By the way, the Kuei-shang were not Chinese but Iranian or perhaps Tocharian (an independent branch of Indo-European gone extinct) speaking peoples who were known by the Chinese.
Of course non of them have anything to do with Nile Valley Kushites. And Clyde knows this.
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quote:Djehuti: By the way, the Kuei-shang were not Chinese but Iranian or perhaps Tocharian (an independent branch of Indo-European gone extinct) speaking peoples who were known by the Chinese.
The Yeuhzi people, who early resided near the border of the agricultural part of China and later migrated on the Eurasian steppe all the way to north India eventually becoming the rulers of the vast agricultural trading Kushan Empire. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dnschmid/Liu_Yuezhi_Kushan.pdfPosts: 1420 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Yonis: actually sad, clyde winters seems to have some sort of tunnel vision going on, he knows he's wrong but he doesn't seem to care for whatever reason when strong evidence are laid infront of him by his opponents. The closest descendants of the kushans.
They don't look quite kushitic now do they Clyde Winters? You seriously need to stop with these borderline childish claims of yours
Well he has a little fanbase [lion/lord], marc and a few others who apparently will believe anything.
I've warned them time and again that underneath the fools-gold Afrocentric sucker-bait, is Winters real-deal agenda which is that the Meriotic writing is imported from Asia and therefore *not* African.
In turn, I think he only believes this - because it allows him to believe he's deciphered the script.
This is what is most important to his ego, which is why in these conversations he accuses everyone else of being jealous.
He even accussed Theophille Obenga of being jealous of him when Obenga ignored his "Kushana-hypothesis".
Apparently Winters doesn't mind at a ll sounding a bit like Lex Luther. [Superman's egomaniac arch-villian].
Of course Lex Luther - evil genius - surrounded himself with 'useful-idiots'.
This is the function that Winters fan-base fullfills. Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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The Blacks who founded the Historic civilizations in Mesopotamia came from the Proto-Sahara.
William Leo Hansberry, African History Notebook, (1981) Volume 2 noted that:
In Persia the old Negroid element seems indeed to have been sufficiently powerful to maintain the overlord of the land. For the Negritic strain is clearly evident in statuary depicting members of the royal family ruling in the second millenium B.C.
Hundreds of years later, when Xerxes invaded Greece, the type was well represented in the Persian army. In the remote mountain regions bordering on Persia and Baluchistan, there is to be found at the present time a Negroid element which bears a remarkable resemblance to the type represented on the ancient mounments. Hence the Negritic or Ethiopian type has proved persistent in this area, and in ancient times it seems to have constituted numerically and socially an important factor in the population" (p.52) .
These ancient Proto-Saharans were called Kushites.The Greco-Roman writers made it clear that there were two Kushite empires one in Asia and the other group in the area we call the Sudan,Nubia, and parts of southern Egypt. The Greek writer Homer alluded to the two Kushite empires, when he wrote "a race divided, whom the sloping rays; the rising and the setting sun surveys". The Greek traveler/historian Herodutus claimed that he derived this information from the Egyptians.
The Asian Proto-Saharans were also called Kushites or Ethiopians. The term Ethiopian comes from two Greek terms: Ethios 'burnt' and ops 'face', as a result Ethiopian means the 'burnt faces'. Herodutus and Homer, described these Ethiopians as "the most just of men;the favorites of the gods". The classical literature makes it clear that the region from Egypt to India was called by the name Ethiopia.
For example, the Elamites called themselves KHATAM, and their capital Susa:KUSSI. In addition, the Kassites, who occupied the central part of the Zagros mountains were called KASHSHU. The Kushana, who helped invent the Meroitic writing, formerly occupied Chinese Turkistan (Xinjiang) and the Gansu province of China.
The Kushites in Asia, as in Africa were known for their skill as bowmen :Steu , the name of the people of Ta-Seti.
The decipherer of the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia, Rawlingson, said Puntites and Kushites were established in Asia. He found mention of Kushiya and Puntiya in the inscriptions of Darius. He also made it clear that the name Kush was also applied to southern Persia, India, Elam, Arabia, and Colchis (a part of southern Russia/Turkistan) in ancient times.
Elamite
Medes
Babylonians
Armenian
Gandaran
Arian
Cappadocian
. The Armenians made it clear that the ancients called Persia, Media,Elam , Aria, and the entire area between the Tigris and Indus rivers Kush.Bardesones, writing in his Book of the Laws of Countries, in the 2nd Century said that the "Bactrians who we called Qushani (or Kushans)".The Armenians, called the earlier Parthian: Kushan and acknowledged their connection with them. Homer, Herodotus, and the Roman scholar Strabo called southern Persia AETHIOPIA. The Greeks and Romans called the country east of Kerma: Kusan.
From Iran the Kushites used the natural entry point into China along the path running from the Zagros to the Altai mountains, and the Dzunganian gate. There is archaeological evidence indicating that farming communities village sites were established along this path of similar origin, which date back to 3500 BC. The archaeological data indicate that this agricultural economy spread from west to east
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You have to be very careful when you describe coins as Kushan. Some of the coins published on the Web are Bactrian and Greek coins that are promoted as Kushan coins.
Also, it is important to remember that the Kushan empire included many diverse nationalities and coins were minted in the languages of these subject people.
Furthermore, if you check the date for Kushan coins and other documents you will see that many of them date back to the period of the Meroitic empire.
.
Kushana
King Kaniska of the Kushan
Kanishka Casket
Kushana
-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Whereas Rilly is working from conjecture, my decipherment allows me to accurately and effectively compare Meroitic and Egyptian terms. Below is a discussion of the Meroitic and Egyptian relationship.
The Kushites and Egyptians had a close relationship for millennia. As a result the Egyptians had a tremendous influence on the culture of the Kushites, especially in the area of religion .
As early as the 12th dynasty the Egyptians controlled Nubia. After 1674 BC, the Kerma rulers regained control of Nubia until the raise of the New Kingdom. Pharaohs of the New Kingdom ruled Egypt for 500 years.
Nubia gained independence after the decline of Egypt in 1085 B.C. During this period the Kushites developed a highly developed civilization at Napata and Meroe (880 B.C.-A. D. 350). Over time the Kushites became strong enough to conqueror Egypt and found the 25th Dynasty.
The long association of Egypt and Nubia suggest that the Egyptians may have influenced more than the culture of the Kushites. In this paper we will review the affinities between the Egyptian and Meroitic languages.
Ll. Griffith during his decipherment of Meroitic (M.) found many Egyptian (E.) terms . These terms were especially used in the political culture area e.g., E. p-sy-n-nsw 'son of king' > M. pesto 'king's foothold/foundation of light' ....
In the short review above of Egyptian and Meroitic cognates we can see the obvious influence of Egyptian, especially Demotic on Meroitic. This influence was shown not only in vocabulary but also grammatical features.
This linguistic material discussed above clearly suggest some Egyptian substrata influence on Meroitic. It indicates Egyptian influence on both the structure and vocabulary of Meroitic.
It is very interesting to note that much of the affinity between Meroitic and Egyptian is based on Demotic examples. This may be explained by the fact that Demotic was used by the Kushites during the 25th Dynasty, and forms the foundation for the Meroitic writing.
Not news. Nobody questions the relationship between Demotic and Meroitic scripts, which is the argument I've always put forth in our exchanges. Apparently, Demotic script was a basis for developing Meroitic script, which did take its own character notwithstanding. You acknowledge this link and yet, talk of this questionable origin from the much younger Tocharian script.
My take based on evidential preponderance:
If Meroitic was a intra-Kushitic lingua franca, which as I noted before, that I suspect it was, then it was likely done so to unite the related but discerned sub-ethnic units of the Kushite society. Just as Demotic script had influenced Meroitic script, I suspect that the Kushitic/Meroitic language, which likely used as a foundation, some Nilo-Saharan affiliated language, also saw some extra-Kushitic infusions, with the most likely source being from its Egyptic counterpart, thus giving it a certain Afrasan touch to it. The descendants of Meroites went nowhere, they are still in the region, not withstanding some cultural shifts [like Arabization, Islamification, Christianization and so forth] along with various population movements along the region. Meroe was a literate society, and as such, there is no reason to assume that they couldn't have taken their scripture [and other specific cultural traits] along with them in the event of any potential 'exodus'. Meroitic script has been found nowhere else but in the Nile Valley!
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I would classify Meroitic as Niger-Congo langauge.
The great savant Cheikh Anta Diop (1974,1981) was convinced that many West African groups had formerly lived in the Egypto-Nubian region before they migrated to West Africa(Diop,1974). He supported this hypothesis with a discussion of the cognation between the names for gods in Egypt-Nubia and West Africa (Diop,1974), Egypto-Nubian and West African ethnomyns and toponyms common to both regions (Diop,1981) and West African and Egyptian languages.
Controversy surrounds the classification of the Niger-Congo Superfamily, especially the Mande group. Greenberg (1963) popularized the idea that the Mande subset was a member of the Niger-Congo Superset of Africa languages.
The position of Mande in the Niger-Congo Superset has long been precarious and today it is given a peripheral status to the Niger-Congo Superset (Bennett & Sterk 1977; Dalby 1988). Murkarovsky (1966) believes that the Mande group of languages does not belong in the Niger-Congo Superset, while Welmers (1971) and Bennett and Sterk (1977) has advanced the idea that Mande was the first group to break away from Niger-Congo, because of its loss of the noun class system.
The Mande languages are closely related to Songhay (Blench,1995; Mukarovsky 1976/77; Zima 1989), Nilo-Saharan ( Boyd 1978; Creissels 1981; Bender 1981) and the Chadic group. Zima (1989) compared 25 Songhay and Mandekan terms from the cultural vocabulary to highlight the correspondence between these two language groups.
Zima (1989:110) made it clear that "the lexical affinities between the Songhay and Mande languages are evident".This view was confirmed by Creissels (1981) who has provided many morphological and lexical similarities between Songhay and Mande, which are too numerous to be accounted for by chance.
Blench (1995)and B. Heine and D. Nurse, African Languages: An Introduction (pp.16-17) believes that the Niger-Congo (Mande) is especially closely united with Central Sudani and Kabu within Nilo-Saharan.
Mukarovsky (1987) has presented hundreds of analogous Mande and Cushitic terms. Due to the similarities between the Mande and Cushitic language families Mukarovsky (1987) would place Mande into the Afro-Asiatic Superset of languages.
This view is not surprising since the Mande languages are closely connected to Coptic as well.
This linguistic evidence makes it clear that the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic speakers originally lived intimate contact. The close relationship between these Superlanguage families makes it clear that Meroitic being classed as a Niger-Congo language would be congruent with the history of this language family.
There are many relationships between Meroitic and other African languages. For example, In Oromo/Galla, the term for queen is 'gifti'; and both 'naaga-ta" in Somali and Wolof 'jigen' mean woman. These terms appear to be related to Kdi > gti/e.
Yet even though we find cognition between some Cushitic and Nubian we can not use these languages to completely decipher Meroitic as proven by many past researchers. The Tocharian language on the otherhand, does allow us to read Meroitic and show its relationship with other African languages.
A comparison of Meroitic to African langauges indicate that Meroitic is closely related to langauges spoken in West Africa. Like Meroitic, the pronoun is often a suffix in other African languages. This suffix of the third person singular is usually n-, in other African languages. For example:
Bambara: no p r i 'his house' Kpelle: nyin 'his tooth' Akan: ni dan 'his house'
The Meroitic a- third person singular affix is also found in other African languages. For example:
Swahili: (1) a-ta kwenda 'he's going to go' (2) a-li-kwenda 'he is here' Manding: (1) ya zo 'he has come' (2) ya shirya mana 'he prepared (it) for us'.
