From: Rick McCallister
Message: 61681
Date: 2008-11-16
> From: Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...>I appreciate your review of Ehret. If it's like you say it is, it's garbage.
> Subject: External links (Was Re: [tied] Re: oldest places- and watername in Scandinavia)
> To: Nostratic-L@yahoogroups.com, cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 5:57 AM
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: G&P
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 9:50 AM
> Subject: RE: [tied] Re: oldest places- and watername in
> Scandinavia
>
> Chamito-Semitic is known from much earlier sources than IE.
> Look at Semitic (at least -2600) and Egyptian (-3300).
> Egyptian is indeed the language whose lifespan is the
> longest known to us :
> about 4800 years.
>
> I'm glad you are leaving open the possibility of links
> between CS and IE.
>
> I will just briefly say that I prefer the "old"
> word Chamito-Semitic (CS),
> because my opinion about the word Afrasian or Afro-asiatic
> is that this word
> was invented by Greenberg to sell the myth that the
> perimeter of CS was
> known once and for good.
> This word is basically a marketing operation by Greenberg
> mixed with some
> kind of scientific putschism that previous works amount to
> nothing.
> I don't want to give any credentials to that myth which
> is part of the
> problem we now have in general when dealing with
> macro-comparative issues.
>
> Rick once asked what was to be thought about Ehret's
> Toward Reconstructing
> Proto-Afro-Asiatic, 1995,
> I can give my own little point of view about this book,
> I have not read the book thoroughly, but the reasons for
> that will appear in
> my sort of review itself.
> I have not tried to find a "real" review of it. I
> suppose someone did that
> before.
>
> I think this book is symptomatic of the current status of
> that field in a
> way.
> Before reading Ehret, I had read Bomhard & Kern 1994,
> and I was expected something of that caliber, something
> Big,
> and I've been hugely disappointed.
> I don't agree with everything in Bomhard & Kern
> 1994,
> but at least, this is serious work, when Ehret's book
> is not.
>
> To put it very shortly, to those who have never opened that
> book,
> most of the pages of the book are columns where supposed
> roots of CS are
> exemplified by "roots" and words from the
> subfamilies of CS.
> Some features are conspicuous and especially disturbing.
> 1. Berber languages are entirely wiped off,
> I guess there is not a single word of Berber in the book.
> Imagine Pokorny without Germanic !?
> I suspect Ehret cannot read French and dodged that problem.
> In spite of the complete disregard of Berber data, Ehret
> nevertheless makes
> the claim Berber should be separated from Tchadic and
> grouped together with
> Semitic and Egyptian.
> This claim is based on nothing and I'm afraid it's
> definitely wrong (for a
> certain number of reasons).
> That idea is based (I'm afraid) on the deep lack of
> knowledge of Berber and
> the superficial shared innovation that Arabic and Berber
> have emphasis
> instead of Glottalization.
> This argument is very shallow and proves nothing as
> Proto-Semitic clearly
> had Glottalization.
> And this is explained in Bomhard & Kern 1994 and I
> agree,
> for the reasons explained in Bomhard & Kern 1994 and
> others that can be
> added.
> 2. Semitic is "dealt with" by Arabic words,
> This is clearly not enough as these words should at least
> be put back in the
> context of (proto-)Semitic.
> And a workable proto-Semitic system should at least be
> described and
> explained,
> 3. Egyptian is "dealt with" thru the traditional
> graphemics of the
> hieroglyphic latinization,
> There is (about ?) never a word of Coptic nor an attempt to
> reconstruct what
> Egyptian words could be like.
> As least, a discussion of what the hieroglyphic
> latinization stands for as
> phonemes should be done,
> Here again, I suspect Ehret cannot do that by himself.
> In other words, _half of CS_ is not dealt with in a
> satisfactory way if
> dealt with at all.
> To be unkind, I'm afraid "Boreafrasian" is
> not a subgroup of
> Chamito-Semitic,
> it more looks like the part of the family where Ehret's
> competence is low or
> non existent.
> It sounds very harsh but I'm afraid this is the real
> situation.
> 4. Other families (whose perimeter is unknown as I said
> before) are
> "exemplified" by "proto-roots",
> There is no possibility to check what these proto-roots are
> worth
> as there is never a single word from a real language.
> Imagine Pokorny without a single word from a real IE
> language !!
> This is what this book actually is.
> 5. Ehret makes the claim he has avoided
> "over-imaginative" comparisons,
> unfortunately, between 5 to 10% look so,
> 6. another disturbing feature is the tendency to regloss
> glosses of
> proto-roots,
> for example four items meaning "to cut with a
> knife" reglossed "to separate"
> this (near fictitious) example creates the impression that
> thru "semantic
> drift" of reglosses, many compared items do not match
> when looked at at the
> elementary level of primary languages,
> but this cannot be checked as (once again) there is no real
> lexical data on
> real languages anywhere.
> And to be frank, (I'm not far from thinking that) the
> absence of a clean
> perimeter of languages and subgrouping and the absence of
> any real lexical
> data must be (interpreted as) a kind of strategy to make
> the book somehow
> immune to concrete criticism. I'm afraid this strategy
> of "fuzzying all
> issues and datas" also achieves the goal of making the
> book useless either
> as a reference or a working tool.
>
> The next part of the title of the book is "vowels,
> tone, consonants, and
> vocabulary"
> It's never explained why we should hypothesize tones in
> CS,
> and what they could have become in languages with no tones.
> It's also clear that the reconstruction is not
> satisfactory as *p and *f are
> distinguished, but on what ground ?
> There are a certain number of syllabic monsters and things
> like *Caà and
> other freakish phonological items.
>
> We are left to imagine what the book could have been with a
> reasonably
> ambitious target.
> It seems it could have become a reference book on
> reconstructing Cushitic
> and Omotic (and maybe Tchadic).
> Unfortunately, it's nothing like that, and it's
> nearly nothing at all,
> as the title is misleadingly ambitious and the contents is
> "strange".
> All in all, it's little wonder this book was not
> published in a serious
> house.
> The book's title is in a way unvoluntarily humouristic.
> Imagine you are a termit and you can build a five-meter
> high termit-hill,
> now you can bravely name it "Reaching the Moon".
> I think the distance between the book and
> "Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic"
> is about that size.
>
> Sorry for the harshness,
> Best.
>
> A.