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The Spread of Berber language: In an interesting model for the spread of the Indo-European languages accross Europe, Colin Renfrew has proposed their diffusion by the steady progress of neolithic agriculture. The geometric increase in the productivity of the land allowed a population grouwht which gradually expanded weswards, displacing or absorbing the mesolithic populations. Curiously, he retains the older model of immigration from a heartland fro Semitic speakers who, he suggests, moved outwards from the Arabian peninsula around the third millennium BC, ultimately outnumbering and absorbing earlier language groups such as Sumerian. However, if we examine a map of the Afro-Asiatic languages - the easter Semitic group, Kushitic, Egyptian and Berber- both the centrality of the Nile Valley and the difficulty of positing the Arabian peninsula as "heratland" become evident. There has never been any suggestion that the Nile Valley was populated from the Arabian peninsula, nor of any major shift in its population. It seems intelectually more satisfying to suggest that the advent of the neolithic in the lower Nile Valley and the delta area caused a major rise in its population density, and a consequent spin-off to the east and north-west of groups of people who carried the new techniques, and relted language, with them. This would explain the presence of these group in the Arabian peninsula as well as in North Africa. The climatic conditions during this period would have made the movement outward from the Nile a far less forbidding enterprise than it would be today. This suggestion cannot, at the moment, be more than speculative. Archeological evidence for a consistent movement of people is lacking, while, unlike the Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic family was as whole has received little study. Only the most rudimentary comparative studies exist, and thus any diagram of the relationship between them is impossible. The one statement we can make is that the Berber languages are all remarkably similar, which suggests that their spread accross North Africa was relatively uniform and did not occur over a great period of time. The break between them and the old Egyptian (related to modern Coptic) could be explained by the physical barrier of the easter desert, which became more and more impassable as the Sahara dried out. Again, this would suggest that the separation of the two had taken place before the definitive drying out of the Sahara between 2,500 and 2,000BC.
Tree of world populations, showing the relationship between the language and genetic groups
(From L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. P. Menozzi and A. Piazza, History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton, N.J., 1994)
From "The Berbers by Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress p. 15-16"
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Essentially a nonsensical tree because it is full of contradictions. It assumes that differentials in arbitrarily selected phenotypical traits reflect cladistic depth and that the branches of the tree have not crisscrossed any number of times in the past. It sometimes assumes that arbitrarily selected phenotypical differences reflect cladistic depth and other times it doesn't assume such. For example Indians and Australian Aboriginese are placed at opposite branches on the tree when in actual fact South Indians, Melanesians and Aboriginese spring from similar migratory groups out of Africa.
Thus, instead of a tree with spreading branches it would have been more accurate to portray the migratory history of HSS as a densely packed bush.
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posted
The above tree is derived from Cavelli Sforza's Genes, Languages and Peoples.
It isn't nonsensical but it is misprepesented here.
It tells us nothing about the spread of Berber language. [Sforza isn't a linguist, and *proves it* in his somewhat overreaching book]
It is *not* and analysis of languages per se. [if the thread poster disagrees, then he can tell us what language would be the "Ethiopian" shown in the tree?], but rather of genetic distance.
In the late 90's Sforza tried to equate genes with languages, but most would say that end up proving the opposite point - that genetic affinity and linguistic affinity can be distinct.
The Magrebian Berber are a perfect example.
Their language is African, and there is no Berber language anywhere in Europe.
But for the NorthWesternmost Coastal Berber, their genetic distance tends to be closer to Southern Europeans than other Africans.
Also remember that Sforza does not include Taureg in his NW African Berber Group - he states that they are genetically East African, yet they speak the 'same' language as NW African Berber.
Finally Sforza's data predates the revelations provided by Y chromosome analysis and E3b, which shows that coastal NorthWest African males must have come from East Africa during the Neolithic.
So the tree you posted tells us absolutely nothing about the spread of the Berber language. [your topic].
posted
It's a correct tree. West African languages are between pygmy and Nilotic.