The use of -i particle to form nouns in Meroitic correspond to the use of the -it and -ayy suffixes to form nouns in Wolof. The Wolof abstract noun formative suffix is -it, -itt, e.g., dog 'to cut', dogit 'sharpness'.
In Wolof abstract nouns are also formed by the addition of the suffix -ayy, and in Dyolo -ay, e.g., baax 'good', baaxaay 'goodness'.
Prefixes are rarely used in Meroitic. The most common prefixes include the prefix of reinforcement -p, the intensive prefix -a and the imperfect prefix -b. The p-, can be either the prefix of reinforcement e.g., ŝ 'patron', p-ŝ 'the patron' ; or the imperfect prefix e.g.,ŝiñ'satisfaction', p-ŝiñ "continuous satisfaction'.
The Meroitic p- affix, means ‘the’. This Meroitic grammatical element corresponds to the Egyptian demonstrative pi 'the'.
In Meroitic, the –o element is used to change a noun into an adjective. The Meroitic –o suffix, agrees with the use affix –u, joined to a vowel, in other African languages to form adjectives. In Swahili, many adjectives are formed by the k- consonant plus the vowel -u : Ku. For example:
In Meroitic the plural case was made by the suffix -b, or reduplication. Reduplication was also used as a plural effect in Meroitic, e.g., d'donations',d-d 'considerable donations'. Reduplication is also used in other African languages to express the idea of abundance and diversity. For example, Swahili: Chungu kikavunjika vipande vipnade ."The cooking pot broke into pieces".
The Meroitic use of the -b suffix to make the plural number, corresponds to the use of the -ba- affix in African languages. In the Bantu languages the plural is formed by the ba- affix. In the Manding group of languages we see use of the -ba suffix. In Manding, the -ba affix is joined to nouns to denote the idea of physical or moral greatness. For example:
(1) na-folo 'good, rich' na-folo-ba 'great fortune' (2) so-kalo 'piece' so-kalo-ba 'considerable quarter of a village'.
In the Meroitic inscriptions there is constant mention of the khi 'body, spirit', the kha 'the abstract personality', the kho 'a shinning or translucent spirit soul'; and the Ba 'soul'. In many African languages the term Ba, is used to denote the terms 'soul or to be'. For example:
Egyptian: Ba Mbachi : Ba Coptic : Bai Bambara : Be Fang : Be.
The kha, existed within and without the human body. It would remain with the body until its flesh decayed, then it would either leave the tomb or hunt it. The Meroitic idea of Kha, as a spirit corresponds to Ka, in many African languages. For example:
Egyptian : Ka Manding : Ka Banda : Ka.
The linguistic evidence makes it clear that some of the Meroites may have spoken languages that belonged to the Niger-Congo-Mande family of languages. This is supported by the linguistic evidence of shared grammatical forms and lexical items between Meroitic and Niger-Congo-Mande discussed above.
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The Kushana hypothesis was based on the following evidence, 1) no African language has been found to be a cognate language of Meroitic 2) the Classical literature says that the Kushites lived in Asia and Africa; 3) the Gymnosophists, or "naked sages" of Meroe came from India.
Before I began work on Meroitic, other researchers had already falsified the African theory for Meroitic's cognate language. The fact that not even Nubian, a language spoken by a people who lived in the Meroitic empire, failed to be the cognate language of Meroitic made it clear that we must look elsewhere for the cognate language spoken by the Meroites.
Flavius Philostratus, the writer of the Vita Apollonii, Vol. 1,cliamed that the Gymnosophists of Meroe originally came from India (see F.C. Conybeare, Philostratus:The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (p.45),1950). Given the fact that the Kushana had formerly ruled India around the time that the Meroitic writing was introduced to the Kushite civilization, lead to the hypothesis that the ancestors of the Gymnosophist may have been Kushana philosophers.
The historical evidence of the Kushana having ruled India made the Classical references to Indians in Meroe, an important source for the construction of alternative theories about the possible location of the cognate language of Meroitic.
There is external evidence, which supports my theory. A theory explains observed phenomena and has predictive power. I have theorized that due to the claims of the Classical writers that some of the Meroites came from India (F.C Conybeare (Trans.), Philostratus: The life of Apollonius of Tyana Vol.2, (1950) pg.271). According to the Life of Apollonius, the Indian Meroites were formerly led by a King Ganges, who had "repulsed the Scythians who invaded this land [India from] across the Caucasus" (Conybeare, Vol.1, Pg.273). Pilostratus also made it clear that the Indians of Meroe came to this country after their king was killed.
The presence of this tradition of an Indian King of the Indian-Meroites conquering the Scythians predicts that the Indian literature should record this historical episode. This prediction is supported by a Jaina text called the Kalakeharya-Kathanaka, which reports that when the Scythians invaded Malwa, the King of Malwa, called Vikramaditya defeated the Scythians (H. Kulke & D. Rothermund, History of India (London, Routledge: 1990, pg.73). This king Vikramaditya may be the Ganges mentioned in the Life of Apollonius.Confirmation of the Ganges story, supports the Classical literary evidence that their were Indianized-Meroites that could have introduced the Tokharian trade language to the Meroites.
Moreover, there were other Indians in North Africa in addition to Kush/Meroe. For example, at Quseir al-Qadim there was a large Indian speaking community (see: R. Salomon, "Epigraphic remains of Indian traders in Egypt", Journal of the American oriental Society, (1991) pp.731-736; and R. Salomon, Addenda, Journal of the American Oriental Society, (1993) pg.593). These Indians were in Egypt writing messages in their own language, around the time we see a switch from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Meroitic writing system.
The evidence that the Classical references to an Indian-Meroite King who conquered the Scythians is supported by the Indian literature, provides external corroboration of the tradition that some of the Meroites were of Indian origin. The presence of Indians traders and settlers in Meroe (and Egypt), makes it almost impossible to deny the possibility that Indians, familiar with the Tokharian trade language did not introduce this writing to the Meroites who needed a neutral language to unify the diverse ethnic groups who made up the Meroite state. In relation to the history of linguistic change and bilingualism, it is a mistake to believe that linguistic transfer had to take place for the Meroites to have used Tokharian, when it did not take place when they wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In summary the classical literature makes it clear that there was a connection between the Gymnosophists (of Meroe) and the Indians. The fact that historical events mentioned in the classical sources are found in the Indian literature confirm the view that there were Indian-Meroites who could have introduced the Tokharian trade language to the Meroites.
The fact that the Nubians who were part of the "Meroitic state", used hieroglyphics and Coptic to write their language without abandoning their native language support the view that they could have also used Tokharian to write Meroitic. And that eventhough they wrote Meroitic inscriptions in Tokharian, they would not have had to abandon Nubian.
The evidence presented above provides internal and external validity for my theory based upon the sources I have cited previously. The sources I have used are impartial, to disconfirm my hypothesis someone needs to show that my propositions are not fully informed [i.e., there were no Indians North Africa and Kush when the Classical writers maintained they were] and present rival explanations based on the evidence. The fact that the claims made by the Classical writers is supported by the Indians themselves if further strong confirmation of the Kushana hypothesis.
The hypothesis based on the classical literature, was enough to support the original Kushana Hypothesis. The predicting power of the original theory, matches the observed natural phenomena which was confirmed elsewhere by cognate place names, ethononyms, lexical items and grammatical features, indicate that my theory has not be falsified.
The ability to reliably predict a linguistic relationship between Kushana and Meroitic, was further confirmation of the Kushana Hypothesis, because the linguistic connections were deducible from prediction.
I controlled the Kushana Hypothesis by comparing the statements of the classical writers, with historical, linguistic anthropological and toponymic evidence found not only in Africa, but also India and Central Asia [where the people also used Tokharian as a trade language to unify the various people in Central Asia]. I constructed five testable hypotheses in support of the Kushana theory, and it seems only fair that these five variables must be disconfirmed, to falsify the Kushana Hypothesis. Failure to disconfirm this theorem, implies validity of my prediction.
My confirmation of the above five variables: the presence of Kushites in Africa and Asia; the presence of Kushana sages in India who may have migrated to Meroe; cognate lexical items; cognate verbs and cognate grammatical features indicates systematic controlled, critical and empirical investigation of the question of Kushana representing the Meroitic cognate language.
I would classify Meroitic as Niger-Congo langauge.
The great savant Cheikh Anta Diop (1974,1981) was convinced that many West African groups had formerly lived in the Egypto-Nubian region before they migrated to West Africa(Diop,1974). He supported this hypothesis with a discussion of the cognation between the names for gods in Egypt-Nubia and West Africa (Diop,1974), Egypto-Nubian and West African ethnomyns and toponyms common to both regions (Diop,1981) and West African and Egyptian languages.
There are many relationships between Meroitic and other African languages. For example, In Oromo/Galla, the term for queen is 'gifti'; and both 'naaga-ta" in Somali and Wolof 'jigen' mean woman. These terms appear to be related to Kdi > gti/e.
Yet even though we find cognition between some Cushitic and Nubian we can not use these languages to completely decipher Meroitic as proven by many past researchers. The Tocharian language on the otherhand, does allow us to read Meroitic and show its relationship with other African languages...
Like I said before, you repeat nullified claims, in a manner not different from a pre-programmed robot repeating the same line in any given occasion. Contrary to what spin-doctors think, repeating descredited lines doesn't lend it legitimacy. You can fool some people all of the time, but you can't fool everyone all the time.Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Whereas Rilly is working from conjecture, my decipherment allows me to accurately and effectively compare Meroitic and Egyptian terms. Below is a discussion of the Meroitic and Egyptian relationship.
The Kushites and Egyptians had a close relationship for millennia. As a result the Egyptians had a tremendous influence on the culture of the Kushites, especially in the area of religion .
As early as the 12th dynasty the Egyptians controlled Nubia. After 1674 BC, the Kerma rulers regained control of Nubia until the raise of the New Kingdom. Pharaohs of the New Kingdom ruled Egypt for 500 years.
Nubia gained independence after the decline of Egypt in 1085 B.C. During this period the Kushites developed a highly developed civilization at Napata and Meroe (880 B.C.-A. D. 350). Over time the Kushites became strong enough to conqueror Egypt and found the 25th Dynasty.
The long association of Egypt and Nubia suggest that the Egyptians may have influenced more than the culture of the Kushites. In this paper we will review the affinities between the Egyptian and Meroitic languages.
Ll. Griffith during his decipherment of Meroitic (M.) found many Egyptian (E.) terms . These terms were especially used in the political culture area e.g., E. p-sy-n-nsw 'son of king' > M. pesto 'king's foothold/foundation of light' ....
In the short review above of Egyptian and Meroitic cognates we can see the obvious influence of Egyptian, especially Demotic on Meroitic. This influence was shown not only in vocabulary but also grammatical features.
This linguistic material discussed above clearly suggest some Egyptian substrata influence on Meroitic. It indicates Egyptian influence on both the structure and vocabulary of Meroitic.
It is very interesting to note that much of the affinity between Meroitic and Egyptian is based on Demotic examples. This may be explained by the fact that Demotic was used by the Kushites during the 25th Dynasty, and forms the foundation for the Meroitic writing.
