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Post by Noah on Aug 22, 2011 20:39:31 GMT -5
Languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic, or Hamito-Semitic, language family are the most commonly spoken modern languages amongst Hamitic people. While many folks are already quite familiar with the phylum's internal branches and subdivisions, fewer are aware that, at a higher structural level, Afro-Asiatic's greatest affinities are shared with language families that are exclusively spoken outside of Africa. Despite what its name might inadvertently suggest, Afro-Asiatic has little relation to the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan language families that are spoken by most Negroid peoples in Africa. The term Afro-Asiatic was actually coined to indicate that the group of related languages that it encompasses are spoken trans-continentally; that is, by modern populations residing in both Africa and Asia. "the entire language family was named "Hamito-Semitic" in 1876 by Fr. Muller in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (Wien 1876-88), where Muller describes the concerned group of languages. J.H. Greenberg, instead, considering that this is the only language family represented in both Africa and Asia, proposed to call it Afro-Asiatic in his work The Languages of Africa, issued in 1963."
books.google.ca/books?id=IiXVqyEkPKcC&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q&f=false "It is clear that the Borean hypothesis involves a super-phylum some of whose sub-taxa are themselves super-phyla. The term phyletic chain is introduced as a better label, particularly because the Borean groups show a chain like distribution from southern Ethiopia through southwestern Eurasia to northeast Asia and down to the end of the New World. Borean has clear similarities to Swadesh's Vasco-Dene. Borean is predominantly associated with human populations of "Caucasoid" or "Northern Mongoloid" physical appearance, the major exceptions being southern India, southern China, southwestern Ethiopia, northern Nigeria, and the Chad Republic. Borean as a chain is closely associated with the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic in the Levant, Europe, and western Eurasia from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago."
greenberg-conference.stanford.edu/Fleming_Abstract.htm
Below is the approximate geographical distribution of the related Nostratic super-family. Note that only the Hamitic-inhabited areas of Africa are actually included in the phylum. Also notice how the linguistic map above parallels the continental distribution of Duffy positivity, Eurasian uniparental markers, and the absence of the sickle cell trait in Africa (among many other factors). For example, with regard to autosomal markers, the blue Hamitic area in the graphic below rather closely corresponds to the aforeposted Afro-Asiatic speech areas: When all of the various lines of evidence are put together, the Hamitic reality is that much more obvious.
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Post by hamiticsister101 on Aug 23, 2011 18:44:33 GMT -5
None of the Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken by the Niger-Congoid peoples, or even the Nilo-Saharans who come close to the Hamites as much as possible than any other African group. The Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) language speakers originated from somewhere in the Middle East, possibly in southern Iraq or Iran. Before travelling throughout the Middle East and Africa.
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Post by Noah on Aug 23, 2011 23:39:27 GMT -5
That's right sis. Aside from a few Negroid groups and individuals here and there that abandoned their original languages and adopted Afro-Asiatic languages instead, Afro-Asiatic is almost entirely spoken by people with Eurasian physical affinities. "Just as in Africa, where the Chadic family was long excluded from Afro-Asiatic because Chadic speakers are black and the rest of the family is not" books.google.ca/books?id=mYwmDE3f6wUC&pg=PA162#v=onepage&q&f=falseWe also know from recent autosomal DNA analysis that most Chadic speakers are actually of Nilotic origin. They just adopted the Afro-Asiatic languages of neighboring Hamitic people. "all Nilo-Saharan–speaking populations from Kenya, Tanzania, southern Sudan, and Chad clustered with west central Afroasiatic Chadic–speaking populations in the global analysis at K ≤11 (Fig. 3), which is consistent with linguistic and archeological data suggesting bidirectional migration of Nilo-Saharans from source populations in Sudan within the past ~10,500 to 3000 years (4, 29). The proposed migration of proto-Chadic Afroasiatic speakers ~7000 years ago from the central Sahara into the Lake Chad Basin may have resulted in a Nilo-Saharan to Afroasiatic language shift among Chadic speakers (37). However, our data suggest that this shift was not accompanied by large amounts of Afroasiatic gene flow" www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5930/1035.shortThe irony is that, biologically-speaking, unmixed Nilotes are actually among the furthest of all the various Negroid peoples from Hamites and other Caucasoid populations. This is despite the fact that they are geographically the closest.
