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Theophile Obenga's "Negro-Egyptian" linguistic phylum
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: [QB] [IMG]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/418BD7W11ML._SL500_AA300_.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/3883742-L.jpg[/IMG] Obenga made it clear that AfroAsiatic does not exist and you can not reconstruct the Proto-language. This is true. Ehret (1995) and Orel/Stolbova (1995) were attempts at comparing Proto-AfroAsiatic. The most interesting fact about these works is that they produced different results. If AfroAsiatic existed they should have arrived at similar results. The major failur of these works is that there is too much synononymy. For example, the Proto-AfroAsiatic synonym for bird has 52 synonyms this is far too many for a single term and illustrates how the researchers just correlated a number of languages to produce a proto-form. Radcliffe commenting on these text observed: [QUOTE] Both sources reconstruct lexical relationships in the attested languages as going back to derivational relationships in the proto-language. (In at least one case OS also reconstruct a derivational relationship-- an Arabic singular-plural pair qarya(tun), qura(n)-- as going back to lexical ones in Proto-Afroasiatic, reconstructions 1568, 1589.) E does this in a thorough-going way and the result is proto-language in which the basic vocabulary consists of a set of polysemous verbal roots with abstract and general meanings, while verbs with more specific meanings, and almost all nouns are derived by suffixation. Further all consonants in this language can serve as suffixes. I would argue that both points are violations of the uniformitarian principle. In general the underived, basic vocabulary of a language and specific and concrete, while abstract words are formed by derivation. Further it is rare for the full consonant inventory of a language to be used in its productive derivational morphology. Finally, given the well-known homorganic cooccurence restrictions on Afroasiatic roots (Greenberg 1950, Bender 1974), each suffix would have to have at least one allomorph at a different point of articulation and a hideously complex system of dissimilation rules would be needed to account for their distribution. E’s justification for this is revealing “With respect to triconsonantal roots in Semitic, a[n] ... explanation of the third consonant as lexicalized pre-proto-Semitic suffixal morphemes has now been put forward (Ehret 1989).... It has been applied here without apology because, quite simply it works.” This is the worst possible argument in favor of the hypothesis.[b] As the above calculations have shown, such a procedure should indeed work quite well as a way of generating random noise[/b]. http://www.tufs.ac.jp/ts/personal/ratcliffe/comp%20&%20method-Ratcliffe.pdf [/QUOTE]There is no such thing as AfroAsiatic. Reference: Ehret,C. 1995. Reconstructing Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Orel, Vladimir and Olga V. Stolbova. 1995. Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a reconstruction. E.J. Brill. Leiden. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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