Not news. Nobody questions the relationship between Demotic and Meroitic scripts, which is the argument I've always put forth in our exchanges. Apparently, Demotic script was a basis for developing Meroitic script, which did take its own character notwithstanding. You acknowledge this link and yet, talk of this questionable origin from the much younger Tocharian script.
My take based on evidential preponderance:
If Meroitic was a intra-Kushitic lingua franca, which as I noted before, that I suspect it was, then it was likely done so to unite the related but discerned sub-ethnic units of the Kushite society. Just as Demotic script had influenced Meroitic script, I suspect that the Kushitic/Meroitic language, which likely used as a foundation, some Nilo-Saharan affiliated language, also saw some extra-Kushitic infusions, with the most likely source being from its Egyptic counterpart, thus giving it a certain Afrasan touch to it. The descendants of Meroites went nowhere, they are still in the region, not withstanding some cultural shifts [like Arabization, Islamification, Christianization and so forth] along with various population movements along the region. Meroe was a literate society, and as such, there is no reason to assume that they couldn't have taken their scripture [and other specific cultural traits] along with them in the event of any potential 'exodus'. Meroitic script has been found nowhere else but in the Nile Valley!
I have always claimed that Meroitic was a lingua franca. But I do not believe that it was related to Nubian because the Nuba were never part of the Meroitic Empire.
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I have always claimed that Meroitic was a lingua franca. But I do not believe that it was related to Nubian because the Nuba were never part of the Meroitic Empire.
Circular argument. Reference my response to this nonsense in the preceding page.
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I would classify Meroitic as Niger-Congo langauge.
The great savant Cheikh Anta Diop (1974,1981) was convinced that many West African groups had formerly lived in the Egypto-Nubian region before they migrated to West Africa(Diop,1974). He supported this hypothesis with a discussion of the cognation between the names for gods in Egypt-Nubia and West Africa (Diop,1974), Egypto-Nubian and West African ethnomyns and toponyms common to both regions (Diop,1981) and West African and Egyptian languages.
There are many relationships between Meroitic and other African languages. For example, In Oromo/Galla, the term for queen is 'gifti'; and both 'naaga-ta" in Somali and Wolof 'jigen' mean woman. These terms appear to be related to Kdi > gti/e.
Yet even though we find cognition between some Cushitic and Nubian we can not use these languages to completely decipher Meroitic as proven by many past researchers. The Tocharian language on the otherhand, does allow us to read Meroitic and show its relationship with other African languages...
Like I said before, you repeat nullified claims, in a manner not different from a pre-programmed robot repeating the same line in any given occasion. Contrary to what spin-doctors think, repeating descredited lines doesn't lend it legitimacy. You can fool some people all of the time, but you can't fool everyone all the time.
I am not trying to fool anyone. There was no evidence that Meroitic was related to any African languages until my decipherment as outlined above.
The comparative method was used to find the cognate language of Meroitic. Using this method Meroitic scholars have compared the "known" Meroitic terms to vernacular African languages to establish morphological cognition between Meroitic and an African language. Up to now these linguistic comparisons failed to reveal the cognate language of Meroitic.
Researchers working on the Meroitic language do not believe that it was a member of the Afro-Asian group. Griffith and Haycock tried to read Meroitic using Nubian.
K.H. Priese, tried to read the Meroitic text using Eastern Sudani; and F. Hintze, attempted to compare Meroitic with the Ural-Altaic group. Siegbert Hummel, compared the "known" Meroitic words to words in the Altaic family which he believed was a substrate language of Meroitic.
Rilly recently claimed that Meroitic is related to Nubian , eventhough Griffith and Haycock failed to read Meroitic using Nubian. Rilly's hypothesis is that Meroitic can be read by reconstructing the proto-language of the Sudani language.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
We can disconfirm this theory because it is not supported by the historical and linguistic evidence we have concerning the linguistic and political history of Kush. We must reject Rilly's theory because ,we have no evidence that 1) Proto-Nilo-Saharan, as constructed by Rilly was ever spoken by a living being; 2) we have evidence that the Noba/Nubians entered Nubia long after the Kushites had founded Napatan and Meroitic civilizations, so eventhough they live in Nubia today, they are not representative of Kushite people who they were often in conflict with; 3) Egyptian documents make it clear that the Blymmes also entered the area after the founding of Napatan and Meroitic civilization, so even if some people claim that the Beja=Blymmes this is conjecture. Consequently, even if Beja= Blymmes, they donot represent the Kushite people who founded the Napata and Meroe civilizations, because both the Noba and Blymmes entered Kush after its founding. This makes it clear that although Rilly's evidence looked promising, the data presented in support of the hypothesis fails to support his claim.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
Because there are no cognate Meroitic terms and lexical items in the Eastern Sudanic Languages, Rilly has begun to reconstruct Proto-Eastern Sudanic, and attempt to read Meroitic text using his Proto-Eastern Sudanic vocabulary. Even if I hadn’t deciphered the Meroitic writing this method would never lead to the decipherment of this or any other language.
First, it must be stated that no “dead “ language has been deciphered using a proto-language. These languages were deciphered using living languages, Coptic in the case of Egyptian, Oromo and (Ethiopian) Semitic was used to decipher the Mesopotamian Cuneiform scripts.
The basic problem with using a proto-language to read a dead language results from the fact that the proto-language has been reconstructed by linguist who have no knowledge or textual evidence of the alleged proto-language. Secondly, there are subgroups in any family of languages. This means that you must first establish the intermediate proto-language (IPL) of the subgroup languages in the target language family. Once the IPLs have been reconstructed, you can then reconstruct the superordinate proto-language (SPL).
You can only reconstruct the SPL on the basis of attested languages. In addition, before you can reconstruct the IPLs and SPL a genetic relationship must be established for the languages within the Superfamily of languages, e.g., Nilo Saharan.
The problem with Rilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have not textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudan in Meroitic times. As a result, the languages spoken by people in this area today may not reflect the linguistic geography of the Sudan in the Meroitic period. This is most evident when we look at modern Egypt. Today the dominant language is Arabic, and yet Arabic has no relationship to Egyptian. If we accept Rilly’s method for deciphering Egyptian we would assume that once me reconstructed proto-Semitic , we could read Egyptian—but as you know Egyptian is not a Semitic language.
These scholars failed to find a match between Meroitic and the vernacular languages of Nubia and the Sudan. This made it necessary to turn to the historical literature concerning the Kushites to form a new hypothesis related to possible sources of the Meroitic language. The historical literature of the Kushites comes from Egyptian and classical sources. It was the Classical authors who noted the influence of the Indians on Meroitic civilization.
Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Doesn't matter; you simply aren't fooling everyone.
quote:Clyde Winters:
There was no evidence that Meroitic was related to any African languages until my decipherment as outlined above.
Of course there is, and I've already demonstrated this.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The comparative method was used to find the cognate language of Meroitic. Using this method Meroitic scholars have compared the "known" Meroitic terms to vernacular African languages to establish morphological cognition between Meroitic and an African language.
That's how it is done; comparative method to find relationships between languages under study.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Up to now these linguistic comparisons failed to reveal the cognate language of Meroitic
Apparently it is a defunct [lingua franca type] language as Egyptic is, but its relationship with contemporary language families [NE Sudanic Nilo-Saharan family] has been demonstrated.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly recently claimed that Meroitic is related to Nubian , eventhough Griffith and Haycock failed to read Meroitic using Nubian.
Rilly claims that it is related to Nilo-Saharan, particularly NE Sudanic branch. What Griffith or Haycock has failed to do, has no bearing on Rilly's work. He even outlined previous failed attempts to find relationship:
Moreover, in the list of the allegedly translated Meroitic words, some were actually wrong. In 1964, Bruce Trigger tried to prove that Meroitic was a Nilo-Saharan - and more specifically an Eastern Sudanic - language. He used a list of Meroitic words compared with Nubian and Nara, a language from Eritrea. But the list was still very scanty, and half the words he used, taken from Zyhlarz's articles, were erroneously translated - or simply did not exist at all. Although he was right in his conclusion, he was wrong in the way he reached them.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly's hypothesis is that Meroitic can be read by reconstructing the proto-language of the Sudani language.
Wrong. Rilly's objective was to show family association of Meroitic, because he acknowledges that:
In spite of the scanty available data, the result is obvious : Meroitic is more than probably a member of the North Eastern Sudanic family.
However, proto-NE Sudanic, proto-Nubian, proto-Taman, or any given languages, can be reconstructed by cognation and phonetic correspondence via comparative analysis.
quote: Clyde Winters:
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan.
Yes.
quote:Clyde Winters:
He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
False. He claims this by comparing Meroitic with contemporary Nilo-Saharan dialects of the NE Sudanic family.
Moreover, Rilly did also analyze Meroitic with other language families outside of Nilo-Saharan, and found no strong correspondence, further rendering your rationale invalid.
quote:Clyde Winters:
We can disconfirm this theory because it is not supported by the historical and linguistic evidence we have concerning the linguistic and political history of Kush.
You can't disconfirm something you haven't even gotten down right, wittingly or unwittingly.
quote:Clyde Winters:
We must reject Rilly's theory because ,we have no evidence that 1) Proto-Nilo-Saharan, as constructed by Rilly was ever spoken by a living being;
False premise: Proto-Nubian, Proto-Taman & Proto-nes were reconstructed.
quote:Clyde Winters:
2) we have evidence that the Noba/Nubians entered Nubia long after the Kushites had founded Napatan and Meroitic civilizations, so eventhough they live in Nubia today, they are not representative of Kushite people who they were often in conflict with;
Circular argument of the nullified. Also notwithstanding the play with the word "Nubian", akin to the Eurocentric ruse [applying it according to convenience of the 'ideological' occasion at hand], you have no evidence of displacement or wipe out of Kushitic population.
quote:Clyde Winters
3) Egyptian documents make it clear that the Blymmes also entered the area after the founding of Napatan and Meroitic civilization, so even if some people claim that the Beja=Blymmes this is conjecture.
Non-issue.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Consequently, even if Beja= Blymmes, they donot represent the Kushite people who founded the Napata and Meroe civilizations, because both the Noba and Blymmes entered Kush after its founding. This makes it clear that although Rilly's evidence looked promising, the data presented in support of the hypothesis fails to support his claim.
Strawman. Cite Rilly on the 'Blymmes'.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
Circular argument and false. See posts above.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Because there are no cognate Meroitic terms and lexical items in the Eastern Sudanic Languages, Rilly has begun to reconstruct Proto-Eastern Sudanic, and attempt to read Meroitic text using his Proto-Eastern Sudanic vocabulary.
False. As a self-proclaimed linguist, you are still incapable of understanding what Rilly was communicating to the audience. Lexical cognition was demonstrated in the tables. One of those tables specifically represents relationship via lexicostatistic analysis, using contemporary Nilo-Saharan languages and available Meroitic lexicons.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Even if I hadn’t deciphered the Meroitic writing this method would never lead to the decipherment of this or any other language.
Where did he proclaim to have deciphered Meroitic, or that this was even his goal at hand?
quote:Clyde Winters:
First, it must be stated that no “dead “ language has been deciphered using a proto-language.
Strawman.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The basic problem with using a proto-language to read a dead language results from the fact that the proto-language has been reconstructed by linguist who have no knowledge or textual evidence of the alleged proto-language. Secondly, there are subgroups in any family of languages. This means that you must first establish the intermediate proto-language (IPL) of the subgroup languages in the target language family. Once the IPLs have been reconstructed, you can then reconstruct the superordinate proto-language (SPL).
