Phylogeographic Refinement and Large Scale Genotyping of Human Y Chromosome Haplogroup E Provide New Insights into the Dispersal of Early Pastoralists in the African Continent
Beniamino Trombetta1,†, Eugenia D’Atanasio1,†, Andrea Massaia1,11, Marco Ippoliti1, Alfredo Coppa2, Francesca Candilio2, Valentina Coia3, Gianluca Russo4, Jean-Michel Dugoujon5, Pedro Moral6, Nejat Akar7, Daniele Sellitto8, Guido Valesini9, Andrea Novelletto10, Rosaria Scozzari1 and Fulvio Cruciani1,8,* July 2015
excerpt
Haplogroup E, defined by mutation M40, is the most common human Y chromosome clade within Africa. To increase the level of resolution of haplogroup E, we disclosed the phylogenetic relationships among 729 mutations found in 33 haplogroup DE Y-chromosomes sequenced at high coverage in previous studies. Additionally, we dissected the E-M35 subclade by genotyping 62 informative markers in 5,222 samples from 118 worldwide populations. The phylogeny of haplogroup E showed novel features compared with the previous topology, including a new basal dichotomy. Within haplogroup E-M35, we resolved all the previously known polytomies and assigned all the E-M35* chromosomes to five new different clades, all belonging to a newly identified subhaplogroup (E-V1515), which accounts for almost half of the E-M35 chromosomes from the Horn of Africa. Moreover, using a Bayesian phylogeographic analysis and a single nucleotide polymorphism-based approach we localized and dated the origin of this new lineage in the northern part of the Horn, about 12 ka. Time frames, phylogenetic structuring, and sociogeographic distribution of E-V1515 and its subclades are consistent with a multistep demic spread of pastoralism within north-eastern Africa and its subsequent diffusion to subequatorial areas. In addition, our results increase the discriminative power of the E-M35 haplogroup for use in forensic genetics through the identification of new ancestry-informative markers.
Introduction
The Male-Specific portion of the human Y chromosome (MSY) is an invaluable tool to investigate many issues about population history (Jobling and Tyler-Smith 2003) and forensic genetics (Jobling 2001; Kayser et al. 2007). Both the lack of meiotic recombination and the uniparental inheritance imply that the MSY differentiation may only be generated by the sequential accumulation of new mutations along radiating male-borne lineages (Underhill and Kivisild 2007). This process creates monophyletic and evolutionary stable entities known as “haplogroups,” defined by biallelic markers (usually single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs]) with a low mutation rate (Xue et al. 2009), which can be arranged in an unambiguous maximum parsimony (MP) phylogenetic tree (Underhill et al. 2000; Karafet et al. 2008; van Oven et al. 2014).
Taking into account the phylogenetic information and the ethnogeographic distribution of haplogroups (i.e., the phylogeographic approach), it is possible to understand and to date some demographic processes behind the dispersal of human populations (for a review, see Chiaroni et al. 2009). Furthermore, by analyzing the worldwide ethnogeographic distribution of different biallelic markers, it is often possible to find one (or more) specific haplogroup confined to restricted geographic areas, allowing the identification of the likely place of origin of an individual carrier (Mizuno et al. 2010; Cruciani et al. 2011; Larmuseau et al. 2011, 2012; Geppert et al. 2015).
In recent years, the advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) led to the discovery of thousands of new polymorphisms used to improve the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. In addition, the possibility of revealing a high number of stable polymorphisms has led to the reevaluation of SNPs as an optimal tool for age estimation of the tree nodes (Francalacci et al. 2013; Poznik et al. 2013; Wei, Ayub, Chen, et al. 2013; Scozzari et al. 2014; Lippold et al. 2014; Hallast et al. 2015). Major changes within the Y phylogeny, obtained by NGS analyses, involved both the resolution of some deep multifurcations (Francalacci et al. 2013; Poznik et al. 2013) and the identification of haplogroups marking recent demographic expansions (Wei et al. 2013; Yan et al. 2014; Hallast et al. 2015).
Despite the notable progresses in SNPs discovery, a deep-sequencing-based analysis of the internal diversity of some specific Y haplogroups is still lacking. Probably, this is because a comprehensive description of the internal diversity of a specific haplogroup requires a targeted sampling of widely divergent chromosomes (Scozzari et al. 2014) rather than a population-based sampling design (Francalacci et al. 2013; Poznik et al. 2013; Wei et al. 2013; Lippold et al. 2014; Hallast et al. 2015).
In this study, we present an updated phylogenetic structure for haplogroup E, which is the most represented MSY lineage in Africa (Cruciani et al. 2002), focusing on the E-M35 clade. This haplogroup received considerable attention in the literature because it has a broad geographic distribution, being present at high frequencies in a wide area stretching from northern and eastern Africa to Europe and western Asia. Moreover, the lineages sharing the M35 mutation have been linked to a wide range of human movements and a multitude of theories have been proposed about their time and place of origin (Arredi et al. 2004; Semino et al. 2004; Cruciani et al. 2006, 2007; Adams et al. 2008; Henn et al. 2008; Battaglia et al. 2009; Lancaster 2009; Trombetta et al. 2011; Bučková et al. 2013; Gebremeskel and Ibrahim 2014). Although several studies have progressively improved the phyletic resolution of this clade (Cruciani et al. 2004, 2006, 2007; Trombetta et al. 2011), it continued to display different polytomies and phylogenetic uncertainties (Trombetta et al. 2011; Lippold et al. 2014; van Oven et al. 2014), with a relatively high number of chromosomes still belonging to the paraphyletic E-M35* paragroup (Cruciani et al. 2004; Trombetta et al. 2011).
In this study, we analyzed 33 high coverage sequences from different data sets (Drmanac et al. 2010; Scozzari et al. 2014) to reconstruct a high confidence haplogroup E phylogeny based on 729 mutations. We used 62 variants to identify and genotype 1,141 E-M35 chromosomes selected from a wider pool of 5,222 males from 118 worldwide populations.
By this analysis, we provided a high-resolution branching of haplogroup E-M35, resolving its previous multifurcations. Furthermore, we assigned all E-M35* chromosomes to new specific terminal branches and identified geographically restricted E-M35 subhaplogroups, thus increasing the discriminative power of the haplogroup for use in human evolution and forensics. Finally, we identified a new monophyletic clade, which accounts for about 40% of the E-M35 chromosomes from the Horn of Africa. SNP-based dating and phylogenetic structuring of this haplogroup highlight eastern Africa as a major center for the demic diffusion of early pastoralists within the continent.
A New Deep Branch within Haplogroup E
In our sample set, we found three individuals from eastern Africa that were derived for the mutation M40, which defines haplogroup E, and ancestral for both P147 and M75 mutations, which, in turn, define the two deepest haplogroup E subclades (Karafet et al. 2008; van Oven et al. 2014). We tested these E*(xM75, P147) chromosomes for all the 13 mutations of branch 3 and for the 3 mutations of branch 4 (fig. 1, supplementary table S3 and fig. S3, Supplementary Material online). All the tested chromosomes were derived both for the mutations defining haplogroup E (branch 3) and for V3725, but ancestral for V1844 and V1865. We found that these chromosomes also share a new mutation (V44, ancestral in other haplogroup E chromosomes) that we identified by Sanger sequencing. Haplogroup E-V44 thus represents a new deep branch of haplogroup E, sister to E-P147. By this analysis, we recognized V3725 and M75 as the two mutations defining the deepest bifurcation within haplogroup E (supplementary fig. S3, Supplementary Material online).
Phylogeography of Haplogroup E By using both the phylogenetic information and the geographic distribution of haplogroup E clades, we performed a discrete phylogeographic analysis (Yu et al. 2010) to associate each node of the tree to one (or more) of six broad geographic regions, with an emphasis on the African continent. This analysis suggests a sub-Saharan placement for the MRCA of the haplogroup E chromosomes here analyzed (supplementary fig. S4, Supplementary Material online). Within this clade, the posterior probability (0.97) strongly favors an eastern African placement for the origin of the E-M215 diversity, as previously suggested by Semino et al. (2004) and Gebremeskel and Ibrahim (2014), whereas a northern African location is favored for the node defining the M78 subclade (posterior probability = 0.76), supporting the previous hypothesis of Cruciani et al. (2007). Despite we assigned most previous deep E-M35 eastern African clades to a single haplogroup (E-V1515), our phylogeographic analysis slightly favors an eastern African origin for E-M35 (posterior probability = 0.64). We found a new clade, defined by V1515 mutation, which originated and differentiated in eastern Africa (posterior probability = 0.99), and expanded southward in recent times as a single terminal clade (E-M293). A posterior probability of 0.92 supports a central/western African origin for haplogroup M2. Within this haplogroup, a shift in location assignment from western Africa to eastern Africa was observed along the lineage leading to a cluster of three (former) E-U209* samples, defined by V2580 mutation (supplementary fig. S4, Supplementary Material online).
The haplogroup E phylogeny here presented shows some relevant changes compared with the most updated and complete Y chromosome phylogenies, in which the two deepest subclades were defined by P147 and M75 mutations (Karafet et al. 2008; van Oven et al. 2014). In this study, we refine the deepest haplogroup E dichotomy, which now involves the E-M75 and the E-V3725 lineages, with the P147 mutation defining a branch sister to the newly discovered E-V44 lineage (supplementary fig. S3, Supplementary Material online). The new mutations V44 and V3725 are eligible markers to test chromosomes which resulted to belong to the paragroup E*(×M75, P147) in other studies. This paragroup, although very rare, being reported so far in two Saudi Arabian samples (Abu-Amero et al. 2009) and one southern African Bantu (Karafet et al. 2008), is of crucial relevance for phylogeographic inferences about the origin of haplogroup E and linked hypotheses about movements out of and back to Africa (Hammer et al.1998; Underhill and Kivisild 2007; Scozzari et al. 2014). Keeping these caveats in mind, our phylogeographic analysis, based on thousands of samples worldwide, suggests that the radiation of haplogroup E started about 58 ka, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, with a higher posterior probability (0.73) for an eastern African origin. Moreover, it seems that the next five major dichotomies also occurred in eastern Africa (posterior probabilities ranging 0.84–0.97) in a time frame of about 15 ky (55–40 ka), underlying the importance of this region for the early differentiation of this widespread haplogroup and for the peopling of the entire continent (supplementary fig. S4, Supplementary Material online).