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Post by theleader9 on Aug 30, 2011 14:38:57 GMT -5
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Post by Noah on Aug 30, 2011 17:07:33 GMT -5
Despite his skin color, the man in the second pic indeed sort of does look Caucasoid. This is almost certainly due to some admixture somewhere down the line in his family. Fact is, most Nilotes of course look nothing like that. Most look like the people below. As I wrote, the comparatively unmixed Nilotes (the Dinka, Nuer, etc.) are, biologically speaking, among the very furthest of the various Negroid peoples from Hamitic folk. And this is in spite of the fact that they are geographically the closest.
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Post by theleader9 on Aug 30, 2011 17:11:24 GMT -5
Yes brother when i wrote you think and i posted that picture of those Dinka in the first picture it was meant has a joke meaning of course they are not related to caucasoids.
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Post by theleader9 on Aug 30, 2011 17:12:15 GMT -5
Yes and the second due dose appear cacasoid and not saying thin lips are a caucasoid trait but his got thinner lips then most somalis and many arabs.
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Post by Noah on Aug 30, 2011 18:00:36 GMT -5
He's actually got thinner lips than even most Europeans. Needless to say, he's an anomalie.
But when I agreed that he has a somewhat Caucasoid appearance, I was actually referring to his overall facial structure (less broad nose, more pronounced nasal bridge, less prognathism, higher forehead, narrower interorbital distance, etc.).
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Post by theleader9 on Aug 30, 2011 22:00:25 GMT -5
The man indeed dose appear to be part caucasoid but it could also be a natrual yet rare phenotype among his people without due to admixture since the features he has ( mainly his thin lips) are not shared by their caucasoid featured neighbours.
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Post by Noah on Aug 31, 2011 1:46:23 GMT -5
Thin lips are not at all a common feature in Nilotic peoples. Large, everted lips are, like those found on the fellows in the photo above. By contrast, in the neighboring Hamitic populations, while thick lips can be found, thin-to-medium sized lips are the norm. And they're almost always not everted, as is typically the case amongst Nilotes and other Negroid peoples. The Egyptian man below is a good example of this. So if one is to guess which population this Nilotic individual's quasi-Caucasoid physical features were introduced from, the adjacent Hamites would be the most logical guess. Indeed, 15%-20% of Nilotes in Southern Sudan are E1b1b carriers due to male-mediated admixture.
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amun
New Member
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Post by amun on Aug 31, 2011 12:56:54 GMT -5
Noah,
Where do you think the Afro-Asiatic language family originated?
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Post by Noah on Aug 31, 2011 21:56:32 GMT -5
That's an interesting and complicated question, amun. I think perhaps the best way to go about answering it is to appraise the relative merits of the main arguments for the proposed Afro-Asiatic (AA) urheimat/original homeland. First, Afro-Asiatic is suggested by some scholars to have originated in the Horn because that is the region that today has the phylum's highest diversity. That is, the Cushitic, Semitic and Omotic branches of AA are all spoken indigenously here, whereas other areas host at most two sub-families. This is a flawed assumption, however, because it heavily relies on the dubious presupposition that Omotic (OM) is an Afro-Asiatic language phylum. In actuality, as explained in Sands (2009), recent work such as Theil (2006) has omitted Omotic altogether from Afro-Asiatic and assigned it to its own separate language family based on the observation that " no closer genetic relations have been demonstrated between OM and AA than between OM and any other language family". This is in keeping with earlier classifications by Newman (1980) and Diakonoff (1996). It is also supported by genetic data, which shows a marked difference between the representative Omotic-speaking individuals in Ethiopia and their Hamito-Semitic-speaking counterparts, in turn suggesting a language switch from Nilo-Saharan to Afro-Asiatic at some point by the Omotic groups of southwestern Ethiopia (an area that borders Southern Sudan). "A clustering of Ethiopian groups was observed when using principal coordinate analyses with genetic distances, appearing midway between a West African Niger-Congo speaking group (Igbo of Nigeria) and an Indo- European speaking group (Greek Cypriots). Some south-western groups (e.g. Anuak) showed greater similarity to West-Africans while the culturally influential Amhara were more similar to Europeans."
dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-ashg-2009-abstracts.html
Altogether, this implies that only two Afro-Asiatic sub-families, Cushitic and Semitic, are actually spoken as a mother tongue in the Horn. But even here, the argument still relies on the assumption that the Ethio-Semitic languages spoken in the Horn evolved in situ in the region, whereas robust linguistic data in combination with the local presence of the Semitic-associated paternal haplogroup J and Sabaean inscriptions all point to the later introduction of Semitic languages by migrants from the Arabian peninsula. That leaves just Cushitic as the only branch of Afro-Asiatic with a plausible origin in the Horn. Aside from the respected linguist Roger Blench, it likewise does not help that proponents of the circum-Horn urheimat for AA are researchers like Christopher Ehret (who has issues with Hamitic people; see the Anti-Hamitism in academia thread). Ehret also includes root words for "goat" and "sheep", among other things, in his reconstruction of Proto-Afro-Asiatic (PAA). However, such ovicaprids were not yet introduced into Africa from Eurasia at the time of PAA (~10,000). There are cave paintings that were also recently discovered in northern Somalia which depict a human figure on horseback, one of the earliest such depictions i.e. a domesticated horse. That rock art, which is attributed to pastoralists, dates back to only about 5,000 years ago, whereas the oldest evidence of horse domestication dates back to 9,000 years ago and is now found in Southwest Asia (no longer Central Asia) -- the exact region where the Hamites are suggested to have crossed into Northeast Africa from. Besides the above, there's also the fact that all of Afro-Asiatic's most closely related language families are spoken outside of Africa. The hypothetical Out-of-Africa exodus(es) cannot be invoked to explain this discrepancy since proto-Nostratic and proto-Borean are believed to have evolved tens of millenia after that putative migration(s) into Eurasia is proposed to have first taken place. The predominant autosomal DNA component that unites all of the various Nostratic-speaking communities likewise is Eurasian in structure, not Sub-Saharan. From the above, the bulk of the evidence therefore suggests the introduction of the Afro-Asiatic languages into Africa by what was likely several waves of West Eurasian migrants (whom we have termed "Hamites" here for convenience).
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amun
New Member
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Post by amun on Sept 1, 2011 10:04:12 GMT -5
Interesting observation, Noah. I don't think Omotic is Afro-Asiatic proper either. They could have received recent linguistic/genetic influence from Afro-Asiatic speaking Cushites which caused all the confusion regarding their status within AA.
Do you think proto-AA speakers entered Africa through the Sinai or Bab-el-Mandeb? I have always suspected that the Cushitic language family could have been spread to the Horn by ancient tribes who might have lived on the Red Sea West Bank which consisted [at that time] mainly of T-M70 and E1b1b-V12 men.
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Post by Noah on Sept 1, 2011 23:21:31 GMT -5
That's exactly how I see it, amun. Omotic is probably just somewhat influenced by Afro-Asiatic languages; a sprachbund effect and whatnot. In the paper linked to above, Theil outlines many examples of careless research that has contributed to the phylum's long-standing misclassification. There's clearly a strong genetic and anthropological connection between the peoples on both sides of the Red Sea coast. I believe that Proto-Afro-Asiatic was probably introduced by West Eurasian migrants through a land bridge across the Bab el-Mandeb (or even perhaps raft technology). In The Jews thread, I briefly touch upon some similarities in terms of uniparental markers between the main peoples in both areas. What's especially compelling about the evidence is that much of it is mtDNA-based. At least as far as prehistory is concerned, maternal lineages are in many ways much more informative than paternal markers alone are since the former's appearance in geographical areas far removed from their proposed point of origin usually implies a wholesale population movement. Recent concubinage notwithstanding, there were no wandering bands of women that might have contributed such lineages. Those women actually moved into the continent with their men, and by extension, were therefore accompanied by one or more Y chromosome clades. E1b1b and the Eurasian haplogroup T could indeed very well be those lineages.
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Post by theleader9 on Sept 1, 2011 23:41:07 GMT -5
What are the Afro Asiatic languages to one another like which are more related to another?
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