Waste of typing for such a lengthy followup to a strawman setup, wouldn't you say?
quote:Clyde Winters:
You can only reconstruct the SPL on the basis of attested languages. In addition, before you can reconstruct the IPLs and SPL a genetic relationship must be established for the languages within the Superfamily of languages, e.g., Nilo Saharan.
See above.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The problem with Rilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have not textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudan in Meroitic times.
What is the Meroitic script then, if not textual evidence of people who live in Sudan, Meroe, during the Meroitic times? LOL. Yes, proto-terms for Eastern Sudanic languages can be setup via comparative analysis, using lexical correspondance across living E. Sudanic languages. A true linguist would know this.
quote:Clyde Winters:
As a result, the languages spoken by people in this area today may not reflect the linguistic geography of the Sudan in the Meroitic period.
Non-sequitur, by strawmen.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This is most evident when we look at modern Egypt. Today the dominant language is Arabic, and yet Arabic has no relationship to Egyptian. If we accept Rilly’s method for deciphering Egyptian we would assume that once me reconstructed proto-Semitic , we could read Egyptian—but as you know Egyptian is not a Semitic language.
Firstly, Arabic isn't indigenous to Egypt, and is from a single source, 'Arabic'. The same can't be said of the Nilo-Saharan dialects spread along Sudan to southern Egypt. These are 'indigenous' languages. Are you suggesting that *all* these different dialects suddenly replaced *all* the former languages of the region, leaving no trace of the original languages of the region?
Recap: Rilly did also analyze Meroitic with other language families outside of Nilo-Saharan, and found no strong correspondence, further rendering your rationale invalid.
quote:Clyde Winters:
These scholars failed to find a match between Meroitic and the vernacular languages of Nubia and the Sudan.
False. Rilly has demonstrated matches between the Meroitic and those languages now in Sudan.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This made it necessary to turn to the historical literature concerning the Kushites to form a new hypothesis related to possible sources of the Meroitic language. The historical literature of the Kushites comes from Egyptian and classical sources. It was the Classical authors who noted the influence of the Indians on Meroitic civilization.
Let me guess: the dubious Tocharian-Meroitic link that you recite like a broken record. Too bad; your narrative has been nullified, yet again.
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quote:Dr. Winters writes: The problem with Rilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have not textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudan in Meroitic times.
quote:MysterySolver writes: What is the Meroitic script then, if not textual evidence of people who live in Sudan, Meroe, during the Meroitic times?
Dr. Winters, MysterySolver is correct in noting your tendency to make circular arguments.
Do you see how you've done that - via your statment above?
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posted
Supercar it is a waste of time discussing Riley's alleged decipherment with you.
It is clear that you don't understand anything about a proto-language:
quote: proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
1. A proto-language is reconstructed by comparing languages from a language family, absence of a full understanding of Meroitic before Rilly did his reconstructions makes his reconstructions invalid;
2. There is no way you can claim a proto-language existed because the entire language is made-up;
3. Because of 2 and 3, no language has been deciphered using a proto-language.
You don't know anything about linguistics so I will not discuss this matter with you further.
I will continue to post the linguistic reasons why Rilly is wrong for people in the know. There was no evidence that Meroitic was related to any African languages until my decipherment as outlined above.
The comparative method was used to find the cognate language of Meroitic. Using this method Meroitic scholars have compared the "known" Meroitic terms to vernacular African languages to establish morphological cognition between Meroitic and an African language. Up to now these linguistic comparisons failed to reveal the cognate language of Meroitic.
Researchers working on the Meroitic language do not believe that it was a member of the Afro-Asian group. Griffith and Haycock tried to read Meroitic using Nubian.
K.H. Priese, tried to read the Meroitic text using Eastern Sudani; and F. Hintze, attempted to compare Meroitic with the Ural-Altaic group. Siegbert Hummel, compared the "known" Meroitic words to words in the Altaic family which he believed was a substrate language of Meroitic.
Rilly recently claimed that Meroitic is related to Nubian , eventhough Griffith and Haycock failed to read Meroitic using Nubian. Rilly's hypothesis is that Meroitic can be read by reconstructing the proto-language of the Sudani language.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
We can disconfirm this theory because it is not supported by the historical and linguistic evidence we have concerning the linguistic and political history of Kush. We must reject Rilly's theory because ,we have no evidence that 1) Proto-Nilo-Saharan, as constructed by Rilly was ever spoken by a living being; 2) we have evidence that the Noba/Nubians entered Nubia long after the Kushites had founded Napatan and Meroitic civilizations, so eventhough they live in Nubia today, they are not representative of Kushite people who they were often in conflict with; 3) Egyptian documents make it clear that the Blymmes also entered the area after the founding of Napatan and Meroitic civilization, so even if some people claim that the Beja=Blymmes this is conjecture. Consequently, even if Beja= Blymmes, they donot represent the Kushite people who founded the Napata and Meroe civilizations, because both the Noba and Blymmes entered Kush after its founding. This makes it clear that although Rilly's evidence looked promising, the data presented in support of the hypothesis fails to support his claim.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
Because there are no cognate Meroitic terms and lexical items in the Eastern Sudanic Languages, Rilly has begun to reconstruct Proto-Eastern Sudanic, and attempt to read Meroitic text using his Proto-Eastern Sudanic vocabulary. Even if I hadn’t deciphered the Meroitic writing this method would never lead to the decipherment of this or any other language.
First, it must be stated that no “dead “ language has been deciphered using a proto-language. These languages were deciphered using living languages, Coptic in the case of Egyptian, Oromo and (Ethiopian) Semitic was used to decipher the Mesopotamian Cuneiform scripts.
The basic problem with using a proto-language to read a dead language results from the fact that the proto-language has been reconstructed by linguist who have no knowledge or textual evidence of the alleged proto-language. Secondly, there are subgroups in any family of languages. This means that you must first establish the intermediate proto-language (IPL) of the subgroup languages in the target language family. Once the IPLs have been reconstructed, you can then reconstruct the superordinate proto-language (SPL).
You can only reconstruct the SPL on the basis of attested languages. In addition, before you can reconstruct the IPLs and SPL a genetic relationship must be established for the languages within the Superfamily of languages, e.g., Nilo Saharan.
The problem with Rilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have not textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudan in Meroitic times. As a result, the languages spoken by people in this area today may not reflect the linguistic geography of the Sudan in the Meroitic period. This is most evident when we look at modern Egypt. Today the dominant language is Arabic, and yet Arabic has no relationship to Egyptian. If we accept Rilly’s method for deciphering Egyptian we would assume that once me reconstructed proto-Semitic , we could read Egyptian—but as you know Egyptian is not a Semitic language.
These scholars failed to find a match between Meroitic and the vernacular languages of Nubia and the Sudan. This made it necessary to turn to the historical literature concerning the Kushites to form a new hypothesis related to possible sources of the Meroitic language. The historical literature of the Kushites comes from Egyptian and classical sources. It was the Classical authors who noted the influence of the Indians on Meroitic civilization.
Dr. Winters, MysterySolver is correct in noting your tendency to make circular arguments.
Do you see how you've done that - via your statment above?
What's worst, as I have amply demonstrated, is that he doesn't seem to have grasped the concepts Rilly is applying and what is being relayed. For instance, he keeps talking of Rilly's supposed reconstruction of proto-Nilo-Sahara, as a means to translate Meroitic, when there is no such thing to be found in the Rilly piece at hand.
He keeps talking about Rilly's focus on geography, in that he chooses to focus on groups in Sudan simply because this is where the Meroitic complex used to be situated. Fact is, before even considering Nilo-Saharan, Rilly first sought after possible cognative association with the Niger-congo and Afrasan families, only to find out that there was no strong correspondence, just as previous attempts by other researchers had demonstrated. On the other hand, stronger correspondence was observed in the Nilo-Saharan family, particularly the eastern Sudanic family, with the northern branches of this family being yet closer.
Rilly himself had this to say about the demographic events in the region:
According to the most recent archaeological work carried out by the University of Geneva, Kerma was founded around 2400 years BC and did not undergo any dramatic ethnic or cultural changes until its final stage. So the origin of Meroitic can now be placed very probably around this date or even a little earlier...
Nowadays, these languages are scattered from Chad to Eritrea, but in the past, there was a link between their present situations : the Wadi Howar, an ancient river, now dried up, once an important tributary of the Nile. In the fourth millenary BC, all the region around this river was still a green country convenient for cattle-breeding. But around this time, this part of the Sahara became arid. Very probably, the pastoral populations living in the region were progressively obliged to gather together along the banks of the Wadi Howar. There they lived together for centuries and acquired a common language : Proto-North Eastern Sudanic. But in the beginning of third millenary BC, the river itself progressively dried up. So a first population migrated to the Nile, where they founded the Kingdom of Kerma, not far from the confluence of the Wadi Howar and the Nile. The geographical, historical and climatic data offer a common support to this theory.
The Taman group went East, towards the springs of the river, to the place where they still live today. Another refugee group, the ancestors of Nubian and Nyima speakers, went South to Kordofan, where they still live today. Later on, in the first centuries AD, Nubian groups invaded the dying Kingdom of Meroe and founded their own kingdoms along the Nile. As for Nara people, I think they first went to the Nile, like the future Meroites, and later went up the Nile and the Atbara toward Eritrea, where they live nowadays.
^Although current work have linked Kerma settlements with earlier settlements in pre-Kerma phases, suggesting settlements stretching further back in time than what's been detailed here, clearly, Rilly notes certain population movements that Clyde accuses him to be ignorant of, and hence, not considering them in his analysis. Winters is just totally disengaged with the real specifics at hand.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Supercar it is a waste of time discussing Riley's alleged decipherment with you.
It is clear that you don't understand anything about a proto-language:
quote: proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
1. A proto-language is reconstructed by comparing languages from a language family, absence of a full understanding of Meroitic before Rilly did his reconstructions makes his reconstructions invalid;
2. There is no way you can claim a proto-language existed because the entire language is made-up;
3. Because of 2 and 3, no language has been deciphered using a proto-language.
You don't know anything about linguistics so I will not discuss this matter with you further.
This is the same tired old robotic line, devoid of intelligence, that you throw at just about anyone who details serious flaws in your perceptiveness on the issues at hand.
You haven't even attempted to engage the specifics of my last point-by-point feedback to your narrative; instead your best comeback, is to throw gibberish of non-sequiturs around, and go about your robotic recitations. Circular disengaged argument, filled with 'off-on-a-tangent' personal attacks, is your trademark; the symptom of argument set up on broken logic.
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quote:For instance, he keeps talking of Rilly's supposed reconstruction of proto-Nilo-Sahara, as a means to translate Meroitic, when there is no such thing to be found in the Rilly piece at hand.
He also says that proto-Nilo-Saharan is invalid, because Rilly's work precedes 'full' understanding of Merotic.
This also makes no sense.
That is -
* It does not follow that proto-Nilo-saharan requires 'full understanding' of Merotic. [what Proto language is based on 'full' understanding of *all* its alleged member langauges?].
** It has not been proven that Meroitic is 'fully' understood, now.
Winters 'claims' to fully understand it.
He is supposed to be proving this, but again his *proof* requires assumption of his conclusion.
If i'm right, therefore i must be right. Circular reasoning. lol.
