Gerry:
>So Glen, are you saying that language movement was from the Middle >East
>into Egypt while the people movement was from Nubia? That >might be
>partially correct; however, are you certain that no people >moved from the
>Middle East into Egypt? This seems a bit peculiar.
This spread of language into Africa doesn't have to be immediate but rather
a trend happening over thousands of years. Nothing peculiar at all. Just
language displacement at work.
I'll admit that I'm not caught up on my Egyptian but it is AfroAsiatic and
AfroAsiatic is a Nostratic language. In the most commonly held Nostratic
hypothesis, AA must be from the Middle East since this is surely the
homeland of Nostratic itself which is based on the pattern of spread of
these languages. The geography of Eurasia lends few options for this
homeland other than the Middle East area.
I don't know the archaeology involving the Egyptians but even if there is
absolutely no proof available of physical movement from the Middle East to
Egypt, we can hardly use this lack of evidence as proof that the Egyptian
language and consequently the AfroAsiatic tongue is native to Africa. Egypt
and the Middle East are not obstructed from each other and I can't see why
it's not possible for language to have spread into Africa despite any
population movement.
Of course, AA's movement into Africa would have happened after the last ice
age and one wonders how much population existed at the time anyway - anyone
have answers?
So this is a definite possibility for the _language_ (not the people per se)
that we, as linguists (not geneticists), have to consider. The only way to
determine the direction of language itself is to look to the direct source
of the answer, linguistics. You can examine genetics till you're blue in the
face but it won't help very much to solve this puzzle. It's self-defeating.
- gLeN
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