One of the most interesting findings of our phylogeographic refinement is the identification of a new clade (E-V1515), which originated about 12 ka (95% CI: 8.6–16.4) in eastern Africa (posterior probability = 0.99) where it is currently mainly distributed. This clade includes all the sub-Saharan chromosomes belonging to the former paragroup E-M35*(×V92, V42, V6, M123, V68, M293, and V257), as well as all the sub-Saharan haplogroups (E-V42, E-M293, E-V92, and E-V6) reported as E-M35 basal clades in a previous phylogeny (Trombetta et al. 2011) (fig. 2). We observed the highest frequency and diversity of this haplogroup in the northern part of the Horn of Africa (present day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia), where the majority of the deepest E-V1515 subhaplogroups and paragroups were found (fig. 3 and supplementary table S7, Supplementary Material online). In the southern part of the Horn (southern Ethiopia, Somalia and northern Kenya), haplogroup E-V1515 is almost exclusively represented by the recent (3.5 ka; 95% CI: 1.7–5.9 ka) subhaplogroup E-V1486. Further south, in southern Kenya and southern Africa, a single E-V1486 terminal clade, known as E-M293 (Henn et al. 2008), was found (fig. 3). This phylogeographic pattern is strongly suggestive of human movements from the northern part of the Horn to the Ethiopian/Kenyan borders between 12 ka (the coalescence of E-V1515) and 3.5 ka (the coalescence of E-V1486), and from here toward southern Africa across the equatorial belt in more recent times (supplementary fig. S4, Supplementary Material online). Haplogroup E-M293 has been previously hypothesized to mark a recent gene flow (about 2 ka) through Tanzania to southern Africa, as a consequence of a migration of non-Bantu speaker pastoralists (Henn et al. 2008). Our data on the distribution and phylogeny of the E-V1515 haplogroup support and extend this hypothesis. We propose that the migration marked by the E-M293 haplogroup could be the final step of a north-to-south range expansion linked to different branches of E-V1515, which initially involved people from Eritrea (and possibly northern Sudan, not sampled here). This migratory route is concordant in time and space with archeological evidence for early domestication of African cattle in northeastern Africa about 10 ka, southward climate-driven movements of herders into southern Ethiopian highlands and Turkana basin (northern Kenya) around 4 ka, and a subsequent subequatorial pastoralist expansion toward southern Kenya/Tanzania and southern Africa not before 3 ka (Ehret 2002; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002; Lesur et al. 2014; Wright 2014). Within haplogroup E-V1515, we also remarked a striking parallelism in the geographic distribution of the MSY sister clades E-V1486 and E-V1700 (fig. 3) with respect to mutations C-14010 and G-13907 found within the enhancer of the autosomal LCT gene (Tishkoff et al. 2007; fig. 3 in Ranciaro et al. 2014). Both C-14010 and G-13907 have been associated with lactase persistence in adulthood and, similarly to MSY mutations V1486 and V1700, are essentially eastern African specific, recent, and found at high frequencies among pastoralist groups (Ingram et al. 2007, 2009; Tishkoff et al. 2007; Jones et al. 2013; Ranciaro et al. 2014). Similarly to C-14010, E-V1486 is found at high frequencies in pastoralist populations from Kenya and Tanzania, (and further south at lower frequencies), whereas E-V1700 mirrors the distribution of the lactase mutation G-13907, being observed at its highest frequency among Cushitic populations from the Horn. Considering the spatial–temporal congruencies with other pieces of evidence coming from archaeology as well as genetics, we propose that the observed phylogeographic trajectories of haplogroup E-V1515 could be the consequence of multistep southward movements of early pastoralists from a northeastern African motherland across the equatorial belt.
FIG. 3. —Maps of the observed frequencies for haplogroup E-V1515 and its major subhaplogroups. (A) Haplogroup E-V1515, (B) haplogroup E-V1700, (C) haplogroup E-V1486, (D) haplogroup E-V2881, (E) haplogroup E-M293, (F) simplified phylogeny of E-V1515, showing the estimated age of the nodes (ky). Place of sampling of chromosomes carrying rare paragroups E-V1515*, E-V1785*, and E-V1486* is shown as blue asterisks in panels (A), (B), and (C), respectively. The sampling locations for the populations used in this analysis are shown in supplementary figure S5, Supplementary Material online.
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
^^ Interesting study. So many things are implicated by these findings like that fact that the various branches of E-M215 (E1b1b) arose 25 thousand years ago thus predating the major language phyla like Afrasian, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Kordofanian. Also, one of the main divisions of E1b1b-- E-M35 is associated with a major Paleolithic expansion within Africa radiating from the Horn.
This phylogeographic pattern is strongly suggestive of human movements from the northern part of the Horn to the Ethiopian/Kenyan borders between 12 ka (the coalescence of E-V1515) and 3.5 ka (the coalescence of E-V1486), and from here toward southern Africa across the equatorial belt in more recent times (supplementary fig. S4, Supplementary Material online). Haplogroup E-M293 has been previously hypothesized to mark a recent gene flow (about 2 ka) through Tanzania to southern Africa, as a consequence of a migration of non-Bantu speaker pastoralists (Henn et al. 2008). Our data on the distribution and phylogeny of the E-V1515 haplogroup support and extend this hypothesis. We propose that the migration marked by the E-M293 haplogroup could be the final step of a north-to-south range expansion linked to different branches of E-V1515, which initially involved people from Eritrea (and possibly northern Sudan, not sampled here). This migratory route is concordant in time and space with archeological evidence for early domestication of African cattle in northeastern Africa about 10 ka, southward climate-driven movements of herders into southern Ethiopian highlands and Turkana basin (northern Kenya) around 4 ka, and a subsequent subequatorial pastoralist expansion toward southern Kenya/Tanzania and southern Africa not before 3 ka (Ehret 2002; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002; Lesur et al. 2014; Wright 2014). Within haplogroup E-V1515, we also remarked a striking parallelism in the geographic distribution of the MSY sister clades E-V1486 and E-V1700 (fig. 3) with respect to mutations C-14010 and G-13907 found within the enhancer of the autosomal LCT gene (Tishkoff et al. 2007; fig. 3 in Ranciaro et al. 2014). Both C-14010 and G-13907 have been associated with lactase persistence in adulthood and, similarly to MSY mutations V1486 and V1700, are essentially eastern African specific, recent, and found at high frequencies among pastoralist groups (Ingram et al. 2007, 2009; Tishkoff et al. 2007; Jones et al. 2013; Ranciaro et al. 2014). Similarly to C-14010, E-V1486 is found at high frequencies in pastoralist populations from Kenya and Tanzania, (and further south at lower frequencies), whereas E-V1700 mirrors the distribution of the lactase mutation G-13907, being observed at its highest frequency among Cushitic populations from the Horn. Considering the spatial–temporal congruencies with other pieces of evidence coming from archaeology as well as genetics, we propose that the observed phylogeographic trajectories of haplogroup E-V1515 could be the consequence of multistep southward movements of early pastoralists from a northeastern African motherland across the equatorial belt.
Now the reason why I'm citing the part above is that I've received word that ever since this paper came out *sigh* the Euronuts are at it again!
The Euronuts correctly associate this demic expansion archaeologically with the Stone Bowl Culture apparently now called Savanna Pastoral Neolithic, but if you read the wiki editing they did on the topic you can see they've managed to white-wash or rather cockasoidized them!! LOL
So not only is Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber 'Caucasoid, but now Cushitic as well! I'm now waiting for them to claim Chadic and Omotic. Hell, I think they did so with the former already. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
^^^Aye... I already seen Euronuts trying to claim Chadic. If I remember correct its due to Chadic being the AA language that is most similar to Egyptian.
Posts: 1891 | From: NY | Registered: Sep 2014
| IP: Logged |
posted
^^ Actually, Chadic has closer affinities with Berber of all the 'northern' Afrasan languages which include Egyptian and Semitic. Plus, it's been found that some Chadic speakers in West Africa carry R paternal lineages which they assume comes from Eurasian peoples yet the highest frequency and diversity of R clades in West Africa are among Niger-Congo speakers in Cameroon!
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by BlessedbyHorus: ^^^Aye... I already seen Euronuts trying to claim Chadic. If I remember correct its due to Chadic being the AA language that is most similar to Egyptian.
They have tried this many years ago. It's not something new.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^^ Actually, Chadic has closer affinities with Berber of all the 'northern' Afrasan languages which include Egyptian and Semitic. Plus, it's been found that some Chadic speakers in West Africa carry R paternal lineages which they assume comes from Eurasian peoples yet the highest frequency and diversity of R clades in West Africa are among Niger-Congo speakers in Cameroon!
posted
^ So where does Omotic fit in according to E. Wolff, that is if he even includes Omotic in his Afrasian classification??
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
Posts: 853 | From: Houston | Registered: Nov 2007
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^^ Actually, Chadic has closer affinities with Berber of all the 'northern' Afrasan languages which include Egyptian and Semitic. Plus, it's been found that some Chadic speakers in West Africa carry R paternal lineages which they assume comes from Eurasian peoples yet the highest frequency and diversity of R clades in West Africa are among Niger-Congo speakers in Cameroon!
quote:Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
Beat me to the question
Posts: 1254 | From: howdy | Registered: Mar 2014
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
click the PDF link in that post
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^^ Actually, Chadic has closer affinities with Berber of all the 'northern' Afrasan languages which include Egyptian and Semitic. Plus, it's been found that some Chadic speakers in West Africa carry R paternal lineages which they assume comes from Eurasian peoples yet the highest frequency and diversity of R clades in West Africa are among Niger-Congo speakers in Cameroon!
quote:Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
Beat me to the question
Never heard of this before.