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quote:He keeps talking about Rilly's focus on geography, in that he chooses to focus on groups in Sudan simply because this is where the Meroitic complex used to be situated. Fact is, before even considering Nilo-Saharan, Rilly first sought after possible cognative association with the Niger-congo and Afrasan families, only to find out that there was no strong correspondence, just as previous attempts by other researchers had demonstrated. On the other hand, stronger correspondence was observed in the Nilo-Saharan family, particularly the eastern Sudanic family, with the northern branches of this family being yet closer.
That makes sense.
Winters says that Merotic is unrelated to *any* African language - was brought in by Indian Gymnansophists, who are really Proto Saharans, and then turns around and classifies the langauge as Niger Congo.
quote:For instance, he keeps talking of Rilly's supposed reconstruction of proto-Nilo-Sahara, as a means to translate Meroitic, when there is no such thing to be found in the Rilly piece at hand.
He also says that proto-Nilo-Saharan is invalid, because Rilly's work precedes 'full' understanding of Merotic.
This also makes no sense.
That is -
* It does not follow that proto-Nilo-saharan requires 'full understanding' of Merotic. [what Proto language is based on 'full' understanding of *all* its alleged member langauges?].
Yeap, you got it right.
Comparative analysis - that's what was done on Rilly's proto-nes, proto-Taman & proto-Nubian, and made no mention of reconstructing proto-Nilo-Saharan, which in any case, as you've perceptively noted, can be reconstructed by comparative analysis of languages in the family. Yet, this is something that doesn't seem to penetrate the head a self-proclaimed linguist like Clyde.
quote:rasol:
** It has not been proven that Meroitic is 'fully' understood, now.
Yes again. Rilly correctly notes that the script is yet to be 'fully' understood, but has done comparative work substantial enough to associate the language with a family, i.e. language family.
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The Yeuhzi people, who early resided near the border of the agricultural part of China and later migrated on the Eurasian steppe all the way to north India eventually becoming the rulers of the vast agricultural trading Kushan Empire. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dnschmid/Liu_Yuezhi_Kushan.pdf
^ LOL Yonis, you are right that the Yuehzi were not Iranian, but they were NOT Chinese. They were, as I said earlier, members of an Indo-European speaking people called the Tocharians.
Look at your sources again.
From Wikepedia:..."The Great Clan of Yue", is the Chinese name for an ancient Central Asian people. There are numerous theories about the derivation of the name Yuezhi and none has yet found general acceptance.[5][6] In Chinese the name translates literally as 'Moon Clan.' According to Zhang Guang-da the name Yuezhi is a transliteration of their own name for themselves, the Visha (the tribes), being called the Vijaya in Tibetan.[7]. They are believed by many scholars to have been the same as or closely related to the Indo-European people named Tocharians (Τοχάριοι) by ancient Greeks...
Nowhere does is it say in your other sources that the Yuezhi were Chinese either, only that they were a nomadic people known to the Chinese. As the wiki article explains, "Yuezhi" is a Chinese transliteration of their actual name. It's funny for you to call them a Chinese clan, considering that historically the Chinese were an agricultural people who did not look kindly on the nomadic peoples whom they considered a threat to their way of life.
By the way, the nomadic people who defeated the Yuezhi, were known as Hsiung-nu by the Chinese who were probably a Turkic speaking people, (although some scholars suggest an Uralic speaking people). Either way, all we have left of the Tocharian speakers like the Yuezhi are written documents which have been translated. The Modern day descendants of the Yuezhi have been entirely assimilated by Turkic tribes.
And of course, the Kushana clan of the Yuezhi have absolutely NOTHING to do with the Kushites of the Nile Valley, nor Mande people of the Sahara! LMAOPosts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
With all said thus far, the basic questions that come up time and again:
Meroitic script is much older than Tocharian script according most sources. How does that square with Meroitic developing from a script younger than itself, by a great time differential?
What about the distinctive set of alphabets?
Even if we were to give the benefit of doubt to this Tocharian-derivation, then it is natural to expect texts to be written both in pure 'Kushana' or some other trade language and Meroitic language in the Nile Valley. What texts written in both 'Kushana' language and Meroitic language have been uncovered in the Nile Valley?
Knowing the closer correspondence in morphology of Meroitic letters with Demotic than Tocharian, why is it not possible for Meroitic to develop from that script from right next door, but necessary for Kushites to go all the way to central-south Asia to adopt their script? Or is the proposal here that the Kushites sat on their hands, while the Kushana adopted script features from Demotic, only for them to then introduce it to Kushites who initially had the gumption to adopt Egyptic hieroglyphics, but not its derivative scripts like Demotic or hieratic? From there, then to presume that the Kushites derived letters from the Tocharian derivative of Demotic script, when they could have easily done so themselves directly from the neighbour next door?
^Certainly, these basic questions have to at least cross the mind, when pushing forward any Tocharian-Meroitic link.
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quote: proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
.
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
I accept that Rilly has probably done a fine job reconstructing Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani, But we can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter. Rilly Paper .
Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a commong ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver: Meroitic script is much older than Tocharian script according most sources. How does that square with Meroitic developing from a script younger than itself, by a great time differential?
When confronted with difficult questions, it seems Dr. Winters attempts to talk around them, with long replies which attempt to change the subject while never answering the question.
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quote:proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
quote:I accept that Rilly has probably done a fine job reconstructing Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani, But we can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire
This statement, that no North East Sudanese speakers ever lived in the Sudanese empire of Meroe is hilarious coming from someone who proclaims - Mandingo in Japan, and Indians in Sudan. Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
quote:I accept that Rilly has probably done a fine job reconstructing Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani, But we can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire
This statement, that no North East Sudanese speakers ever lived in the Sudanese empire of Meroe is hilarious coming from someone who proclaims - Mandingo in Japan, and Indians in Sudan.
Please cite any documented ( i.e., Nubian lexical items) evidence of Nubian being spoken in the Meroitic Empire .
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver: Meroitic script is much older than Tocharian script according most sources. How does that square with Meroitic developing from a script younger than itself, by a great time differential?
When confronted with difficult questions, it seems Dr. Winters attempts to talk around them, with long replies which attempt to change the subject while never answering the question.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
Some of the Meroitic signs correspond to Meroitic signs.
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3)
Sure ancient scripts help when attempting reconstruct proto-languages, but not all that necessary. What is however necessary, is to determine family relationship of the language in question, through lexical, phonetic, and morphological correspondences and thereby determining cognation. In the process, looking at terms from specific historic cultural innovations and events that have been traced back to certain timelines, can help in guaging the time depths of the languages, particularly if these terms are common occurrences across the language family, but unique to language family. Once language family is established, ongoing comparative analysis can enable reconstruction of the 'intermediary' proto-languages for the sub-families of languages within the larger one, and then ultimately, the proto-language for the overall family.
quote:Clyde Winters:
the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
That's what comparative analysis allows linguists to do, from the pattern of lexical and morphological correspondences, to be able to predict proto-terms with confidence level near to exactness.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction)
Oversimplification. Names of persons were necessary in the process to uncover other terms from the cotexts. Moreover, these names aren't from a proto-Meroitic names from the Napatan state, the precursor of Meroe, isn't the same thing as proto-language, much less artificial. You aren't making sense.
quote:Clyde Winters:
and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards.
What standards. If you believe that a language family called Eastern Sudanic exists, which can be further broken down to the northern and southern branches, why can't its proto-language for either branch be determined with classical comparative analysis?
And why shouldn't terms from such reconstruction and actually language of the family in question be compared with available Meroitic lexical correspondences?
quote:Clyde Winters:
This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period.
There doesn't have to be documents for proto-north Eastern Sudanic language. This is why the 'reconstruction' for the proto-language of the clusters of pre-exiting north eastern Sudanic languages, from using comparative analysis, is necessary to begin with.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
False. Nubian was only one of sub-language family of the eastern Sudanic family in the overall analysis, amongst the many others. You either cannot read, or you're intentionally misinterpreting what was said in the link. The need for doing so, in case you need to be informed, is to determine lexical and morphological correspondences between available Meriotic lexicons and the lexicons of eastern Sudanic languages, and then zero in on the relatively closer branch of the eastern Sudanic family.
quote:Clyde Winters:
A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
And a fact that you continue to ignore, when you falsely and incessantly accuse him of not taking such events into consideration in his analysis, just like now.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
Okay? Yes, having documents of ancient examples of language families can add relative precision to the predictions made in the reconstructed proto-language, but it isn't necessary to have one, to be able to reconstruct a proto-language, which as your citation correctly notes, is a theorectical construc, done so methodologically by comparative analysis of living languages of the family. What's all that necessary hence, is to be able to have a living language to work with.
quote:Clyde Winters:
I accept that Rilly has probably done a fine job reconstructing Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani
Until now, I could have sworn that you were criticizing his ability to even do that.
quote:Clyde Winters:
But we can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline.
We can regect your false claims that he relied on proto-north eastern Sudanic to read Meroitic terms. This is why it was crucial for you to have engaged by rebuttals of your narrative, which you understandly didn't have the gumption to do.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Proto-Nilo Saharan is supposed to precede the Meroitic complex, by quite a huge time differential. You aren't making sense. But available understood Meroitic lexicons have enabled to pinpoint which language family it associates with, and within which branch. This is what Rilly has figured out, and you've failed to demonstrate how his method is flawed. That's all.
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Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have documented evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term from Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
We must not forget that there is no way to prove Nilo-Saharan preceed Meroitic because we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic.
False. Lexicostatistics allows him to determine the extent or degree of lexical correspondences between available Meroitic lexicons and languages across the eastern Sudanic family, and thereby gauge which branch of this family is relatively closer, upon being able to place each language into northern and southern clusters.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a commong ancestor.
It is a quantitative application used to gauge the extent of lexical correspondence across languages, using certain pre-selected basic terms as a basis.
quote:Clyde Winters
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
This is the feature that classical comparative analysis seeks to assess and hence predict terms for proto-language reconstruction.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment.
Including the previously attested Meroitic terms, Rilly through his 'multicontextual approach' was able to come up with 39 'assured' Meroitic terms using primary Kemetic and Meroitic texts. Time consuming, but achievable.
quote:Clyde Winters:
None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god.
That's where you are wrong. See his examples in the lexical correspondence table, as part of the comparison with the '39 assured' Meroitic terms.
quote:Clyde Winters:
With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language.
Who said anything about dating a common ancestral language between Meroitic and other eastern Sudanic languages (?), although it's certainly possible via classical comparative analysis and multidisciplinary work. Just another non-sequitur for you to knock down.
Nilo-Saharan is the language family that Meroitic is supposed to belong to, hence a subset of Nilo-Saharan. So, it makes no sense to talk about a common ancestor between Meroitic and Nilo-Saharan.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates.
False. Meroitic and Kemetic primary texts were primarily used to translate Meroitic terms. That alone renders the rest your claim ridiculous. Your recitation about finding no cognates in Nilo-Saharan has been addressed two posts above.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages.
What we have here, is the absence of your perceptiveness to grasp what is being relayed in the link. Lexical correspondences to basic available Meroitic lexicons have been found across the eastern Sudanic family, including the Nubian sub-branch.
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The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
You need to be able to distinguish Tocharian script from Kharosthi script. Most sources place the Tocharian script in the common era, no earlier than the 1st century. Which is it; Tocharian or Kharosthi?
quote:Clyde Winters:
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
Dating attributed to earliest attestation of Meroitic is ~ 2nd century BC; a far cry from the 6th-8th ce of Tocharian script.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Some of the Meroitic signs correspond to Meroitic signs.
