Re: [tied] Re: Black Athena: The Afroasiatic RootsofClassicalCivili

At 7:41:19 PM on Friday, June 9, 2006, mkelkar2003 wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 2:11:36 PM on Friday, June 9, 2006, mkelkar2003 wrote:

>>> Genetic Distance and Language Affinities

>>> http://www.friesian.com/trees.htm

>>> On the genetic distance chart IE and AA speakers appear
>>> next to each other if that means anything at all to the
>>> linguists.

>> That's the Cavalli-Sforza chart from the 1991 Scientific
>> American article. It's seriously flawed, to put it
>> mildly. See, for instance, Jacques Guy's criticism on the
>> Linguist List:

>> <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9201d&L=linguist&D=1&P=2989>

Note further that several of the entities listed as
populations are in fact *defined* linguistically (e.g.,
Bantu, Nilosaharan, Uralic, and N. Turkic), and that several
of the linguistic phyla are controversial -- extremely so in
the case of Amerind.

> This lengthy meaningless critique just demonstrates that
> GEOGRPAHY not subjective and in my opinion a rather
> arbitrary classification of languages into "families" is
> the main marker of where people have come from.

Your opinion, however, is based on almost total ignorance of
linguistic science and as such is well-nigh worthless. And
your dismissal of the critique as 'meaningless' is a pretty
clear indication that you didn't understand it.

[...]

Brian