--Neba, Aaron (1999). Modern Geography of the Republic of Cameroon, 3rd ed. Bamenda: Neba Publishers.
The Bamum, sometimes called Bamoum, Bamun, Bamoun, or Mum, are a Bantu ethnic group of Cameroon with around 215,000 members.
The deepest branching separates A1b from a monophyletic clade whose members (1a A2, A3, B, C, and R) all share seven mutually reinforcing derived mutations (five transitions and two transversions, all at non-CpG sites).
[...]
How does the present MSY tree compare with the backbone of the recently published “reference” MSY phylogeny?13 The phylogenetic relationships we observed among chromosomes belonging to haplogroups B, C, and R are reminiscent of those reported in the tree by Karafet et al.13 These chromosomes belong to a clade (haplogroup BT) in which chromosomes C and R share a common ancestor (Figure 2).
[...]
It is worth noting that this clade was previously detected in west Africa, although at low frequencies.10,30–32 Three chromosomes from the Bakola pygmy group from southern Cameroon (central Africa) were found to carry the derived allele at V164, V166, V196, and P114 and were classified as A1b. Interestingly, one chromosome from an Algerian Berber group (north- west Africa) was found to carry the derived allele at V164, V166, and V196 but carried the ancestral one at P114, implying a bipartite structure for A1b, where P114 defines an internal node.
Three features of our data are of particular interest. First, the branching order at the deepest points of the tree is different from that previously recognized. The root of the tree now falls between A1b and A1a-T, and the number of deep branchings leading to African-specific clades has doubled (Figure 2), providing further strong support for the MSY-based evidence of a modern human origin in the African continent.
Second, the MSY tree is deeper than previously believed. The present figure of about 140 KY for the inferred most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of the MSY phylogeny is older than previous estimates (about 100 KY or below)33–35 and easier to reconcile with plausible scenarios of modern human origin. 36 Clearly, calculation of the precise age of the tree largely depends on the accuracy of the assumed mutation rate. In any case, an antiquity of the root greater than that previously estimated is evident from the present tree structure. It is worth noting that A1b, long neglected in previous large-scale resequencing studies of the MSY, contributes to the older TMRCA and high nucleotide diversity values that we observe, highlighting the importance of targeted studies on rare haplogroups.
Third, contrary to previous phylogeny-based conclu- sions,15,16 the deepest clades of the revised MSY phylogeny are currently found in central and northwest Africa.
quote: The regional distribution of an ancient Y-chromosome haplogroup C-M130 (Hg C) in Asia provides an ideal tool of dissecting prehistoric migration events. We identified 465 Hg C individuals out of 4284 males from 140 East and Southeast Asian populations. We genotyped these Hg C individuals using 12 Y-chromosome biallelic markers and 8 commonly used Y-short tandem repeats (Y-STRs), and performed phylogeographic analysis in combination with the published data. The results show that most of the Hg C subhaplogroups have distinct geographical distribution and have undergone long-time isolation, although Hg C individuals are distributed widely across Eurasia. Furthermore, a general south-to-north and east-to-west cline of Y-STR diversity is observed with the highest diversity in Southeast Asia. The phylogeographic distribution pattern of Hg C supports a single coastal 'Out-of-Africa' route by way of the Indian subcontinent, which eventually led to the early settlement of modern humans in mainland Southeast Asia. The northward expansion of Hg C in East Asia started approximately 40 thousand of years ago (KYA) along the coastline of mainland China and reached Siberia approximately 15 KYA and finally made its way to the Americas.
--Zhong H1, Shi H, Qi XB, Xiao CJ, Jin L, Ma RZ, Su B.
Global distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup C reveals the prehistoric migration routes of African exodus and early settlement in East Asia.
quote:Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
If you were paying attention, the author of the study was Ekkehard Wolff whose study was based on phonology. Another linguist named Carleton Hodges based his study on phonetics which led him to the binary division of Afrasian with a northern or 'Boreafrasian' division (consisting of Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic) and a southern or 'austrafrasian' (consisting of Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic). Hodge's binary division is much more popular in scholarly circles and is reminiscent of the phonetic based binary division of Indo-European which has a centum/western division and a satem/eastern division. Truthfully, Afrasian is much older than Indo-European and is so ancient there is no actual consensus as to the divergence and development of all the subfamilies. For example, certain features in grammar and syntax make Semitic (particularly languages like Akkadian and South Arabian) more similar to Cushitic languages. Whereas the same can be said of To-Bedawi (the Beja language) and its relation to Egyptian language.
The point is all descend from a common ancestor. 'Bantu' by the way, is itself a subfamily of Niger-Congo which is itself part of a Niger-Kordofanian phylum.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
Dieudonne Toukam attempted to explain that they were not Bantus. I never heard of the Baladi treasury.
Posts: 1254 | From: howdy | Registered: Mar 2014
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
If you were paying attention, the author of the study was Ekkehard Wolff whose study was based on phonology. Another linguist named Carleton Hodges based his study on phonetics which led him to the binary division of Afrasian with a northern or 'Boreafrasian' division (consisting of Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic) and a southern or 'austrafrasian' (consisting of Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic). Hodge's binary division is much more popular in scholarly circles and is reminiscent of the phonetic based binary division of Indo-European which has a centum/western division and a satem/eastern division. Truthfully, Afrasian is much older than Indo-European and is so ancient there is no actual consensus as to the divergence and development of all the subfamilies. For example, certain features in grammar and syntax make Semitic (particularly languages like Akkadian and South Arabian) more similar to Cushitic languages. Whereas the same can be said of To-Bedawi (the Beja language) and its relation to Egyptian language.
The point is all descend from a common ancestor. 'Bantu' by the way, is itself a subfamily of Niger-Congo which is itself part of a Niger-Kordofanian phylum.
Hahaha, don't you know? asar imhotep doesn't believe in the afro-asiatic language family. Hence, he feigns shock as if every professional linguist who studies these languages haven't already mentioned the closeness of semitic and AE. He fancies himself a linguistic scholar but idk how he could not know of basic info like this if he were truly one.
Posts: 214 | Registered: Oct 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
There's many contradictory classifications of Afro-Asiatics. A valid reconstruction of the language family was never done (the 2 reconstructions attempts used a subset of the phylum and even then were not similar). The suppose phylum has one of the worse cognates similarities of any language family (which seems largely due to recent borrowing from Arab/Islam). The phylum was born in the era of the hamitic myth racist craze.
Obenga and Diop considered the family to be an invalid one. Many mainstream linguists question the family.
If you consider population genetics and the differentiations/similarities between populations. As well as linguistic argumentation. It seems Obenga's Classification of African languages make more sense.
Click image for larger version.
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
Theophile Obenga is a scholar who worked closely with Diop.
Afro-asiatic language is derived from the old Hamito-Semitic language family itself derived from the Hamitic racist myth.
While most linguists have accepted Afro-asiatic as a linguistic group without questioning. It it questioned by many linguists. Its grouping is much weaker than the Indo-European supra-language family. There's much more inter-language diversity and the supra-language family would be much older than the Indo-European one.
Obenga's great (and voluminous) academic work demonstrate, using comparative linguistic (same one used for the Indo-European family), the linguistic correspondence (lexical, grammatical, etc) between various languages of the Afro-Egyptian supra-family. While Obenga went a long way to prove the existence and describe the Afro/Negro-Egyptian language family. Obenga is not alone in questioning the validity of the "Hamito-Semitic" aka the Afro-Asiatic language family.
Here excerpt from Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser:
quote: Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing , where Berber and Chadic have influenced one another; Chadic has also been influenced by both "Niger-Congo" and "Nilo- Saharan" languages ; Omotic and Cushitic share areal traits; Egyptian influenced Semitic and was itself influenced; Cushitic has Semetic; and Semitic. especially through Arabic in the last millennium . has influenced many others.
The Afroasiatic union has relied mainly on morphological agreements in the pronominal paradigms and the presence of a masculine-feminine gender distinction. This evidence is attractive, but not completely compelling . As for lexical comparisons, Afroasiatic scholars are in general agreement that the findings have been more limited and harder to interpret . Indeed, the two recent large-scale attempts at Afroasiatic reconstructing and assembling large sets of cognates, Ehret(1995) and Orel and Stoibova(1995), are so radically different from one another, with little in common, that they raise questions about the possibility of viable reconstruction in Afroasiatic . As Newman reports, "the list of supposed cognate lexical items between Chadic and other Afroasiatic languages presented in the past have on the whole been less reliable " (Newman 1980:13), Newman (2000:262) recognized that "in the opinion of some scholars, the evidence supporting the relationship between the Chadic language family and other languages in the groups in the Afroasiatic phylum, such as Semitic and Berber, is not compelling." Jungraithmayr's (2000:91) conclusions raise even graver doubts about being able to classify Chadic successfully:
To sum up: As long as there are deep-rooted properties like pronominal morphemes - existent in a given language that hint a certain genetic origin, these properties ultimately determine the classification of that language. However, since most of the ancient (Hamitosemitic) structures and properties of the Chadic languages have been destroyed or at least mutilated and transformed to the extent that they can hardly be identified as such any more , it is crucial to study these languages as deeply and thoroughly as possible.