Even your own diagrammatical representation refutes you. It shows that Meroitic has a different set of alphabets from Kharosthi, and bears more resemblance with 'Demotic' and 'Egyptian' than Kharosthi.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
In my last response to your narrative, which you never addressed, Rilly was cited pointing out the flaws in previous attempts, which of course, which have no bearing on his more refined 'multicontextual' approach.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This is a farce because we do have documented evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages.
This claim is what I call a farce, because Meroitic has been demonstrated to be part of the Nilo-Saharan, closely related to the eastern Sudanic branch of this language family. Any wonder why you call yourself a linguist, and still not get this.
quote:Clyde Winters:
As a result, any proto-term from Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
Nonsense. See post above.
quote:Clyde Winters:
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
Classical comparative analysis uses contemporary languages belonging to a family or 'clusters' of a superfamily. If lexical items and morphological items across these languages in a family have strong correspondences and hence, cognation, which should be expected in the 'clusters' of a language family, then it is a safe bet that they inherited these terms from a common ancestor, which would have apparently not changed to a great extent. These regularities allow for prediction of the proto-terms which, if they were to be tested with those of an actual ancestor, would come close to being exact.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Proto-language is a 'theoretical common ancestor', man, methodologically derived from known language clusters or family. A common ancestor is therefore expected to be 'dialect free', because it was this proto-language that was supposed to have given rise to the existing dialects. Saying that it is 'dialect free', is almost akin to saying in genetics, that ancestral E3b isn't as microscopically diverse as its sub-clades which comprise of their on clusters from microsatellite diversity.
quote:Clyde Winters:
We must not forget that there is no way to prove Nilo-Saharan preceed Meroitic because we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire,
Use your head; how can Meroitic language precede something that it is a member of? It is like saying "Clyde" precedes a lineage that he is supposed to be part of. Makes no sense.
quote:Clyde Winters:
especially Nubian, precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic.
Nubian is part of the north eastern Sudanic family; proto-North eastern Sudanic language reconstruction requires language comparisons transcending the Nubian sub-branch of the north eastern Sudanic sub-family of the eastern Sudanic family, in turn belonging to the Nilo-Saharan superfamily.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago.
You keep robotically reciting this, and I keep demonstrating how false it is, and out of sync with what was written in the link.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
A fact which you continue to use nonetheless, to make false charges against him.
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posted
It was too late to edit this, so I'm hereby providing this edited version of a previous post, for precision in clarity:
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3)
Sure ancient scripts can be helpful when attempting to reconstruct proto-languages, but not all that necessary. What is however necessary, is to determine family relationship of the language clusters under study, through lexical, phonetic and morphological correspondences, thereby determining cognation. In the process, looking at terms from specific historic cultural innovations and events or processes that have been traced back to certain timelines, can help in gauging the time depths of the language clusters, particularly if these terms are common occurrences across the clusters, but unique to said clusters or even the language family at large. Once language family is established, ongoing comparative analysis can enable reconstruction of the 'intermediary' proto-languages of the clusters within the larger family, and then ultimately, the overall proto-language for the superfamily.
quote:Clyde Winters:
the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
That's what comparative analysis allows linguists to do, via the pattern of lexical and morphological correspondences, to be able to predict proto-terms with confidence level near to exactness.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction)
Oversimplification. Names of persons were necessary in the process to uncover other terms from the cotexts. Moreover, the 'proto-Meroitic' names aren't from a proto-language; they are names of figures of the Napatan state, the precursor of Meroe, which isn't the same thing as a 'proto-language', much less artificial. You aren't making sense.
quote:Clyde Winters:
and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards.
What standards? If you believe that a language family called Eastern Sudanic exists, which can be further broken down into the northern and southern branches, then why can't its proto-language for either branch be determined by classical comparative analysis?
And why shouldn't terms from both such reconstruction and the actual languages of the family [used to reconstruct the proto-language] in question be compared with available Meroitic lexicons?
quote:Clyde Winters:
This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period.
There doesn't have to be ancient documents, in order to reconstruct proto-north Eastern Sudanic language. This is why the 'reconstruction' of the proto-language of clusters of exiting north eastern Sudanic languages, using comparative analysis, is necessary to begin with. It is a 'thoeretical' common ancestor.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
False. Nubian was only one of the sub-language families of the eastern Sudanic family in the overall analysis, amongst the many others. You either cannot read, or you're intentionally misinterpreting what was said in the link. The need for doing so, in case you need to be informed, was to determine lexical and morphological correspondences between available Meriotic lexicons and those of eastern Sudanic languages, and then zero in on the relatively closer branch of the eastern Sudanic family.
quote:Clyde Winters:
A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
And a fact that you continue to ignore, when you falsely and incessantly accuse him of not taking such events into consideration in his analysis, just like now.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
Okay? Yes, having documents of ancient examples of language families can add relative precision to the predictions made in the reconstructed proto-language, but it isn't necessary to have one, to be able to reconstruct a proto-language, which as your citation correctly notes, is a theorectical construct, done so methodologically by comparative analysis of active languages of the family under study. What's all that necessary hence, is to be able to have living language clusters to work with.
quote:Clyde Winters:
I accept that Rilly has probably done a fine job reconstructing Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani
Until now, I could have sworn that you were criticizing his ability to even do that.
quote:Clyde Winters:
But we can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline.
We can reject your false claims that he relied on proto-north eastern Sudanic to read Meroitic terms. This is why it was crucial for you to have engaged my rebuttals to your narrative, which you understandably didn't have the gumption to do.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Proto-Nilo Saharan is supposed to precede the Meroitic complex, by quite a huge time differential. You aren't making sense. But available understood Meroitic lexicons have enabled the pinpointing of which language family it most closely associates with, and within which branch. This is what Rilly has figured out, and you've failed to demonstrate how his method is flawed.
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quote: proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
.
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
quote:Winters posts: We have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period
Unless you are arguing that Eastern Sudanic, Berta and other Nilo Saharan langauge groups -did not exist- a few thousand years ago, and then tautologically assume that Meroitic is not Nilo Saharan as well, this comment makes no sense.
quote:there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
^ This is also complete nonsense given that you claim Meroitic belongs to "Niger-Congo", which isn't spoken anywhere near this region and never has been, and you believe Meroitic script to have been introduced by "Indians", whose languages are not found within a thousand miles of Sudan.
The reason that Obenga ignored your -hypothesis- is because it doesn't make any sense.
Nilo Saharan is spoken throughout this region....Niger Congo and Kushana-Indian [and Indo European tongue] are not.
quote:MysterySolver writes: Available understood Meroitic lexicons have enabled the pinpointing of which language family it most closely associates with, and within which branch. This is what Rilly has figured out, and you've failed to demonstrate how his method is flawed.
Certainly arguing that Rilly can't place Meroitic into Nilo Saharan because Nilo Saharan doesn't exist 2 thousand years ago makes no sense.
And claiming Merotic was introduced by Indo European speakers - and therefore can somehow be placed in Niger Congo is non-sequitur and just flat out bizarre.
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quote:The empire was created by the Kushan tribe of the Yuezhi confederation, an Indo-European people from the eastern Tarim Basin and Gansu, China, possibly related to the Tocharians.
Tosharians:
quote:The Tocharians or Tusharas as known in Indian literature were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China
Clyde Winters wrote: Meroitic is related to the Tokharian/Kushana language, which is classed in the Indo-European family.
quote:Rasol posted: I find it fascinating, from a tactical point of view, how you have learned to get off your theory of demic diffusion of Merotic script from India, by masquerading it as Afrocentrism.
I am [mildly] dissappointed that not one of your 'afrocentric' fan base has managed to put two and two together, and realise what you are actually saying.
posted
^^Re: Clyde's last post before Rasol's postings:
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
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posted
Truth will always overcome a lie, no matter what the lie is.
[QB]
quote: proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
.
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
posted
The Kushana hypothesis was based on the following evidence, 1) no African language has been found to be a cognate language of Meroitic 2) the Classical literature says that the Kushites lived in Asia and Africa; 3) the Gymnosophists, or "naked sages" of Meroe came from India.
Before I began work on Meroitic, other researchers had already falsified the African theory for Meroitic's cognate language. The fact that not even Nubian, a language spoken by a people who lived in the Meroitic empire, failed to be the cognate language of Meroitic made it clear that we must look elsewhere for the cognate language spoken by the Meroites.
Flavius Philostratus, the writer of the Vita Apollonii, Vol. 1,cliamed that the Gymnosophists of Meroe originally came from India (see F.C. Conybeare, Philostratus:The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (p.45),1950). Given the fact that the Kushana had formerly ruled India around the time that the Meroitic writing was introduced to the Kushite civilization, lead to the hypothesis that the ancestors of the Gymnosophist may have been Kushana philosophers.
The historical evidence of the Kushana having ruled India made the Classical references to Indians in Meroe, an important source for the construction of alternative theories about the possible location of the cognate language of Meroitic.
There is external evidence, which supports my theory. A theory explains observed phenomena and has predictive power. I have theorized that due to the claims of the Classical writers that some of the Meroites came from India (F.C Conybeare (Trans.), Philostratus: The life of Apollonius of Tyana Vol.2, (1950) pg.271). According to the Life of Apollonius, the Indian Meroites were formerly led by a King Ganges, who had "repulsed the Scythians who invaded this land [India from] across the Caucasus" (Conybeare, Vol.1, Pg.273). Pilostratus also made it clear that the Indians of Meroe came to this country after their king was killed.
The presence of this tradition of an Indian King of the Indian-Meroites conquering the Scythians predicts that the Indian literature should record this historical episode. This prediction is supported by a Jaina text called the Kalakeharya-Kathanaka, which reports that when the Scythians invaded Malwa, the King of Malwa, called Vikramaditya defeated the Scythians (H. Kulke & D. Rothermund, History of India (London, Routledge: 1990, pg.73). This king Vikramaditya may be the Ganges mentioned in the Life of Apollonius.Confirmation of the Ganges story, supports the Classical literary evidence that their were Indianized-Meroites that could have introduced the Tokharian trade language to the Meroites.
Moreover, there were other Indians in North Africa in addition to Kush/Meroe. For example, at Quseir al-Qadim there was a large Indian speaking community (see: R. Salomon, "Epigraphic remains of Indian traders in Egypt", Journal of the American oriental Society, (1991) pp.731-736; and R. Salomon, Addenda, Journal of the American Oriental Society, (1993) pg.593). These Indians were in Egypt writing messages in their own language, around the time we see a switch from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Meroitic writing system.
The evidence that the Classical references to an Indian-Meroite King who conquered the Scythians is supported by the Indian literature, provides external corroboration of the tradition that some of the Meroites were of Indian origin. The presence of Indians traders and settlers in Meroe (and Egypt), makes it almost impossible to deny the possibility that Indians, familiar with the Tokharian trade language did not introduce this writing to the Meroites who needed a neutral language to unify the diverse ethnic groups who made up the Meroite state. In relation to the history of linguistic change and bilingualism, it is a mistake to believe that linguistic transfer had to take place for the Meroites to have used Tokharian, when it did not take place when they wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In summary the classical literature makes it clear that there was a connection between the Gymnosophists (of Meroe) and the Indians. The fact that historical events mentioned in the classical sources are found in the Indian literature confirm the view that there were Indian-Meroites who could have introduced the Tokharian trade language to the Meroites.
