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Theophile Obenga's "Negro-Egyptian" linguistic phylum
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate: [QB] I already posted this in this thread but the post seems to have disappeared [and reappeared]. So this is a repost with a few changes: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Truthcentric: [qb] For those of you who have never heard of this guy: [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Théophile_Obenga]Theophile Obenga[/URL] [/qb][/QUOTE]Theophile Obenga is a great scholar who worked closely with Diop. He also made great books about non-egyptian related African history (using linguistics). Afro-asiatic language is derived from the old Hamito-Semitic language family itself derived from the Hamitic racist myth (a mythical group of Caucasian looking black people not related to other black African who live in Northern Africa, Eastern Africa and have founded the Ancient Egyptian civilization). While most linguist have accepted Afro-asiatic as a linguistic groups without questioning. 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 academic work (and quite voluminous) demonstrate by using the comparative linguistic methodology (same one used for the Indo-European family) the linguistic correspondences (lexical, grammatical, etc) between various languages families spoken in Africa. Considering them all daughter languages descendant of the Negro-Egyptian language family. While Obenga went a long way proving the existence of the Negro-Egyptian language family. Obenga was also questioning the validity of the "Hamito-Semitic" aka the Afro-Asiatic language family and he is not alone. Here excerpt from [i]Language Classification: History and Method[/i] (2008) by Campbell and Poser: [QUOTE] [b]Comparison among Afroasiatic languages is complicated by long-term language contacts and borrowing[/b] , where Berber and Chadic have influenced one another; [b]Chadic has also been influenced by both "Niger-Congo" and "Nilo- Saharan" languages[/b] ; Omotic and Cushitic share areal traits; Egyptian influenced Semitic and was itself influenced; Cushitic has Semetic; and Semitic. especially through Arabic [b]in the last millennium[/b] . 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, [b]but not completely compelling[/b] . As for lexical comparisons, Afroasiatic scholars are in general agreement that the findings have been more [b]limited and harder to interpret[/b] . 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 [b]raise questions about the possibility of viable reconstruction in Afroasiatic[/b] . 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 [b]less reliable[/b] " (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: [i] 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 [b]they can hardly be identified as such any more[/b] , it is crucial to study these languages as deeply and thoroughly as possible.[/i] 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, [b]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[/b] . These obvious surface similarities between Chadic and non-Chadic languages in [b]central Sudan[/b] 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 [i]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.[/i] 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.) [b]There are several problems with this claim.[/b] 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. [b]The most serious problem is that of probability.[/b] 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. [b]The argument, then, has no force. [/b] 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, [b]some Afroasiatic languages lack these, while some neighboring non-Afroasiatic languages which have been influenced by them have these traits[/b] . This being the case, these traits are neither necessary nor sufficient to show the genetic relationship. -[i]Language Classification: History and Method[/i] (2008) by Campbell and Poser [/QUOTE]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 [b]cannot be found[/b] . And there is more. As noted in another thread, Ehret said: [QUOTE] The initial warming of climate in the Belling-Allerød interstadial, 12,700-10,900 BCE, brought increased rainfall and warmer conditions in many African regions. [b]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. [/b] 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. http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Ehret%20Africa%20in%20History%205-5-10.pdf [/QUOTE]So the homeland of the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo/Bantu), and debunked Afro-asiatic (considered Cushitic and Chadic by Obenga, Semitic languages didn't exist at that time) 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: [IMG]http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w513/Amunratheultimate/Misc/Climate-controlledoccupationintheEasternSaharaduringthemain.jpg[/IMG] So Ehret, situate the homeland of the 4 main language groups in Africa (Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo/Bantu), Cushitic and Chadic), which encompass almost all African languages spoken today, in the 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. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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