He notes "the enormous degree of linguistic complexity we encounter in the Chadic language," with observation that the degree of "Africanization" has sometimes reached the point where, structurally speaking, the similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic . These obvious surface similarities between Chadic and non-Chadic languages in central Sudan put an additional task load on the researcher's shoulders (Jungraithmayr 2000:91)
Nevertheless, Newman is of the opinion that "some points of resemblance in morphology and lexicon are so striking that if one did not assume relationship, they would be impossible to explain away." There is methodological lesson to be gained in examining Newman's (1980) argument, which has been considered strong evidence of Afroasiatic. Newman (1980:19) argued that in
a range of Afroasiatic languages from whatever branch, one finds that the words for 'blood,' 'moon; 'mouth' 'name' and 'nose' for example tend to be masculine: 'eye', 'fire, ' and 'Sun,' feminine; and 'water', grammatically plural...where the overall consistency in gender assignment contrasts strikingly with the considerable diversity in form.
He compared fourteen words which have the same gender across the branches of Afroasiatic and assumed this coincidence proves the genetic relationship. (Newman's table has fifteen items, but 'egg' is listed as doubtful, and in any case, there may be a non-arbitrary real-world connection between 'egg' and female gender.) There are several problems with this claim. First, it violates the principle of permitting only comparisons which involve both sound and meaning (see Chapter 7)- Newman's comparisons involve only meaning (gender) and the forms compared are not for the most part phonetically similar. Second, it assumes that the choice of the gender marking is equally arbitrary for each of the forms involved, but this is clearly not the case. For example, 'sun' and 'moon' tend to be paired cross linguistically in a set where the two have opposite genders, one masculine, one feminine - Newman's Afroasiatic masculine 'moon' and feminine 'sun' parallels Germanic and many other languages. In many languages including some of the ones compared here, feminine gender is associated with 'diminutive' ; this may explain why the larger animals of the list, 'crocodile' and 'monkey.' have masculine gender. In any case, of Newman's fourteen, only four are feminine; perhaps. then, masculine is in some way the unmarked gender, the gender most likely to be found unless there is some reason for a morpheme to be assigned to the feminine class. As for 'water' being in the "plural," in three of the language groups compared, masculine and plural have the same form, so that it would be just as accurate in these to say that water' was "masculine." Also for 'water,' plurality and mass noun may be associated in some non-arbitrary way. The most serious problem is that of probability. As Nichols ( 1996a) shows, even if there were an equal probability for any word in the set to show up either as masculine or feminine (and as just argued this is not the case), for Newman's argument to have force, it would need to involve a closed set with exactly these words with no others being tested for gender parallels. The probability of finding this number of forms with identical gender across the six branches of Afroasiatic when an open sample of basic nouns is searched comes out to be roughly equivalent to the fourteen in Newman's table - the number he found is about what should be expected. The argument, then, has no force.
Nichols (1997a:364) sees Afroasiatic as "an atypically stock-Like quasistock." She says it is "routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found." though she thinks it has a "distinctive grammatical signature that includes several morphological features at least two of which independently suffice statistically to show genetic relatedness beyond any reasonable doubt." As pointed out above, some Afroasiatic languages lack these, while some neighboring non-Afroasiatic languages which have been influenced by them have these traits . This being the case, these traits are neither necessary nor sufficient to show the genetic relationship.
-Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser
We can note:
- Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing
- The similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic
- Afroasiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found .
And there is more. As noted in another thread, Ehret said:
quote: The initial warming of climate in the Belling-Allerřd interstadial, 12,700-10,900 BCE, brought increased rainfall and warmer conditions in many African regions. Three sets of peoples, speaking languages of the three language families that predominate across the continent today, probably began their early expansions in this period. Nilo-Saharan peoples spread out in the areas around and east of the middle Nile River in what is today the country of Sudan. Peoples of a second family, Niger-Kordofanian (EDIT: to which Niger-Congo and Bantu are offshoots) , spread across an emerging east-west belt of savanna vegetation from the eastern Sudan to the western Atlantic coast of Africa. In the same era, communities speaking languages of the Erythraic branch of the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) family expanded beyond their origin areas in the Horn of Africa, northward to modern-day Egypt.
[...]
In the tenth millennium in the savannas of modern-day Mali, communities speaking early daughter languages of proto-Niger-Congo, itself an offshoot of the Niger-Kordofanian family , began to intensively collect wild grains, among them probably fonio.
So the homeland of the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo/Bantu), and Afro-asiatic language is set in the eastern part of the Sahara-Sahel-Nile Belt in the area close to Sudan or in Sudan (aka Kush/Nubia/Nile Valley). He also add that those 3 African language family probably began their expansions in the 12,700-10,900 BCE period.
In the final chapter of his book, Obenga locate the homeland of the Negro-Egyptian language in the Nile Valley from the African Great lakes regions and place it at a time before 10 000-8000 BCE.
Which wonderfully also correspond to archeological evidences from that era:
So Ehret, situate the homeland of the 3 main language groups in Africa (Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo/Bantu), and Afro-asiatic), which encompass almost all African languages spoken today, in area close to Sudan, which happens to be the about the same location as where Obenga place the homeland of the Negro-Egyptian family. Which happens to be the same location African people were living in the period prior to the Holocene/Green Sahara (see image A). The only place inhabited during that era due to the extreme aridity.
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate: There's many contradictory classifications of Afro-Asiatics. A valid reconstruction of the language family was never done (the 2 reconstructions attempts used a subset of the phylum and even then were not similar). The suppose phylum has one of the worse cognates similarities of any language family (which seems largely due to recent borrowing from Arab/Islam). The phylum was born in the era of the hamitic myth racist craze.
Obenga and Diop considered the family to be an invalid one. Many mainstream linguists question the family.
If you consider population genetics and the differentiations/similarities between populations. As well as linguistic argumentation. It seems Obenga's Classification of African languages make more sense.
Click image for larger version.
Smh, man you're debunking your ownself. Linguists disagree on the organization of sub-phylae within afro-asiatic but they all agree on the phylum's existence as shown by the 1st pic you just posted! If you can't recognize the difference between those 2 simple concepts then that's saying a lot about your intellect.
Afro-asiatic had nothing to do with the hamitic theory. Greenberg who 1st proposed the family made his assignments based on linguistic evidence without regard to race. That's why he grouped chadic language with others like semitic and berber whereas before him scholars didn't group chadic with the others because they thought the chadic speakers were "negros". No need to make up lies dude.
Posts: 214 | Registered: Oct 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate: I posted this earlier about this:
Theophile Obenga is a scholar who worked closely with Diop.
Afro-asiatic language is derived from the old Hamito-Semitic language family itself derived from the Hamitic racist myth.
While most linguists have accepted Afro-asiatic as a linguistic group without questioning. It it questioned by many linguists. Its grouping is much weaker than the Indo-European supra-language family. There's much more inter-language diversity and the supra-language family would be much older than the Indo-European one.
Obenga's great (and voluminous) academic work demonstrate, using comparative linguistic (same one used for the Indo-European family), the linguistic correspondence (lexical, grammatical, etc) between various languages of the Afro-Egyptian supra-family. While Obenga went a long way to prove the existence and describe the Afro/Negro-Egyptian language family. Obenga is not alone in questioning the validity of the "Hamito-Semitic" aka the Afro-Asiatic language family.
Here excerpt from Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser:
quote: Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing , where Berber and Chadic have influenced one another; Chadic has also been influenced by both "Niger-Congo" and "Nilo- Saharan" languages ; Omotic and Cushitic share areal traits; Egyptian influenced Semitic and was itself influenced; Cushitic has Semetic; and Semitic. especially through Arabic in the last millennium . has influenced many others.
The Afroasiatic union has relied mainly on morphological agreements in the pronominal paradigms and the presence of a masculine-feminine gender distinction. This evidence is attractive, but not completely compelling . As for lexical comparisons, Afroasiatic scholars are in general agreement that the findings have been more limited and harder to interpret . Indeed, the two recent large-scale attempts at Afroasiatic reconstructing and assembling large sets of cognates, Ehret(1995) and Orel and Stoibova(1995), are so radically different from one another, with little in common, that they raise questions about the possibility of viable reconstruction in Afroasiatic . As Newman reports, "the list of supposed cognate lexical items between Chadic and other Afroasiatic languages presented in the past have on the whole been less reliable " (Newman 1980:13), Newman (2000:262) recognized that "in the opinion of some scholars, the evidence supporting the relationship between the Chadic language family and other languages in the groups in the Afroasiatic phylum, such as Semitic and Berber, is not compelling." Jungraithmayr's (2000:91) conclusions raise even graver doubts about being able to classify Chadic successfully:
To sum up: As long as there are deep-rooted properties like pronominal morphemes - existent in a given language that hint a certain genetic origin, these properties ultimately determine the classification of that language. However, since most of the ancient (Hamitosemitic) structures and properties of the Chadic languages have been destroyed or at least mutilated and transformed to the extent that they can hardly be identified as such any more , it is crucial to study these languages as deeply and thoroughly as possible.
He notes "the enormous degree of linguistic complexity we encounter in the Chadic language," with observation that the degree of "Africanization" has sometimes reached the point where, structurally speaking, the similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic . These obvious surface similarities between Chadic and non-Chadic languages in central Sudan put an additional task load on the researcher's shoulders (Jungraithmayr 2000:91)
Nevertheless, Newman is of the opinion that "some points of resemblance in morphology and lexicon are so striking that if one did not assume relationship, they would be impossible to explain away." There is methodological lesson to be gained in examining Newman's (1980) argument, which has been considered strong evidence of Afroasiatic. Newman (1980:19) argued that in
a range of Afroasiatic languages from whatever branch, one finds that the words for 'blood,' 'moon; 'mouth' 'name' and 'nose' for example tend to be masculine: 'eye', 'fire, ' and 'Sun,' feminine; and 'water', grammatically plural...where the overall consistency in gender assignment contrasts strikingly with the considerable diversity in form.