The fact that the Nubians who were part of the "Meroitic state", used hieroglyphics and Coptic to write their language without abandoning their native language support the view that they could have also used Tokharian to write Meroitic. And that eventhough they wrote Meroitic inscriptions in Tokharian, they would not have had to abandon Nubian.
The evidence presented above provides internal and external validity for my theory based upon the sources I have cited previously. The sources I have used are impartial, to disconfirm my hypothesis someone needs to show that my propositions are not fully informed [i.e., there were no Indians North Africa and Kush when the Classical writers maintained they were] and present rival explanations based on the evidence. The fact that the claims made by the Classical writers is supported by the Indians themselves if further strong confirmation of the Kushana hypothesis.
The hypothesis based on the classical literature, was enough to support the original Kushana Hypothesis. The predicting power of the original theory, matches the observed natural phenomena which was confirmed elsewhere by cognate place names, ethononyms, lexical items and grammatical features, indicate that my theory has not be falsified.
The ability to reliably predict a linguistic relationship between Kushana and Meroitic, was further confirmation of the Kushana Hypothesis, because the linguistic connections were deducible from prediction.
I controlled the Kushana Hypothesis by comparing the statements of the classical writers, with historical, linguistic anthropological and toponymic evidence found not only in Africa, but also India and Central Asia [where the people also used Tokharian as a trade language to unify the various people in Central Asia]. I constructed five testable hypotheses in support of the Kushana theory, and it seems only fair that these five variables must be disconfirmed, to falsify the Kushana Hypothesis. Failure to disconfirm this theorem, implies validity of my prediction.
My confirmation of the above five variables: the presence of Kushites in Africa and Asia; the presence of Kushana sages in India who may have migrated to Meroe; cognate lexical items; cognate verbs and cognate grammatical features indicates systematic controlled, critical and empirical investigation of the question of Kushana representing the Meroitic cognate language.
Kushana
King Kaniska of the Kushan
Kanishka Casket
Kushana
quote:Originally posted by rasol: Asian "Kushites"
Kushan empire of India:
quote:The empire was created by the Kushan tribe of the Yuezhi confederation, an Indo-European people from the eastern Tarim Basin and Gansu, China, possibly related to the Tocharians.
Werner Vycihle , in "Le pays de Kousch dans une inscription Ethiopienne", Annales d'Ethiopie ,2, (1957) pp.177-179, has provided us with many lexical items relating to the Sudanese. The people of Upper Nubia and the Sudan were known in Egyptian as k-'-s and k-'-s-i . The Hebrew people called the Kushites kus. In the cuneiform inscriptions the Sudanese were called Kusiya. In the Ethiopic inscriptions Ezana the Kushites were called Kashi or Kasu. In Sumerian the Kushites were called Melukha = Kasi and Kasi = Kush. The best evidence for Meroitic civilization and history comes from the classical literature. This hypothesis was supported by the fact that Lepsius used the classical literature to find old Meroe. Following the Egyptian and other ancient peoples the classical scholars also called the Sudanese: Ethiopians or Kushites. The classical scholars made it clear that the Kushites lived not only in Africa but also Asia. Hommer alluded to the two Kushite empires when he wrote "A race divided, whom the sloping rays; the rising and the setting sun surveys". Herodotus (L.xii;C.lxx.) said that there two Ethiopias. The Roman Strabo also claimed that there were two Ethiopias.
The countries of Bactria, Afghanistan, Georgia, ancient Elam and Beluchistan were called Kush . The Armenian historians always named the eastern Parthians Kushan. The people living there called themselves Kushana , Kuisa or Kusa . Moses Chorene (/Xorenac'i) in Patmut'iwn Hayoc' (Venice,1881) claimed that the four divisions of Persia: Media, Elymais, Aria, and etc. as Kush. C. B. Rawlinson in "Notes on the Early History of Babylonia", Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 15, pp. 221-222 discussed the unity of Ethiopians in Asia and Africa.
This would explain the statement by Philostratus in Life of Appollonius and Jerom, that the Gymnosophists of Kush, who settled near the source of the Nile, descended from the Brahmins of India, having been forced to migrate after the murder of their king. Eustathius, also said that the Kushites (Meroites) came from India. Flavius Philostratus, the writer of the Vita Apollonii, Vol. 1,cliamed that the Gymnosophists of Meroe originally came from India (see F.C. Conybeare, Philostratus:The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (p.45),1950). Given the fact that the Kushana had formerly ruled India around the time that the Meroitic writing was introduced to the Kushite civilization, led to the hypothesis that the ancestors of the Gymnosophist may have been Kushana philosophers.
The historical evidence of the Kushana having ruled India made the Classical references to Indians in Meroe, an important source for the construction of alternative theories about the possible location of the cognate language of Meroitic.
There is external evidence, which supports my theory. A theory explains observed phenomena and has predictive power. I have theorized that due to the claims of the Classical writers that some of the Meroites came from India (F.C Conybeare (Trans.), Philostratus: The life of Apollonius of Tyana Vol.2, (1950) pg.271). According to the Life of Apollonius, the Indian Meroites were formerly led by a King Ganges, who had "repulsed the Scythians who invaded this land [India from] across the Caucasus" (Conybeare, Vol.1, Pg.273). Pilostratus also made it clear that the Indians of Meroe came to this country after their king was killed.
The presence of this tradition of an Indian King of the Indian-Meroites conquering the Scythians predicts that the Indian literature should record this historical episode. This prediction is supported by a Jaina text called the Kalakeharya -Kathanaka, which reports that when the Scythians invaded Malwa, the King of Malwa, called Vikramaditya defeated the Scythians (H. Kulke & D. Rothermund, History of India (London, Routledge: 1990, pg.73). This king Vikramaditya may be the Ganges mentioned in the Life of Apollonius. Confirmation of the Ganges story, supports the Classical literary evidence that their were Indianized-Meroites that could have introduced the Tokharian trade language: Kushana to the Meroites.
Moreover, there were other Indians in North Africa in addition to Kush/Meroe. For example, at Quseir al-Qadim there was a large Indian speaking community (see: R. Salomon, "Epigraphic remains of Indian traders in Egypt", Journal of the American oriental Society, (1991) pp.731-736; and R. Salomon, Addenda, Journal of the American Oriental Society, (1993) pg.593). These Indians were in Egypt writing messages in their own language, around the time we see a switch from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Meroitic writing system.
Moreover, we can also be sure that the Kushan were known in northeast Africa because a horde of Kushan coins were found in the floor of a cave at the present monastery-shrine at Debra Demo in modern Ethiopia in 1940.
First, I would like to make it clear that the probable language of the Kushana was Tamil. According to Dravidian literature, the Kushana were called Kosars=Yakshas=Yueh chih/ Kushana. This literature maintains that when they entered India they either already spoke Tamil, or adopted the language upon settlement in India.
The Kushana and the Yueh chih were one and the same. In addition to North Indian documents the Kushana-Yueh chih association are also discussed in Dravidian literature. V Kanakasabhai, The Tamils Eighteen hundred years ago, note that in the Sanskrit literature the Yueh chih were called Yakshas, Pali chroniclers called them Yakkos and Kosars< Kushana.
They allegedely arrived in India during the 2nd century BC. He makes it clear that the Yueh chih/ Kushana as noted on their coins worshipped Siva as seen on the coins of Kanishka. This is why we have a coin of a Kushana king from Taxila, dated to AD 76 that declares that the king was maharaja rajatiraja devaputra Kushana "Great King, King of kings, Son of God, the Kushana".
Kushana
King Kaniska of the Kushan
The term Tochara has nothing to do with the Yueh chih, this was a term used to describe the people who took over the Greek Bactrian state, before the Kushana reached the Oxus Valley around 150 BC . There is no reason the Kushana may not have been intimately familiar with the Kharosthi writing at this time because from 202BC onward Prakrit and Chinese documents were written in Kharosthi.
The Kushana and the Yueh chih were one and the same. In addition to North Indian documents the Kushana-Yueh chih association are also discussed in Dravidian literature.V Kanakasabhai, The Tamils Eighteen hundred years ago note that in the Sanskrit literature the Yueh chih were called Yakshas, Pali chroniclers called them Yakkos and Kosars< Kushana. They allegedely arrived in India during the 2nd century BC. He makes it clear that the Yueh chih/ Kushana as noted on their coins worshipped Siva as seen on the coins of Kanishka.This is why we have a coin of a Kushana king from Taxila, dated to AD 76 that declares that the king was maharaja rajatiraja devaputra Kushana "Great King, King of kings, Son of God, the Kushana".
Some researchers believe that the Ars'i spoke Tocharian A, while Tocharian B was the "Kucha language" may have been spoken by the Kushana people. I don't know where you read that the speakers of Tocharian A were called Ars'i. This names have nothing to do with ethnic groups, they refer to the cities where Tocharian text were found: Tocharian A documents were found around Qarashar and Turfan, thusly these text are also referred to as Turfanian or East Tocharian; Tocharian B documents were found near the town of Kucha, thusly they are sometimes called Kuchean or West Tocharian.
Kanishka Casket
Linguist use the term Tochari to refer to these people, because they were given this title in Turkic manuscripts . They called themselves Kushana.
The observable evidence make it clear that the terms used to label the Tocharian dialects are not ethnonyms, they are terms used to denote where the Tocharian records were found. The use of the term Ars'i does not relate to the Kushana people. The terms: Asii, Pasiani, Tochari and Sacarauli, refer to the nomads that took away Bactria from the Greeks.
These nomads came from the Iaxartes River that adjoins that of Sacae and the Sogdiani .The Kushana people took over Bactria much later. It is a mistake to believe that Ars'i and Kucha were ethnonyms is under-standable given your lack of knowledge about Tocharian. And I will agree that there were a number of different languages spoken by people who wrote material in Tocharian. It is for this reason that I have maintained throughout my published works on Tocharian, that this was a trade language. This language was used by the Central Asians as a lingua franca and trade language due to the numerous ethnic groups which formerly lived in central Asia". Kharosthi was long used to write in Central Asia. It was even used by the Greeks. The use of the Kharosthi writing system in Central Asia and India, would place this writing contemporaneous with the tradition, recorded by the Classical writers of Indians settling among the Kushites of Meroitic Empire..
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quote:Truth will always overcome a lie, no matter what the lie is.
Agreed. And the truth is there is no evidence that Indo-Europeans created the Merotic script, as you are implying.
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There were many people who probably used Tocharian for purposes of communication including the Kushana and the "Ars'i/Asii". They probably used Tocharian as a lingua franca. You make it clear in your last post that numerous languages were spoken in Central Asia when the Tocharian was written in Kharosthi.
Most researchers believe that a majority of the people who lived in this area were bilingual and spoke Bactrian ,Indian languages among other languages. I agree with this theory, and believe that the Kushana Kings may have spoken a Dravidian language. Due to the possibility that the Kushana spoke a Dravidian language which is the substratum language of Tocharian; and the presence of a number of different terms in Tocharian from many languages spoken in the area-led me to the conclusion that Tocharian was a trade language. The Kushana always referred to themselves as the Kushana/Gushana. The name Kushana for this group is recorded in the Manikiala Stone inscription (56BC?), the Panjtar Stone inscription of 122 AD and the Taxila Silver Scroll. The Greeks called them Kushana in the Karosthi inscriptions, and Kocano. In the Chinese sources they were called Koei-shuang or Kwei-shwang= Kushana, and Yueh chih .
