Re: Afro-Asiatic

Glen wrote in reply to Gerry's point

>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.

That

> 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.

But for language displacement to be at work, you need to have two
languages in contact with each other by some means. And language
displacement also tends to occur parallel with other factors
(Socio-political movements, spread of religion, trade, migrations,
cultural diffusion etc). Given that the split of Nostratic was 15,000
years before the present or thereabouts we are hear talking of
movements that occurred in the late Ice Age, early post ice age
environments. This was a period in which climates grew warmer, and
movements of peoples and of cultures (and I suspect thereby of
languages too) moved from south to north. There is evidence of
movements of mesolithic cultures out of Africa (both in Spain and in
the Middle East). Why could not proto-Nostratic have orginally been an
African family that moved north into the steppe in the period from
15,000 to 8,500 BCE?

> 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.

The Middle East remains the homeland of Nostratic only if you continue
to adhere to a Middle Eastern origin of Afro-Asiatic. If Afro-Asiatic
had an African homeland (which on genetic, cultural and even linguistic
evidence is a possibility) Africa would be the origin of the
Nostratics, not the Middle East. Then we would have no trouble getting
Afro-Asiatic into Africa, as they would have been there all along.

> 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.

True, from what I understand, the Egyptian language has a non-Semitic
substratum, with later additions of Semitic loan words that probably
did come across the Sinai at different periods. But the substratum
language shows no Asiatic links and is totally African.

> 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?

Yes, population demographics indicates that at about 10,000 BCE we are
talking of a total planetary population of about 10 million people
world wide.

> 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.

But Glen, if Afro-Asiatic is one of the first (if not the first) to
split from the Nostratic core, then we have a destinct movement north -
from Africa, through the middle east, onto the Eurasiatic steppe lands.
This movement accords well with archaeology as it is understood in the
period from 15,000 to about 8,500 BCE (the period in which you yourself
propose a split of the Nostratic languages).

John