He compared fourteen words which have the same gender across the branches of Afroasiatic and assumed this coincidence proves the genetic relationship. (Newman's table has fifteen items, but 'egg' is listed as doubtful, and in any case, there may be a non-arbitrary real-world connection between 'egg' and female gender.) There are several problems with this claim. First, it violates the principle of permitting only comparisons which involve both sound and meaning (see Chapter 7)- Newman's comparisons involve only meaning (gender) and the forms compared are not for the most part phonetically similar. Second, it assumes that the choice of the gender marking is equally arbitrary for each of the forms involved, but this is clearly not the case. For example, 'sun' and 'moon' tend to be paired cross linguistically in a set where the two have opposite genders, one masculine, one feminine - Newman's Afroasiatic masculine 'moon' and feminine 'sun' parallels Germanic and many other languages. In many languages including some of the ones compared here, feminine gender is associated with 'diminutive' ; this may explain why the larger animals of the list, 'crocodile' and 'monkey.' have masculine gender. In any case, of Newman's fourteen, only four are feminine; perhaps. then, masculine is in some way the unmarked gender, the gender most likely to be found unless there is some reason for a morpheme to be assigned to the feminine class. As for 'water' being in the "plural," in three of the language groups compared, masculine and plural have the same form, so that it would be just as accurate in these to say that water' was "masculine." Also for 'water,' plurality and mass noun may be associated in some non-arbitrary way. The most serious problem is that of probability. As Nichols ( 1996a) shows, even if there were an equal probability for any word in the set to show up either as masculine or feminine (and as just argued this is not the case), for Newman's argument to have force, it would need to involve a closed set with exactly these words with no others being tested for gender parallels. The probability of finding this number of forms with identical gender across the six branches of Afroasiatic when an open sample of basic nouns is searched comes out to be roughly equivalent to the fourteen in Newman's table - the number he found is about what should be expected. The argument, then, has no force.
Nichols (1997a:364) sees Afroasiatic as "an atypically stock-Like quasistock." She says it is "routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found." though she thinks it has a "distinctive grammatical signature that includes several morphological features at least two of which independently suffice statistically to show genetic relatedness beyond any reasonable doubt." As pointed out above, some Afroasiatic languages lack these, while some neighboring non-Afroasiatic languages which have been influenced by them have these traits . This being the case, these traits are neither necessary nor sufficient to show the genetic relationship.
-Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser
We can note:
- Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing
- The similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic
- Afroasiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found .
And there is more. As noted in another thread, Ehret said:
quote: The initial warming of climate in the Belling-Allerřd interstadial, 12,700-10,900 BCE, brought increased rainfall and warmer conditions in many African regions. Three sets of peoples, speaking languages of the three language families that predominate across the continent today, probably began their early expansions in this period. Nilo-Saharan peoples spread out in the areas around and east of the middle Nile River in what is today the country of Sudan. Peoples of a second family, Niger-Kordofanian (EDIT: to which Niger-Congo and Bantu are offshoots) , spread across an emerging east-west belt of savanna vegetation from the eastern Sudan to the western Atlantic coast of Africa. In the same era, communities speaking languages of the Erythraic branch of the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) family expanded beyond their origin areas in the Horn of Africa, northward to modern-day Egypt.
[...]
In the tenth millennium in the savannas of modern-day Mali, communities speaking early daughter languages of proto-Niger-Congo, itself an offshoot of the Niger-Kordofanian family , began to intensively collect wild grains, among them probably fonio.
So the homeland of the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo/Bantu), and Afro-asiatic language is set in the eastern part of the Sahara-Sahel-Nile Belt in the area close to Sudan or in Sudan (aka Kush/Nubia/Nile Valley). He also add that those 3 African language family probably began their expansions in the 12,700-10,900 BCE period.
In the final chapter of his book, Obenga locate the homeland of the Negro-Egyptian language in the Nile Valley from the African Great lakes regions and place it at a time before 10 000-8000 BCE.
Which wonderfully also correspond to archeological evidences from that era:
So Ehret, situate the homeland of the 3 main language groups in Africa (Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo/Bantu), and Afro-asiatic), which encompass almost all African languages spoken today, in area close to Sudan, which happens to be the about the same location as where Obenga place the homeland of the Negro-Egyptian family. Which happens to be the same location African people were living in the period prior to the Holocene/Green Sahara (see image A). The only place inhabited during that era due to the extreme aridity.
Obenga and Diop lack proper linguistic credentials so their opinion on linguistics is irrelevant. Campbell, Poser and Ehret all say the afro-asiatic family exists and they refer to its existence in the very quotes you post! And part of your quote actually argues explicity for afro-asiatic's existence. Do you even understand what you read? Stop making a fool of yourself.
Posts: 214 | Registered: Oct 2011
| IP: Logged |
After partitioning the SNP data into African and non-African origin chromosome segments, we found support for a distinct African (Ethiopic) ancestry and a distinct non-African (Ethio-Somali) ancestry in HOA populations. The African Ethiopic ancestry is tightly restricted to HOA populations and likely represents an autochthonous HOA population. The non-African ancestry in the HOA, which is primarily attributed to a novel Ethio-Somali inferred ancestry component, is significantly differentiated from all neighboring non-African ancestries in North Africa, the Levant, and Arabia. The Ethio-Somali ancestry is found in all admixed HOA ethnic groups, shows little inter-individual variance within these ethnic groups, is estimated to have diverged from all other non-African ancestries by at least 23 ka, and does not carry the unique Arabian lactase persistence allele that arose about 4 ka. Taking into account published mitochondrial, Y chromosome, paleoclimate, and archaeological data, we find that the time of the Ethio-Somali back-to-Africa migration is most likely pre-agricultural.
We close with a provisional linguistic hypothesis. The proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers are thought to have lived either in the area of the Levant or in east/northeast Africa [8], [107], [108]. Proponents of the Levantine origin of Afro-Asiatic tie the dispersal and differentiation of this language group to the development of agriculture in the Levant beginning around 12 ka [8], [109], [110]. In the African-origins model, the original diversification of the Afro-Asiatic languages is pre-agricultural, with the source population living in the central Nile valley, the African Red Sea hills, or the HOA [108], [111]. In this model, later diversification and expansion within particular Afro-Asiatic language groups may be associated with agricultural expansions and transmissions, but the deep diversification of the group is pre-agricultural. We hypothesize that a population with substantial Ethio-Somali ancestry could be the proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers. A later migration of a subset of this population back to the Levant before 6 ka would account for a Levantine origin of the Semitic languages [18] and the relatively even distribution of around 7% Ethio-Somali ancestry in all sampled Levantine populations (Table S6). Later migration from Arabia into the HOA beginning around 3 ka would explain the origin of the Ethiosemitic languages at this time [18], the presence of greater Arabian and Eurasian ancestry in the Semitic speaking populations of the HOA (Table 2, S6), and ROLLOFF/ALDER estimates of admixture in HOA populations between 1–5 ka (Table 1).
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
Me:While most linguists have accepted Afro-asiatic as a linguistic group without questioning. It it questioned by many linguists. Its grouping is much weaker than the Indo-European supra-language family. There's much more inter-language diversity and the supra-language family would be much older than the Indo-European one. A viable reconstruction was never successful. Afroasiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found.
You:Most linguists have accepted the Afro-astiatic linguistic groups.
Here excerpt from Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser. Obenga is a solid scholar but this is not Obenga!:
quote: Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing , where Berber and Chadic have influenced one another; Chadic has also been influenced by both "Niger-Congo" and "Nilo- Saharan" languages ; Omotic and Cushitic share areal traits; Egyptian influenced Semitic and was itself influenced; Cushitic has Semetic; and Semitic. especially through Arabic in the last millennium . has influenced many others.
The Afroasiatic union has relied mainly on morphological agreements in the pronominal paradigms and the presence of a masculine-feminine gender distinction. This evidence is attractive, but not completely compelling . As for lexical comparisons, Afroasiatic scholars are in general agreement that the findings have been more limited and harder to interpret . Indeed, the two recent large-scale attempts at Afroasiatic reconstructing and assembling large sets of cognates, Ehret(1995) and Orel and Stoibova(1995), are so radically different from one another, with little in common, that they raise questions about the possibility of viable reconstruction in Afroasiatic . As Newman reports, "the list of supposed cognate lexical items between Chadic and other Afroasiatic languages presented in the past have on the whole been less reliable " (Newman 1980:13), Newman (2000:262) recognized that "in the opinion of some scholars, the evidence supporting the relationship between the Chadic language family and other languages in the groups in the Afroasiatic phylum, such as Semitic and Berber, is not compelling." Jungraithmayr's (2000:91) conclusions raise even graver doubts about being able to classify Chadic successfully:
To sum up: As long as there are deep-rooted properties like pronominal morphemes - existent in a given language that hint a certain genetic origin, these properties ultimately determine the classification of that language. However, since most of the ancient (Hamitosemitic) structures and properties of the Chadic languages have been destroyed or at least mutilated and transformed to the extent that they can hardly be identified as such any more , it is crucial to study these languages as deeply and thoroughly as possible.
He notes "the enormous degree of linguistic complexity we encounter in the Chadic language," with observation that the degree of "Africanization" has sometimes reached the point where, structurally speaking, the similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic . These obvious surface similarities between Chadic and non-Chadic languages in central Sudan put an additional task load on the researcher's shoulders (Jungraithmayr 2000:91)
Nevertheless, Newman is of the opinion that "some points of resemblance in morphology and lexicon are so striking that if one did not assume relationship, they would be impossible to explain away." There is methodological lesson to be gained in examining Newman's (1980) argument, which has been considered strong evidence of Afroasiatic. Newman (1980:19) argued that in
a range of Afroasiatic languages from whatever branch, one finds that the words for 'blood,' 'moon; 'mouth' 'name' and 'nose' for example tend to be masculine: 'eye', 'fire, ' and 'Sun,' feminine; and 'water', grammatically plural...where the overall consistency in gender assignment contrasts strikingly with the considerable diversity in form.