As you can see the term Kushana had been used to refer to these people long before Kujula Kadphises used the term as a personal name. This was over a hundred years after the Kushana had become rulers of Bactria. It would appear from the evidence that the nation of the Kushana was called Kusha.
posted
The Kushana/Tocharian language was a lingua franca. The base of this language is Dravidian not Indo-European.
I have never claimed that Meroitic was an Indo-Aryan language. The Meroites used Kushana to write their inscriptions. I would classify Meroitic as Niger-Congo language.
The great savant Cheikh Anta Diop (1974,1981) was convinced that many West African groups had formerly lived in the Egypto-Nubian region before they migrated to West Africa(Diop,1974). He supported this hypothesis with a discussion of the cognation between the names for gods in Egypt-Nubia and West Africa (Diop,1974), Egypto-Nubian and West African ethnomyns and toponyms common to both regions (Diop,1981) and West African and Egyptian languages.
Controversy surrounds the classification of the Niger-Congo Superfamily, especially the Mande group. Greenberg (1963) popularized the idea that the Mande subset was a member of the Niger-Congo Superset of Africa languages.
The position of Mande in the Niger-Congo Superset has long been precarious and today it is given a peripheral status to the Niger-Congo Superset (Bennett & Sterk 1977; Dalby 1988). Murkarovsky (1966) believes that the Mande group of languages does not belong in the Niger-Congo Superset, while Welmers (1971) and Bennett and Sterk (1977) has advanced the idea that Mande was the first group to break away from Niger-Congo, because of its loss of the noun class system.
The Mande languages are closely related to Songhay (Blench,1995; Mukarovsky 1976/77; Zima 1989), Nilo-Saharan ( Boyd 1978; Creissels 1981; Bender 1981) and the Chadic group. Zima (1989) compared 25 Songhay and Mandekan terms from the cultural vocabulary to highlight the correspondence between these two language groups.
Zima (1989:110) made it clear that "the lexical affinities between the Songhay and Mande languages are evident".This view was confirmed by Creissels (1981) who has provided many morphological and lexical similarities between Songhay and Mande, which are too numerous to be accounted for by chance.
Blench (1995)and B. Heine and D. Nurse, African Languages: An Introduction (pp.16-17) believes that the Niger-Congo (Mande) is especially closely united with Central Sudani and Kabu within Nilo-Saharan.
Mukarovsky (1987) has presented hundreds of analogous Mande and Cushitic terms. Due to the similarities between the Mande and Cushitic language families Mukarovsky (1987) would place Mande into the Afro-Asiatic Superset of languages.
This view is not surprising since the Mande languages are closely connected to Coptic as well.
This linguistic evidence makes it clear that the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic speakers originally lived intimate contact. The close relationship between these Superlanguage families makes it clear that Meroitic being classed as a Niger-Congo language would be congruent with the history of this language family.
There are many relationships between Meroitic and other African languages. For example, In Oromo/Galla, the term for queen is 'gifti'; and both 'naaga-ta" in Somali and Wolof 'jigen' mean woman. These terms appear to be related to Kdi > gti/e.
Yet even though we find cognition between some Cushitic and Nubian we can not use these languages to completely decipher Meroitic as proven by many past researchers. The Tocharian language on the otherhand, does allow us to read Meroitic and show its relationship with other African languages.
A comparison of Meroitic to African langauges indicate that Meroitic is closely related to langauges spoken in West Africa. Like Meroitic, the pronoun is often a suffix in other African languages. This suffix of the third person singular is usually n-, in other African languages. For example:
Bambara: no p r i 'his house' Kpelle: nyin 'his tooth' Akan: ni dan 'his house'
The Meroitic a- third person singular affix is also found in other African languages. For example:
Swahili: (1) a-ta kwenda 'he's going to go' (2) a-li-kwenda 'he is here' Manding: (1) ya zo 'he has come' (2) ya shirya mana 'he prepared (it) for us'.
The use of -i particle to form nouns in Meroitic correspond to the use of the -it and -ayy suffixes to form nouns in Wolof. The Wolof abstract noun formative suffix is -it, -itt, e.g., dog 'to cut', dogit 'sharpness'.
In Wolof abstract nouns are also formed by the addition of the suffix -ayy, and in Dyolo -ay, e.g., baax 'good', baaxaay 'goodness'.
Prefixes are rarely used in Meroitic. The most common prefixes include the prefix of reinforcement -p, the intensive prefix -a and the imperfect prefix -b. The p-, can be either the prefix of reinforcement e.g., ŝ 'patron', p-ŝ 'the patron' ; or the imperfect prefix e.g.,ŝiñ'satisfaction', p-ŝiñ "continuous satisfaction'.
The Meroitic p- affix, means ‘the’. This Meroitic grammatical element corresponds to the Egyptian demonstrative pi 'the'.
In Meroitic, the –o element is used to change a noun into an adjective. The Meroitic –o suffix, agrees with the use affix –u, joined to a vowel, in other African languages to form adjectives. In Swahili, many adjectives are formed by the k- consonant plus the vowel -u : Ku. For example:
In Meroitic the plural case was made by the suffix -b, or reduplication. Reduplication was also used as a plural effect in Meroitic, e.g., d'donations',d-d 'considerable donations'. Reduplication is also used in other African languages to express the idea of abundance and diversity. For example, Swahili: Chungu kikavunjika vipande vipnade ."The cooking pot broke into pieces".
The Meroitic use of the -b suffix to make the plural number, corresponds to the use of the -ba- affix in African languages. In the Bantu languages the plural is formed by the ba- affix. In the Manding group of languages we see use of the -ba suffix. In Manding, the -ba affix is joined to nouns to denote the idea of physical or moral greatness. For example:
(1) na-folo 'good, rich' na-folo-ba 'great fortune' (2) so-kalo 'piece' so-kalo-ba 'considerable quarter of a village'.
In the Meroitic inscriptions there is constant mention of the khi 'body, spirit', the kha 'the abstract personality', the kho 'a shinning or translucent spirit soul'; and the Ba 'soul'. In many African languages the term Ba, is used to denote the terms 'soul or to be'. For example:
Egyptian: Ba Mbachi : Ba Coptic : Bai Bambara : Be Fang : Be.
The kha, existed within and without the human body. It would remain with the body until its flesh decayed, then it would either leave the tomb or hunt it. The Meroitic idea of Kha, as a spirit corresponds to Ka, in many African languages. For example:
Egyptian : Ka Manding : Ka Banda : Ka.
The linguistic evidence makes it clear that some of the Meroites may have spoken languages that belonged to the Niger-Congo-Mande family of languages. This is supported by the linguistic evidence of shared grammatical forms and lexical items between Meroitic and Niger-Congo-Mande discussed above.
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-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Andrew and Susan Sherratt (1988:585), have argued that convergence through a process of creolization may have been an important feature of language change in ancient times as a result of inter-regional trade.
The Proto-Indo-European family is based upon surviving languages and historical literature. Andrew and Susan Sherratt (1988:584), have suggested that this linguistic entity, Indo-European, may be valid for a relatively late point in time. Given the evidence of Hittite, this view in general has little support but, in relation to Tocharian on the otherhand, this hypothesis has considerable merit.
V.I. Georgiev has suggested that the common original homeland of the Tocharians was a region extending between the Denieper river and the Urals, near Finno-Ugrians. This hypothesis is founded on the fact that Tocharian shares many phonological, word formational and lexical features with the Balto-Slavic languages. Georgiev believes that there probably existed a Finno-Ugrian substratum in Tocharian.
Mallory has suggested that the Afanasievo culture of the steppes may be the ancestor culture of the Tocharian speakers. He believes that the geographical separation of the Afanasievo culture from his proposed Pontic-Caspian homeland for the IE speakers, would explain the failure of TOCHARIAN to reflect the series of linguistic innovations experienced by the Indo-Iranians .
The Chinese historical literature, on the otherhand, indicates that the Tocharian speakers were called Kushana or Yueh chih and originated in China. Winters has argued that their ancestral culture was the Qijia culture of western China. Winters has argued that the Yueh people were Dravidians speakers. Lacouperie was sure that the Yueh people came from the West.
Although Tocharian is accepted as an IE language there is disturbing linguistic evidence that makes it difficult to properly place Tocharian in the IE family. A large part of the vocabulary of Tocharian detailed etymology. There is considerable influence on Tocharian from Sanskrit and Iranian due to Buddhism. Tocharian also shares many phonological and word formational and lexical correspondences with Balto-Slavic languages.
J.Van Windekens (1976) has compared Tocharian and IE vocabularies and established the following Tocharian isoglosses, ranked as follows: 1) Germanic, 2) Greek, 3) Indic, 4-5) Baltic and Iranian, 6) Latin, 7) Slavic, 8) Celtic, 9) Anatolian, 10) Armenian and 11) Albanian. D.Q. Adams (1984) established a different rank order 1) Germanic, 2) Greek, 3) Baltic, 4) Indic, 5) Slavic, 6-8) Latin, Celtic, Iranian, 9) Albanian, 10) Anatolian and 11) Armenian. Tocharian shares many ancient features with Hittite in noun morphology. For example, Tocharian A e-, B ai- 'to give' : Hittite pai- < pa-ai-; Tocharian A ya- 'to do': Hittite iia-; Tocharian A tkam, B kem 'earth': Hittite tekan.
In relation to Sanskrit and Greek, Tocharian has preserved the mediopassive voice and the presence of both subjunctive and optative mood. The most important evidence of Tocharian relations within the IE family are the Greek and Tocharian cognates: Tocharian A ñkat, B ñakte 'God'; A natäk 'lord', nasi 'lady'; Greek wanakt 'King', *wanakya queen' .
It is interesting to note that Dravidians and Tocharians share many terms for animals, e.g., Dravidian ku-na 'dog', Tocharian ku 'dog'; and Dravidian kode 'cow', Tocharian ko 'cow'. There are five different IE roots for horse. This multiplicity of IE roots for horse makes these terms inconclusive for the IE proto-lexicon. This is interesting because the Dravidian term for horse is iyuli, this is analogous to Tocharian yuk.
> The Tocharian lexicon has also been influenced by Tibetan, Chinese and Uighur. The Sino-Tibetan influence is evident in certain key terms, e.g., Tocharian B plewe 'boat, Gurung plava 'boat', Archaic Chinese plyog and ancient Chinese plyow 'boat'; these terms for boat corresponds with Tamil patavu 'boat'; Tocharian A kuryur, B karyar 'business', purchase', B kary 'to buy', Tibetan-Burmic *kroy , in Burmic Krwè 'debt', Kochin khoi 'borrow or lend'; and Tocharian A and B par 'bring, take', IE *bher 'bring', Tibeto-Burmic *p-, in *par 'trade, buy, sell' and Kannanda bar 'bring'.
The Dravidian and Altaic substratums in Tocharian supports the hypothesis of Andrew and Susan Sherratt that Tocharian was a trade language. This would also agree with Chinese evidence that the Tocharians migrated into Central Asia from the east, not the northwest.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: The Kushana/Tocharian language was a lingua franca. The base of this language is Dravidian not Indo-European.
I did find that Meroitic was related to the Tokhrian/Kushana language, which is classed in the Indo-European family.
Care to explain how you get from admission that what you call Tokhrian/Kushana is and IndoEuropean language, to reclassifying it as Dravidian, and then reclassifying it again to Niger Congo?
And you wonder why your linguistic work is rejected or ignored? Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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