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Theophile Obenga's "Negro-Egyptian" linguistic phylum
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Asar Imhotep: [QB] While I disagree on some points espoused by Amun, he is correct in this sense. Everyone who claims to be against Obenga's work has never read ANY of his linguistic arguments and it is obvious. I have also noticed that these same persons do not keep up with linguistic research and know the different schools of thought or what the real arguments have been. They never attend linguistic and historical conferences and have no clue of what the "consensus" is. If you have a disagreement with his research, you have to debunk it linguistically and not one of the detractors above has proposed a linguistic argument against what he has actually written. As I have stated before on this forum, Negro-Africaines is NOT Diop and Obenga's brainchild. It is L. Homburger before Diop. They have advanced the work of her thesis and others have corroborated it in many ways. Secondly, Obenga is NOT the only one questioning the validity of Afro-Asiatic as a super language family. Amun has already cited NON OBENGA SOURCES and NON AFROCENTRIC SOURCES which make this same claim. So if one is to attack Obenga, one must attack all of the other qualified linguists who say the same thing as Obenga. If one was to read Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse's book _African Languages: An Introduction (2000)_ one could read the chapter on Afro-Asiatic by Richard Hayward and get a sense of the shakiness by which this family is defended. If one was to go down further and read Paul Newman's article on "Comparative Linguistics" in the same cited work, he states the following: [QUOTE] Heine and Nurse (2000: 161-2) (c) The job of the comparative linguist is to provide the best explanation possible consistent with the facts. In proposing a classification, it is [i]not[/i] necessary that a linguist 'prove' that the classification is absolutely certain by the presentation of conclusive evidence. In response to widely speculative classifications that had been offered at various times by irresponsible scholars, many careful, emperically based linguists jumped to the opposite extreme and took the position that all languages should be treated as unrelated unless and until proved otherwise. This was thought to be a prudent scientific requirement. However, on close inspection, the requirement turns out to be untenable and not in keeping with standard scientific procedures. All that the comparative linguist can be expected to do is look at a pair or group of languages. If resemblances show up that appear to be greater than could be expected by chance, the linguist has to ask why. Could the resemblances be accounted for by universal sound symbolism, could they reflect areal characteristics, could they perhaps be due to borrowing from one language into another, or are the resemblances of the kind that are indicative of common origin? If the latter is the case, the linguist is justified in postulating a genetic relationship even if the evidence is still somewhat on the weak side. For example, in the opinion of some scholars, the evidence supporting the relationship between Chadic language family and other language groups in the Afroasiatic phylum, such as Semitic and Berber, is not compelling. Nevertheless, 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. The classification of Chadic within the Afroasiatic is thus fully justified, not because it has been 'proved' as in a court of law, but because it is the explanation most consistent with the facts as a whole. [/QUOTE]This is telling and informs us of the changes in attitudes as it regards language classifications. I argue it is because of linquists like Obenga who have constantly challenged them on the Afro-Asiatic hypothesis, that these attitudes have changed in such a way that they can put a 'loop-hole' in the method so they can keep their established language phylums. The author above would place Obenga in the "extreme" category of those who require "proof" of the language family. By using the comparative method, Afro-Asiatic cannot be said to be a language phylum. However, if we use the criterion from the quote above, if we have "just enough evidence," we would be justified in positing a language family. This releaves the Afrisan proponents from having to demonstrate rigorous proof of the phylum. This is what got Greensberg in trouble with Asian and Native-American languages. They require proof before categorization, where as the Africanists do not. The problem is that when this is done in the reverse, one wants to move the goal post in the middle of the game. For if this is the case, then Wolof, Bantu and Nilo-Saharan languages belong to the same family as Egyptian as established by Diop, Obenga, Bilolo, Anselin, Oduyoye, Ndigi, Lam, Pfouma, Sambu and others who have established the relationship, using sound linguistic methods, between Egyptian and Kongo-Saharan languages, which forces a reclassification of African languages which Obenga has attempted to do. The more I study this, the more Obenga is being vendicated by the evidence from various different areas of study. As I stated before, my problem with Obenga's past work is that the same criteria used to NOT establish Afro-Asiatic as a language family, is the same that doesn't establish Nilo-Saharan or Khoisan. So it is an issue of consistency as he uses those proposed families unchecked in his Negro-Africaines (the larger family for Berber, Negro-Egyptian and Khoisan). So with this said, it would be of benefit to actually take the time out and study the field of linguistics so one can come to a linguistic conclusion and not one based on how one feels. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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