He compared fourteen words which have the same gender across the branches of Afroasiatic and assumed this coincidence proves the genetic relationship. (Newman's table has fifteen items, but 'egg' is listed as doubtful, and in any case, there may be a non-arbitrary real-world connection between 'egg' and female gender.) There are several problems with this claim. First, it violates the principle of permitting only comparisons which involve both sound and meaning (see Chapter 7)- Newman's comparisons involve only meaning (gender) and the forms compared are not for the most part phonetically similar. Second, it assumes that the choice of the gender marking is equally arbitrary for each of the forms involved, but this is clearly not the case. For example, 'sun' and 'moon' tend to be paired cross linguistically in a set where the two have opposite genders, one masculine, one feminine - Newman's Afroasiatic masculine 'moon' and feminine 'sun' parallels Germanic and many other languages. In many languages including some of the ones compared here, feminine gender is associated with 'diminutive' ; this may explain why the larger animals of the list, 'crocodile' and 'monkey.' have masculine gender. In any case, of Newman's fourteen, only four are feminine; perhaps. then, masculine is in some way the unmarked gender, the gender most likely to be found unless there is some reason for a morpheme to be assigned to the feminine class. As for 'water' being in the "plural," in three of the language groups compared, masculine and plural have the same form, so that it would be just as accurate in these to say that water' was "masculine." Also for 'water,' plurality and mass noun may be associated in some non-arbitrary way. The most serious problem is that of probability. As Nichols ( 1996a) shows, even if there were an equal probability for any word in the set to show up either as masculine or feminine (and as just argued this is not the case), for Newman's argument to have force, it would need to involve a closed set with exactly these words with no others being tested for gender parallels. The probability of finding this number of forms with identical gender across the six branches of Afroasiatic when an open sample of basic nouns is searched comes out to be roughly equivalent to the fourteen in Newman's table - the number he found is about what should be expected. The argument, then, has no force.
Nichols (1997a:364) sees Afroasiatic as "an atypically stock-Like quasistock." She says it is "routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found." though she thinks it has a "distinctive grammatical signature that includes several morphological features at least two of which independently suffice statistically to show genetic relatedness beyond any reasonable doubt." As pointed out above, some Afroasiatic languages lack these, while some neighboring non-Afroasiatic languages which have been influenced by them have these traits . This being the case, these traits are neither necessary nor sufficient to show the genetic relationship.
-Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser
We can note:
- Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing
- The similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic
- Afroasiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found
- Obenga's classifications of African languages can be confirmed genetically by the close genetic distance between Cushitic, Chadic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Kordofanian speakers (Fst distance, shared E-P2 and various MtDNA haplogroups for example).
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites and Europeans...
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites or Europeans...
Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic.[14][15] Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic.
______________________
Ehret et al. (December 2004). "http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/306/5702/1680c The Origins of Afroasiatic
McCall, Daniel F. (1998). "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?". Current Anthropology 39 (1): 139–44. doi:10.1086/204702. ISSN 0011-3204
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites or Europeans...
Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic.[14][15] Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic.
______________________
Ehret et al. (December 2004). "http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/306/5702/1680c The Origins of Afroasiatic
McCall, Daniel F. (1998). "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?". Current Anthropology 39 (1): 139–44. doi:10.1086/204702. ISSN 0011-3204
As you know I don't believe in the Afro-hamitic family (pun intended), but I must also consider the possibility that I am wrong about this. It's not a big deal either way.
It's always possible Semitic speakers to be people who in their history switched language with the arrival of some African speaking people. Since most modern scholars agree that Afroasiatic has an African origin.
Semetic speakers in Arabia have limited ancient African admixtures. They have some but not a lot of African E, A and B haplogroups for example (some recent some older). So at some point, "future" Semitic speakers who are now mostly from F haplogroups (like J, T) would have to have switched languages to speak an African language (now called Afro-Asiatic).
Later on, Semitic speakers (mainly Arabic and future ethio-Semitic speakers) migrated to Africa, admixing with people while spreading the Arabic, Ethio-Semitic languages and the Muslim religion. Affecting through borrowing the language of Cushitic and Chadic speakers (often people converted to Islam which use a text in Semitic/Arabic language, even if we must take into account most people didn't know how to read in the past).
Recent genetic studies date the arrival of Semitic speakers in modern Egypt and modern East Africa to around 750 and 3000 years ago respectively ** . I don't have to say that it is well after the foundation of the Ancient Egyptian state and precursor cultures like Badarian, Naqada, Tasian, Nabta Playa, etc.
This is just to say that either way it doesn't detract for the African origin of Ancient Egyptians. Ancient DNA taken from actual Ancient Egyptians mummies is all I need. The rest is just a big bonus (archaeological continuity/indigenous Africans, post-cranial analysis, genetic analysis on modern populations, etc).
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites or Europeans...
Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic.[14][15] Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic.
______________________
Ehret et al. (December 2004). "http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/306/5702/1680c The Origins of Afroasiatic
McCall, Daniel F. (1998). "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?". Current Anthropology 39 (1): 139–44. doi:10.1086/204702. ISSN 0011-3204
Try to cite his later works, of you try come across as objective and relevant. LOL
He clearly stated that old linguistic approach is based on racism and prejudice.
Ehret now calls Afroasiatic Afrasan. And Porto-Afrasan has its root at lake Nuba, which is well known now. Meanstream Afroasiatic is still Afroasiatic. But the consensus is clear on it. The root of the phylum is in Africa.
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites or Europeans...
Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic.[14][15] Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic.
______________________
Ehret et al. (December 2004). "http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/306/5702/1680c The Origins of Afroasiatic
McCall, Daniel F. (1998). "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?". Current Anthropology 39 (1): 139–44. doi:10.1086/204702. ISSN 0011-3204
As you know I don't believe in the Afro-hamitic family (pun intended), but I must also consider the possibility that I am wrong about this. It's not a big deal either way.
It's always possible Semitic speakers to be people who in their history switched language with the arrival of some African speaking people. Since most modern scholars agree that Afroasiatic has an African origin.
Semetic speakers in Arabia have limited ancient African admixtures. They have some but not a lot of African E, A and B haplogroups for example (some recent some older). So at some point, "future" Semitic speakers who are now mostly from F haplogroups (like J, T) would have to have switched languages to speak an African language (now called Afro-Asiatic).
Later on, Semitic speakers (mainly Arabic and future ethio-Semitic speakers) migrated to Africa, admixing with people while spreading the Arabic, Ethio-Semitic languages and the Muslim religion. Affecting through borrowing the language of Cushitic and Chadic speakers (often people converted to Islam which use a text in Semitic/Arabic language, even if we must take into account most people didn't know how to read in the past).
Recent genetic studies date the arrival of Semitic speakers in modern Egypt and modern East Africa to around 750 and 3000 years ago respectively ** . I don't have to say that it is well after the foundation of the Ancient Egyptian state and precursor cultures like Badarian, Naqada, Tasian, Nabta Playa, etc.
This is just to say that either way it doesn't detract for the African origin of Ancient Egyptians. Ancient DNA taken from actual Ancient Egyptians mummies is all I need. The rest is just a big bonus (archaeological continuity/indigenous Africans, post-cranial analysis, genetic analysis on modern populations, etc).
Arab ethic groups are diverse. And like too so in genetics.
J1 likely arose at the Sinai aka South Levant, and diverted from there in-and-out of Africa.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites and Europeans...
You have no idea, the latest game euronuts play is that E1b1a is actually Eurasian. And was carried by Europeans into Africa.
It has nothing to do with this forum. Its a worldwide phenomenon.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:- Afroasiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found
Of course it can not. Large parts of Africa are English speaking. Yet, they have no connects to the British.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ So where does Omotic fit in according to E. Wolff, that is if he even includes Omotic in his Afrasian classification??
I happen to have found a relatively new publication by him.
quote: There are between 30 and 50 or so Cushitic languages depending in the first instance on what is differentiated as a language or a variety or dialect of a language, and in the second instance on whether or not the so-called Omotic languages are subsumed under the term Cushitic, which would add around another 30 languages. For a brief discussion on the status of Omotic see 1.2. below. The various Cushitic languages are considerably more differentiated amongst themselves than the members of the Semitic family, and several branches of Cushitic themselves show as much internal complexity as Semitic as a whole. The present-day focus or epicentre of the Cushitic languages is the area of the four countries of the Horn of Africa: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. Outside this region, one language, Beja, is also spoken in Sudan and southern Egypt, and Somali and Oromo extend into Kenya along with a few smaller languages, chiefly members of the South Cushitic branch, which are found only in Kenya and Tanzania. There is also some linguistic evidence that Cushitic languages were in the past more widespread in East Africa and have now given way both to Bantu and Nilotic languages in the area of today’s Kenya and Tanzania.
In terms of numbers of speakers many Cushitic languages are comparatively small, with a few thousands, tens of thousands or occasionally hundreds of thousands of speakers, and in a few instances with only a few hundred or less. Although available figures are not always reliable in respect of exact numbers, the only Cushitic languages with more than a million speakers are ‘Afar (c. 1 million), Beja (c. 1.2 million), Oromo (at least 18 million, counting all varieties), Sidaama (c. 2.9 million), and Somali (around 13 million). To these may be added Omotic Wolaitta and the varieties of the Gamo- Gofa-Dawro cluster (c. 1.2 million each). There are no pre-modern records of Cushitic languages, the earliest attestations being in the first instance extracts from the Song of Songs translated at the behest of the Scottish traveller, James Bruce, in the late 18th cent., and later some Agäw prayer texts written in Ethiopic script that probably date from the mid 19th cent. Otherwise, until orthographies were developed for some languages towards the end of the 20th cent., all prior attestations derive from language studies made by foreign scholars from the latter half of the 19th cent. onwards. Some languages remained unknown to scholarship until the second half of the 20th cent.
Dieudonne Toukam attempted to explain that they were not Bantus. I never heard of the Baladi treasury.