Posts: 1115 | From: GOD Bless the USA | Registered: May 2006
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mazigh ك دير من اين انت في المغرب عفني في لغتي عوجة عندي سوأل ليش يكون الاهل الصحرى الناطقون اللغة البرابر اسود في لونهم لما كل ناسا يقول ان الطوارق من افريقة شرقي؟ هل عندهم دليل و ان المعظم الطوارق اسود من الاجل اخطلاط افارقة أيكون ذا دليلا لعدم الترفيع الشؤون الالوان في انفسهم؟ كيف يرى القربة بعضهم بعض في نسب؟ اقرب الى البرابر الشواطي او الاجوارهم الجنوبيين؟
-------------------- لا اله الا الله و محمد الرسول الله Posts: 495 | From: anchorage, alaska | Registered: Feb 2007
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Beg to differ. Here's why. Cavalli-Sforza writes(The History and Geography of Human Genes, p.380): " The central question is why should there be any congruence between genetic and linguistic evolution?[the key word here is 'evolution']The main resaon is that the two evolutions, in principle follow the same history, which can be represented, in a simple or sometimes oversimplified way, as a sequence of fissions. In two or more populations that have separated, there begins a process of differentiation of both genes and languages....
This is just a rehash of the old and discredited theory that sought to link languages genetically with the people who spoke such languages.
Diop, for example, pointed out the fallacy of such a view that established Pular as a "Hamitic language". And there are other examples--as in the case of the so-called "Afro-Asiatic languages".
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quote:Originally posted by MyRedCow: It's a correct tree. West African languages are between pygmy and Nilotic.
Evidently you are hard of hearing. It is *not* a language tree at all.
This thread is potentially a good example of how people can go off on wild tangents based on wrong initial assumptions.
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I should agree with you. The tree doesn't seem to me to be language related at all. I wonder where the Ancient Egyptian language is situated on the tree.
The tree was illustrated in the book where i got the above citation from. But it seems that the autors of that book tend from time to time to put some offtopic illustartions and references.
But how about the bold written citation in my original reply?
@abdulkarem3, sorry i don't have any information concerning your question. i only know i'm fine, and i'm from the Rif mountains (Northern Morocco). I hope i'll later find some info. concerning your questions.
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quote: Curiously, he retains the older model of immigration from a heartland from Semitic speakers who, he suggests, moved outwards from the Arabian peninsula around the third millennium BC, ultimately outnumbering and absorbing earlier language groups such as Sumerian. However, if we examine a map of the Afro-Asiatic languages - the easter Semitic group, Kushitic, Egyptian and Berber- both the centrality of the Nile Valley and the difficulty of positing the Arabian peninsula as "heratland" become evident.
^ This is true, though I wonder why the quotation fails to mention Chadic, and Omotic.
quote: There has never been any suggestion that the Nile Valley was populated from the Arabian peninsula, nor of any major shift in its population.
Well, there has been such a suggestion, but it is true that their is no serious evidence for it.
quote: It seems intelectually more satisfying to suggest that the advent of the neolithic in the lower Nile Valley and the delta area caused a major rise in its population density, and a consequent spin-off to the east and north-west of groups of people who carried the new techniques, and relted language, with them.
This is precisely the *African* neolithic whose specific precuror is the Khartoum mesolithic that we speak of so often. Afrisan languages originate in the horn/sudan, spread down the nile, to thence to the Levantine [Semitic], and to West Africa [ Chadic and Berber].
quote: This would explain the presence of these group in the Arabian peninsula as well as in North Africa.
Agreed.
quote: The climatic conditions during this period would have made the movement outward from the Nile a far less forbidding enterprise than it would be today.
Depends on the time period, in the Holocene much of the sahara ceased to exist, the drying up of northern Africa probably concentrated holocene Africans into the Nile Valley, and at some point prior to the neolithic decissation, the Arabian peninsula and the Levantine would have been more equable as well.
quote:This suggestion cannot, at the moment, be more than speculative. Archeological evidence for a consistent movement of people is lacking, while, unlike the Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic family was as whole has received little study.
However - it's received significant additional study since the above was published.
quote:The one statement we can make is that the Berber languages are all remarkably similar, which suggests that their spread accross North Africa was relatively uniform and did not occur over a great period of time.
This is clear, yes.
quote:The break between them and the old Egyptian (related to modern Coptic) could be explained by the physical barrier of the easter desert, which became more and more impassable as the Sahara dried out. Again, this would suggest that the separation of the two had taken place before the definitive drying out of the Sahara between 2,500 and 2,000BC.
I agree, but it is also clear that there is not simply a 'break' in saharan populations into East and Western Africans, and African language families, but rather a neolithic movement from East Africa to the West and to the Magreb.
