10:06 AM +0100 3/28/06, Alexander King wrote:
>
>> ...I believe that the "ancient gene" discussion is
>> supposedly based  on evidence that San populations have
>> genes which seem to have  experienced much fewer
>> mutations over the millenia...
>
> Alexander, thanks for your comments. Actually, I think
> the argument is the other way around. In general, people
> of sub-Saharan Africa exhibit greater genetic diversity
> than populations outside Africa, the result presumably of
> genetic drift: the migrating populations were not
> representative samples of the genetic diversity that
> existed in the founding population.
>
>> ...This kind of "ancient gene" talk is vulnerable...
>
> Yes, and that's a third issue needing unpacking. So, in
> that short sentence that Shreeve wrote...
>
> "The San communicate with clicks to keep from spooking
> game-- a feature that is also found in languages spoken
> by other African groups who carry ancient DNA markers."
>
> ...we now have three complaints/grievances:
>
> (1) The assumption that a phonological feature such as
> click consonants is "ancient" because they occur in a
> population that (apparently) has a long history as a
> population;
>
> (2) The assumption that these clicks were (consciously?)
> adopted as a way to avoid "spooking game"; and the
> subgrievance: are clicks really less "spooky" than other
> consonants? (To be fair, if there's a squirrel on my back
> porch and I make alveolar click sounds, it'll often sit
> up and look at me as if trying to figure out what sort of
> grotesque squirrel I might be, giving me time to shoot it
> if I wanted to*; but if I just say something like, "yo,
> squirrel!" it'll usually run off.)
>
> (3) The false notion that the San and other such
> populations walk around carrying "ancient" genes (in my
> intro to anthro class we just watched an otherwise pretty
> fair film on the Yanomama in which they are referred to
> as a "stone age people").
>
> (Based on my previous experience with NGS, I wonder
> whether the "clicks are good for not spooking game" thing
> could have been elicited from a San person, as a part of
> their folk model about their language, and passed on as
> fact. I say this because in 1979 NGS published an article
> on Grenada in which the author made a ridiculous
> characterization of the English Creole spoken there. I
> happened to be doing fieldwork in Grenada at that time,
> and, silly me, I wrote to correct them. NGS's response
> was that they had asked a "local expert" about the
> language, and that was all they needed. The "local
> expert" turned out to be a member of the very small white
> elite class in Grenada, many of whom carry around in
> their heads pretty bizarre folk models of the nature of
> the language spoken by people of African descent.)
>
> Anyway... If anyone thinks of anything else we can drag
> out of Shreeve's statement, let me know. I'm preparing a
> letitor.
>
> Ron
>
> *No squirrels were harmed in the writing of this email.
>
>