Oomph, that's deep. I never heard of that term before either.
Baladi Egyptians (Fellaheen). I remember Zarahan had post on Fellaheen farmers, stating that they showed affinities with "sub Saharan" Africans. Thou, some Eurocentric minds claim the Fellaheen were Arab/ middle eastern farmers. The discrepancy in here is, the Natufians.
Ironically V88 is found at the Siwa as well. And in Tueareg. from Central Africa.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Troll Patrol # Ish Gebor:
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate:
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: [qb] I don't think most people in this thread understood the new data on Haplogroup E So therefore they divert to a done to death before debate on Afroasiatic
This forum is ridiculous sometimes. Even if the subject of a thread would the study determining Ramses III to be E1b1a, there's will be some people trying to connect it to Semites or Europeans...
Proto-Semitic speakers were originally believed by some to have first arrived in the Middle East from Africa, possibly as part of the operation of the Saharan pump, around the late Neolithic.[14][15] Diakonoff sees Semitic originating between the Nile Delta and Canaan as the northernmost branch of Afroasiatic.
______________________
Ehret et al. (December 2004). "http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/306/5702/1680c The Origins of Afroasiatic
McCall, Daniel F. (1998). "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?". Current Anthropology 39 (1): 139–44. doi:10.1086/204702. ISSN 0011-3204
Try to cite his later works, of you try come across as objective and relevant. LOL
He clearly stated that old linguistic approach is based on racism and prejudice.
Ehret now calls Afroasiatic Afrasan. And Porto-Afrasan has its root at lake Nuba, which is well known now. Meanstream Afroasiatic is still Afroasiatic. But the consensus is clear on it. The root of the phylum is in Africa.
some people in the forum belive that it doesn't matter what you call it or what the origin is, they say that Egyptian and Semitic languages are unrelated
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
Patrol says: Baladi Egyptians (Fellaheen). I remember Zarahan had post on Fellaheen farmers, stating that they showed affinities with "sub Saharan" Africans. Thou, some Eurocentric minds claim the Fellaheen were Arab/ middle eastern farmers. The discrepancy in here is, the Natufians.
Yes the Britannica article below noted that these rural fellahim were darker, and more "negroid."
"In Libya, which is mostly desert and oasis, there is a visible Negroid element in the sedentary populations, and at the same is true of the Fellahin of Egypt, whether Copt or Muslim. Osteological studies have shown that the Negroid element was stronger in predynastic times than at present, reflecting an early movement northward along the banks of the Nile, which were then heavily forested." (Encyclopedia Britannica 1984 ed. "Populations, Human")
Then of course there is plenty of modern Egyptian racism against the dark-skinned Baladi- see Google links below:
Some criticize "black Americans" for talking about racism in Egypt, but if anything it is African-Americans who are keeping faith with with the darker sons of the soil" - the Baladi, while their fellow Egyptians are trying to "distance" themselves from such folk. --------------------------------------------------------------------
RACIST SLURS IN ARABIC AGAINST DARK EXPAT placeshttp://www.expat-blog.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=209174
ARTICLE ON EGYPTIAN OBSESSION WITH SKIN LIGHTENERS AND WHITENESS A question of colour Is racial prejudice on the rise in Egypt, or are Egyptians merely obsessed with skin colour? Gamal Nkrumah searches for answers
But, a more accurate explanation would be that Egypt has for thousands of years been ruled by foreign, and lighter-skinned, invaders -- Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, the French and British. A large section of the pre-revolutionary Egyptian elite could trace their ancestry to Balkan, Caucasian and Turkish roots. Moreover, Napoleon Bonaparte's French expedition was notorious for sowing its seeds in places like the Delta city of Mansoura whose women are reputedly "exceptionally beautiful"; in Egyptian common parlance that means fair-skinned, with light-coloured eyes and hair.
Not only are the poorer classes darker in complexion, but they tend to display more "African" cultural traits. Much of the music they enjoy has rhythmic beats that are reminiscent of those of the music of Africa south of the Sahara, with an emphasis on drums and percussion. The elite tend to favour classical Western-influenced music or Middle Eastern (Turkish and Persian) musical strains dominated by stringed instruments. While the poorer and working classes are more likely to dance spontaneously and with abandon in public, the elites tend to be more restrained. Much clapping and ululation accompanies street parties in low income areas, the elites, in sharp contrast, shun these "baladi" literally "country" traits, suggestive of the African.
Amun Ra says: He notes "the enormous degree of linguistic complexity we encounter in the Chadic language," with observation that the degree of "Africanization" has sometimes reached the point where, structurally speaking, the similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic . These obvious surface similarities between Chadic and non-Chadic languages in central Sudan put an additional task load on the researcher's shoulders (Jungraithmayr 2000:91)
So they are saying via this quote that Chadic may be more related to the Nilo-Saharan and Niger Congo than Berber etc to the north?
Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by sudaniya: Is ancient Egyptian more closely related to Berber, Beja, Chadic or Semitic?
There's a lot of contradictory classifications of the putative Afro-Asiatic phylum.
Each linguists, lets say the main specialists in the field, would provide you with a different answer to your question.
Here's an image with a few of the different classifications:
Orel & Stobova, Diakonoff and Militarev would answer you the Chadic language family.
Thanks for this. I really would have thought that Beja would be closer to Egyptian than the others.
Posts: 1568 | From: Pluto | Registered: Sep 2008
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate: There's many contradictory classifications of Afro-Asiatics. A valid reconstruction of the language family was never done (the 2 reconstructions attempts used a subset of the phylum and even then were not similar). The suppose phylum has one of the worse cognates similarities of any language family (which seems largely due to recent borrowing from Arab/Islam). The phylum was born in the era of the hamitic myth racist craze.
Obenga and Diop considered the family to be an invalid one. Many mainstream linguists question the family.
Actually most mainstream linguists don't question the existence of the phylum at all. the reason for all these inconsistencies in phylum construction is 2-fold:
1. As I previously stated, Afrasian is so ancient that it is virtually impossible to reconstruct the genetic relations and divergences without a proper record of representatives of all subfamilies. Suffice to say, it is without a doubt that there were many Afrasian languages that became extinct before the modern era let alone when the phylum was first postulated.
2. Even the languages that are still extant today are only recently being studied in detail. A perfect example is Omotic which was not first acknowledged to be part of the phylum because it was not properly understood or studied.
Also, though the phylum was born during the era of 'Hamitic' or rather 'Caucasoid' craze it was born because scholars did recognize a close similarity not only in certain words but overall grammar and syntax. Due to the racial bias, this genetic relationship was only accepted for Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber but not the others until objective evidence forced these scholars into admitting the phylum was extensive in 'Sub-Sahara' a.k.a. 'black Africa'.
quote:If you consider population genetics and the differentiations/similarities between populations. As well as linguistic argumentation. It seems Obenga's Classification of African languages make more sense.
Click image for larger version.
But languages are NOT populations. Languages can be influenced or adopted entirely by people without having genetic input. That's why as per Dr. Keita you can NOT therefore should not make language and population synonymous. A perfect example is the fact that most Indo-European languages today are spoken by non-white, even dark Indians of South Asia while not all white Europeans speak Indo-European. The same is true for Africa. I just explained in my initial post that many of these E-subclades predate the modern language phyla of Africa so how can you then associate languages with common ancestry?? Instead of all African languages belonging to one giant superphylum, it is more likely that the different language phyla that European scholars discovered still holds true except that because speakers of these different phyla have co-existed and even intermarried there would be much influences. Hence the reason why ancient Egyptian has Nilo-Saharan influence or why Wolof, a Niger-Congo language has Egyptian affinities per Diop is likely because it was influenced either by Berber or another language that was similar to Egyptian if not Egyptian itself.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by sudaniya: Thanks for this. I really would have thought that Beja would be closer to Egyptian than the others.
Sudaniya, the Beja language To-Bedawi is generally considered Cushitic however it has many peculiar features that make it rather an outlier among Cushitic languages and more intermediate between Cushitic and Egyptian. Ehret for example makes it an independent branch of Afrasian separate entirely from Cushitic but still intermediate between Cushitic and Egyptian. The problem is that not enough info has been gathered on all Afrasian languages. Only a few languages (some estimate 3%) of all Afrasian languages have been documented extensively and these are primarily the languages that have been preserved in writing since ancient times i.e. Semitic and Egyptian. Even the Egyptian language seems to be a sole representative of an entire branch the same way Greek is in Indo-European. We have no idea as to how many Afrasian languages were lost in the Nile Valley region alone. In ancient Egyptian texts, we get only glimpses of these languages in the various people and place names in Nubia to the south or in the eastern and western deserts. There were Afrasian languages that became extinct only recently in the pasty several decades. So just imagine the tremendous loss of diversity since ancient times!
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Troll Patrol # Ish Gebor: Arab ethic groups are diverse. And like too so in genetics.
J1 likely arose at the Sinai aka South Levant, and diverted from there in-and-out of Africa.
Indeed. Populations of a region can change quite drastically over time. Note that according to the last major study by Ehret et al. using bayesian analysis Proto-Semitic originated approximately 4,000 BCE during the chalcolithic period or rather the very end of the neolithic and very beginning of the bronze age.