What is most interesting about this view, and what gets 'lost' by the overpowering yet marginally relevant graphic of the tree..... is that it excludes the favorite Eurocentric ideas of Berber languge somehow spreading from Arabia, or Europe.
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^ It's innacurate and misleading. It has graphs that have been *altered* without permission from the original source', and it doesn't address your fallacious remarks about the tree shown in this thread.Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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And there ought to be a distinction between science and ideology. Any genetic dendogram based on continental populations is scientifically erroneous--especially given that all the continents are conjoined and that bottlenecks can develop both intercontinentally and intracontinetally.
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Dendograms are just cluster charts which show relationships between units of data.
*Anytime* [meaning, not just pertaining to population genetics] a chart is based upon 2 or more distinct data structures the results must be and imperfect generalisation.
Example:
A dendogram showing Native Flowers of Hawaii.
Flower is a phyla. Hawaii is geography. Thus a dendogram of flowers of Hawaii shows 1 data class in terms of another.
Your point is particularised in terms of population genetic dendograms - but you fail to explain why discussing Native Y chromosome lineages of Australia, is instrinsically any more 'ideological' than discussing Native Flowers of Hawaii (?)
Which leads me to...
quote:bottlenecks can develop both intercontinentally and intracontinetally.
This statement is self defeating, because you accept the idea of bottlenecks, admit they can be defined, and use continents as the bases of demarcation.
Apparently you do not see that the phrase "intercontinentally" and "intracontinentally" are both predicated on the continent as the basic unit of data.
In other words....we are right back where we started. Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:The one statement we can make is that the Berber languages are all remarkably similar, which suggests that their spread accross North Africa was relatively uniform and did not occur over a great period of time.
This is clear, yes.
Thanks rasol for the enlightening! I have read this in several sources. One source estimated that the spread of the Berber languages has happened in the third millennium before Christus.
How do they define the word "spread" (not literally)? With other words, do they mean the Berber language has replace other existing languages, or that it branched to various dialects/languages/branches?
We read in the book "A History of Language" of "Steven Roger Fischer" this following:
quote: Africa's luxuriant and fertile northern regions of 10,000 years ago - long before the relatively recent desertification - suggests a former population surfeit from which many ancient languages too their source. So far, 371 separate Afro-Asiatic languages have identified, in six separate Afro-Asiatic languages have been identified, in six separate families: Berber (29 languages), Chadic (192), Cushitic (47), Egyptian (1), Omotic of Ethiopia (28) and Semitic (73)... The surprising number of Chadic languages in comparison to the other, much smaller families possibly points to the origin of this important and very early superfamily that, before the great migrations at the end of the last Ice Age, occupied those regions of central North Africa which desert now claims in great swaths.
One of the better knwon Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian, a "family language" with written records dating back some 5,400 years, because of its unique geographical circumstances never generated multiple synchronic (contemporaneous) languages, but only single diachronic (temporal) ones.
We can see in this quote that author has used dubble standards to approch the spread of the languages. In the first case, he supposed that that the Chadic languge may be very old, while he explains the unification of the Egyptian language as a result of special circumstances.
additionally, we read this following in "African Languages: An Introduction" by "Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse" :
quote:The Berber language, another subgroup of the North Erythraic branch, expanded at three different periods. First, in the third millennium BC, the speakers of proto-Berber spread accross areas extending from the central Maghreb to the borders of Middle kingdom Egypt. A second Berber expansion covered large parts of North Africa in the last millennium BC and gave rise to many of the Berber peoples known in the Roman records. A final Berber spread took place in the first millennium AD. when the Tuareg, by then possessors of camels, occupied the central Sahara (Ehret 1999)
Now, my curious question would be that the spread of the proto-Berber languages has occured in the third millennium BC, i wonder what the Libyans (ancesors of the Berbers) known to the Egyptian before the third millenniums have spoken?! The autors specified the Egypt by referring to it as "Middle kingdom Egypt" while we know that the Libyans/Berbers were known to the Egyptians in the pre-dynastic era. This implies also that there already was a proto-Egyptian languae while the proto-Berbers has occured in late periods which contradicts the view of the original quote (the Berbers) considering the break between the Egyptian language and Berber language was a question of natural boundaries (the desertification) and thus a contemporary separation.
(It may be that i misunderstand them) Thanks in advance,
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Evidently you are hard of hearing. It is *not* a language tree at all.![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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