Recall the results of a study was done on the DNA of human remains in Jordan in the Dead Sea area dating to the Bronze Age: Abstract A high-resolution, Y-chromosome analysis using 46 binary markers has been carried out in two Jordan populations, one from the metropolitan area of Amman and the other from the Dead Sea, an area geographically isolated. Comparisons with neighboring populations showed that whereas the sample from Amman did not significantly differ from their Levantine neighbors, the Dead Sea sample clearly behaved as a genetic outlier in the region. Its high R1*-M173 frequency (40%) has until now only been found in northern Cameroonian samples. This contrasts with the comparatively low presence of J representatives (9%), which is the modal clade in Middle Eastern populations, including Amman. The Dead Sea sample also showed a high presence of E3b3a-M34 lineages (31%), which is only comparable to that found in Ethiopians. Although ancient and recent ties with sub-Saharan and eastern Africans cannot be discarded, it seems that isolation, strong drift, and/or founder effects are responsible for the anomalous Y-chromosome pool of this population. These results demonstrate that, at a fine scale, the smooth, continental clines detected for several Y-chromosome markers are often disrupted by genetically divergent populations. --Carlos Flores et al 2005
And here is a reconstruction of the skulls of a Bronze Age couple from modern Bab Edh-Dhra again near the Dead Sea (near ancient Sodom of Sodom and Gommorah infamy):
^ Despite the fanciful skin and hair color, note the Natufian features of prognathism and prominent zygomatic bones.
The implications are as clear as they are dramatic.
By the way, I am of the same opinion as our friend Yom (moderator Henu) that Proto-Semitic itself was a member of a larger Afrasian sub-family (Pre-Proto-Semitic) which it soon subsumed as its descendants spread and took over the region.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by africurious: Obenga and Diop lack proper linguistic credentials so their opinion on linguistics is irrelevant. Campbell, Poser and Ehret all say the afro-asiatic family exists and they refer to its existence in the very quotes you post! And part of your quote actually argues explicity for afro-asiatic's existence. Do you even understand what you read? Stop making a fool of yourself.
Can you respond to anything that does not include an insult and a logical fallacy? That **** is annoying.
Posts: 1254 | From: howdy | Registered: Mar 2014
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: [QB] Actually most mainstream linguists don't question the existence of the phylum at all.
It is questioned at least in the matter already stated above in the Book extract you refuse to take into consideration. Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser.
If you did, you would have learned that: - Afro-Asiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found.
- The similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic
- Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: But languages are NOT populations. Languages can be influenced or adopted entirely by people without having genetic input. That's why as per Dr. Keita you can NOT therefore should not make language and population synonymous.
True. Language switch is possible. That is a population changing its language to another at a certain point in its history. In this case it would be future Semitic speakers, changing their language to an African one (now called Afroasiatic). That is if you consider the Afroasiatic homeland to be in Africa like most linguists today.
Dr. Keita did mention the possibility of finding the common ancient Paleo language of all E-P2(aka PN2) populations (mainly P2/e1b1a and p2/e1b1b). That is the common ancestral language of Niger-Kordofanian, Cushitic and Chadic speakers.
From In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory by Omar Keita
This Paleo-African language that Keita mention here could be the Egypto-African common stock language determined by Obenga.
The PN2 transition unites Niger-Kordofanian, Cushtiic and Chadic speakers. It's very natural to ask ourselves what language was this common P2/PN2 male ancestor speaking?
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
posted
I paid attention to the post. I don't think you are familiar on how historical comparative linguistics is done. Shared phonology is a typological trait and can be influenced by areal contacts. This is not a basis for classification. I asked a specific question in regards to the linguistic work. Who did the necessary work to make the claim that Semitic and ciKam derive from the same parent? What languages were compared? What features of the languages? What is the parent of the language that gave birth to these two languages? What is its structure? All linguists, by now, should know that Semitic and ciKam do not share a common parent. This was acknowledged even in the time of Wallis Budge and Alan Gardiner. Nothing has changed.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: How do they have Egyptian and Semitic coming from the same branch as if they share a common parent? Who did that analysis? Where can we find the data?
If you were paying attention, the author of the study was Ekkehard Wolff whose study was based on phonology. Another linguist named Carleton Hodges based his study on phonetics which led him to the binary division of Afrasian with a northern or 'Boreafrasian' division (consisting of Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic) and a southern or 'austrafrasian' (consisting of Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic). Hodge's binary division is much more popular in scholarly circles and is reminiscent of the phonetic based binary division of Indo-European which has a centum/western division and a satem/eastern division. Truthfully, Afrasian is much older than Indo-European and is so ancient there is no actual consensus as to the divergence and development of all the subfamilies. For example, certain features in grammar and syntax make Semitic (particularly languages like Akkadian and South Arabian) more similar to Cushitic languages. Whereas the same can be said of To-Bedawi (the Beja language) and its relation to Egyptian language.
The point is all descend from a common ancestor. 'Bantu' by the way, is itself a subfamily of Niger-Congo which is itself part of a Niger-Kordofanian phylum.
quote:Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate: It is questioned at least in the matter already stated above in the Book extract you refuse to take into consideration. Language Classification: History and Method (2008) by Campbell and Poser.
If you did, you would have learned that: - Afro-Asiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found.
- The similarities between Chadic and Niger-Congo and/or Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in their immediate vicinity have become more striking than between Chadic and other Hamitosemitic languages, particularly Berber or Semetic
- Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing
Yes, but the same can be said of members of any language phylum! Germanic languages, especially North Germanic share many affinities with non-Indo-European languages of the immediate vicinity like Finnish and Saami. Daic languages (that include Thai) share affinities with Sino-Tibetan languages, particularly Kam Sui languages of China. And Japanese surprisingly contains many Austronesian features even though there are no Austronesian speakers in the vicinity of Japan. Thus, African languages are not unique or special in this regard.
quote:True. Language switch is possible. That is a population changing its language to another at a certain point in its history. In this case it would be future Semitic speakers, changing their language to an African one (now called Afroasiatic). That is if you consider the Afroasiatic homeland to be in Africa like most linguists today.
Of course I consider the Afrasian homeland to be in Africa! What makes you think I considered otherwise?! The ONLY branch of Afrasian outside of Africa is Semitic which is an outlier among all Afrasian branches which are native only to the African continent are far more diverse due to greater age. Also what do you mean by "future Semitic speakers"??
quote:Dr. Keita did mention the possibility of finding the common ancient Paleo language of all E-P2(aka PN2) populations (mainly P2/e1b1a and p2/e1b1b). That is the common ancestral language of Niger-Kordofanian, Cushitic and Chadic speakers.
From In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory by Omar Keita
This Paleo-African language that Keita mention here could be the Egypto-African common stock language determined by Obenga.
The PN2 transition unites Niger-Kordofanian, Cushtiic and Chadic speakers. It's very natural to ask ourselves what language was this common P2/PN2 male ancestor speaking?
LOL I suggest you read the very passage you cite. In it Keita makes it specifically clear that it would be erroneous to assume that the PN2 ancestors spoke a proto-language ancestral to all the modern phyla spoken in the continent today. On the contrary the new study of PN2 clade refinement which lioness cited in the topic, supports the more plausible notion that proto-Khoisan, proto-Afrasian, proto-Nilo-Saharan, and proto-Niger-Kordofanian, do NOT all share a common ancestor. Maybe the latter two do but not all four. Rather these four phyla are the ones that happened to not only survive but thrive due to certain cultural opportunities that may never be known as they all occurred during prehistoric times. What is known is that since Africa was the source of all humanity and thus African populations have the greatest genetic diversity, it would make sense for Africa to have the greatest linguistic and cultural diversity as well but obviously this diversity was lost during the end of the Pleistocene. This is shown in genetics with the expansion of PN2 (which predates all modern language phyla) and in anthro-paleontology with a decrease in craniofacial features in many areas. There is no way to attribute an entire clade or supraclade with any modern language phyla. You can probably do so with a subclade that descended approximately around the time of a language but that's it.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
LOL Yes I've seen this video when it first came out as well as the OP comments which I responded to as well!
I also that suggest that Amun-Ra, Asar, and others see the video below by Christopher Ehret on the history of human languages in general: https://youtu.be/Mmr0AE1QywsPosts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
People who know more about these haplogroup things than I do may correct me on this, but I would have guessed PN2's expansion across Africa would have had something to do with pastoralism in the Holocene Green Sahara. Wherever or whenever it originated, I say the Green Sahara appears the choicest location where West, Central, and Northeast Africans would have converged and intermingled, thus exchanging these haplogroups. Of course they would have already been genetically and linguistically differentiated by then.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: I also that suggest that Amun-Ra, Asar, and others see the video below by Christopher Ehret on the history of human languages in general: https://youtu.be/Mmr0AE1Qyws
I saw this video before. It's a good video.
If you check at around 6m23, he discuss regular sound law of the Indo-European phyla. For example, the F in Father may have been a P before in proto-Indo-European. In Afro-Asiatic such regular sound law were never found. That's why the book says: Afro-Asiatic is routinely accepted as a genetic grouping, though uncontroversial regular correspondences cannot be found.
The idea at the end of the video of a human proto-language common to all human, from which Khoisan would be the first group to diverge from the others, is very interesting. Obenga's Egypto-African language is probably very old too but much more cognates can be found in common between all languages of Africa.
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: Of course they would have already been genetically and linguistically differentiated by then.
It's impossible. Niger-Kordofanian and Cushitic/Chadic speakers share upstream haplogroups not downstream. In other word, there's no evidence of recent admixtures between most of those populations directly or through intermediaries.
For example, Somali and Yoruba share a common E-P2 grandfather (upstream haplogroup). But don't share downstream haplogroups like E1b1a and E1b1b. So those populations didn't admix with each others recently. Yet, they share a lot of upstream haplogroup and have a relatively low genetic distance between them. This can only be the product of a common origin not recent admixtures between those people.
Posts: 2981 | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: People who know more about these haplogroup things than I do may correct me on this, but I would have guessed PN2's expansion across Africa would have had something to do with pastoralism in the Holocene Green Sahara. Wherever or whenever it originated, I say the Green Sahara appears the choicest location where West, Central, and Northeast Africans would have converged and intermingled, thus exchanging these haplogroups. Of course they would have already been genetically and linguistically differentiated by then.
The problem is that PN2 *predates* the Green Sahara by many millennia. Now mind you the Green Sahara was responsible for the spread of certain downstream markers like E-M78 and E-M35 but not for PN2 itself.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic