This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Afroasiatic languages article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Index
|
|||
This page has archives. Sections older than 100 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
First, I think the presentation in the "homeland section" is not very encyclopedic, but rather seems to be, in part, ideologically influenced. The highlighting of Blench commentary for example does not seem relevant to the section, but rather as possible critic to the (West) Asian model.
Why Militarev views are only partially presented (West Asian farmers), while in the 2009 paper he says something totaly different. Militariev argues for West Asian pastoralists! This is also a rather different proposal based on new evidence, and not identical with the agriculturalists model. This must be corrected.
I also argue to include Hogdson et al. 2014, Mc Call 1984 and Pagani and Crevecoeur (2019), as this is obviously relevant. There is no clear cut between "African" and "Asian", and to think that the two are one coherent group without any influence from outside is quite shocking to me. As in my latest comment here, implying any "racialist" agendas here (as stating they may or may not be "Black African" or having "black apperance" or "white" or "yellow" or "green" is unecyclopedic and out of context).
My main concerns are that the paragraphs do partially not correspond with the cited references, nor do they give the full view. The agruments are partially outdated, with more recent studies clearly stating "Northeast African" (not my main point, but I still think it is dubious to not present that). And in regards to Ehret and co, they cite even older papers (inline 5-8), that hardly can represent the currenc linguistic concensus (if there is any). Krause96 (talk) 12:31, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
The Levantine hypothesis argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by the archaeological Natufian culture, which is known for introducing agriculture in the Near East. Alexander Militarev, the main proponent of this hypothesis, advanced glottochronological dates of Proto-Afroasiatic migrations in the ninth through the tenth millenium BCE based on his reconstruction of a plethora of farming and pastoral prehistoric vocabulary [...] This hypothesis has been contested by the authors of different theories involving an African origin of Afroasiatic, who accuse it of biased Mediterranean and philology centrism, doubt the convoluted Levantine migration scenario that would have resulted after the likely first split of the Omotic-Cushitic branch, and challenge the real validity of Militarev's reconstructed terms and evidence related to Proto-Afroasiatic agricultural practices.(p. 5)
Theories of African origin have an obvious advantage in that the overwhelming majority of Afroasiatic languages were or are currently spoken within the boundaries of this continent(ibid.)
Given the dually "deeply-rooted" presence of Afro-Asiatic languages both in Africa and in the Levant, the linguistic debate on the origin of this family is still open (Kitchen et al. 2009;Ehret et al. 2004) and probably settling on an intermediate "across-the-Sinai" solution. This shows that even relatively well studied cultural packages such as languages point to early interactions between Africa and the neighbouring Eurasian cultures or, in other words, to a geographical shrinking of what can currently be defined as "strictly African" in a long term perspective.
We find that most of the non-African ancestry in the HOA can be assigned to a distinct non-African origin Ethio-Somali ancestry component, which is found at its highest frequencies in Cushitic and Semitic speaking HOA populations (Table 2, Figure 2). In addition to verifying that most HOA populations have substantial non-African ancestry, which is not controversial [11]–[14], [16], we argue that the non-African origin Ethio-Somali ancestry in the HOA is most likely pre-agricultural. In combination with the genomic evidence for a pre-agricultural back-to-Africa migration into North Africa [43], [61] and inference of pre-agricultural migrations in and out-of-Africa from mitochondrial and Y chromosome data [13], [32]–[37], [47], [99]–[102], these results contribute to a growing body of evidence for migrations of human populations in and out of Africa throughout prehistory [5]–[7] and suggests that human hunter-gatherer populations were much more dynamic than commonly assumed. [...] We close with a provisional linguistic hypothesis. The proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers are thought to have lived either in the area of the Levant or in east/northeast Africa [8], [107], [108]. Proponents of the Levantine origin of Afro-Asiatic tie the dispersal and differentiation of this language group to the development of agriculture in the Levant beginning around 12 ka [8], [109], [110]. In the African-origins model, the original diversification of the Afro-Asiatic languages is pre-agricultural, with the source population living in the central Nile valley, the African Red Sea hills, or the HOA [108], [111]. In this model, later diversification and expansion within particular Afro-Asiatic language groups may be associated with agricultural expansions and transmissions, but the deep diversification of the group is pre-agricultural. We hypothesize that a population with substantial Ethio-Somali ancestry could be the proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers. A later migration of a subset of this population back to the Levant before 6 ka would account for a Levantine origin of the Semitic languages [18] and the relatively even distribution of around 7% Ethio-Somali ancestry in all sampled Levantine populations (Table S6). Later migration from Arabia into the HOA beginning around 3 ka would explain the origin of the Ethiosemitic languages at this time [18], the presence of greater Arabian and Eurasian ancestry in the Semitic speaking populations of the HOA (Table 2, S6), and ROLLOFF/ALDER estimates of admixture in HOA populations between 1–5 ka (Table 1).
My prediction is that Africa will turn out to be the cradle of Afroasiatic, though the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic were a reflux population from Southwest Asia. This is more in line with your argument, but note that it is not really part of the discussion on the matter.
Some scholars, while accepting an origin of Afroasiatic within Africa, argue that the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic can be linked to a Paleolithic and pre-agricultural migration wave into Africa from Western Asia, which subsequently dispersed in Africa, including a later back-migration by the Semitic-branch to the Levant. This view is broadly supported by archaeogenetic evidence.
Pagani and Crevecoeur (2019) argue that given on the still open debate on the origin of Afroasiatic, the concensus will probably settling on an intermediate "across-the-Sinai" solution. They also note that the very early interactions between African and Eurasian cultures, point "to a geographical shrinking of what can currently be defined as "strictly African" in a long term perspective".
Establishing a likely homeland of Afroasiatic can help inform subgrouping. Most evidence suggests that it was in the southeastern Sahara or closer to the coast, in the horn of Africa. Genetic data are also consistent with dispersion from this region.(p. 30). The first statement is cited to Diakonoff 1988 and Ehret at al. 2004. The statement on genetics is cited to Underhill et al. 2001, p. 55.--Ermenrich (talk) 15:55, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
While we cannot cite this in the article due to WP:SYNTH, it still should inform how we present information, and the articles you cite appear nowhere in the 2023 volume when discussion is had of genetic evidence.- I am sorry, I do not understand what you want to tell me.
It might belong at Afroasiatic Homeland.Yes, in a more elaborated way. Here, the summary article, should mention this too. As it is relevant, informative, and does not do any harm to the reading flow or topic.Krause96 (talk) 18:30, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.. That has been done by me, but you keep making excuses to remove it by personal arguments, rather factual! If you can not participate in a discussion, also not remove it! This is disruptive.Krause96 (talk) 10:25, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
@Andrew Lancaster: requesting commentary of another user please.
Scholars, such as Hogdson et al., present archaeogenetic evidence in favor for a place of dispersion within Africa, but argue that the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic can ultimately be linked to a Paleolithic and pre-agricultural migration wave into Africa from Western Asia, and that the Semitic-branch represents a back-migration to the Levant.[1] Similar arguments have already been raised before.[2]
Pagani and Crevecoeur (2019) argue that given on the still open debate on the origin of Afroasiatic, the concensus will probably settling on an intermediate "across-the-Sinai" solution. They also note that the very early interactions between African and Eurasian cultures, point "to a geographical shrinking of what can currently be defined as "strictly African" in a long term perspective".[3], but think it is strange why Ermenrich has such unconstructive and biased view here.Krause96 (talk) 10:46, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
Here's my 2 cents: first of all, all detail about the Afroasiatic homeland belongs (surprise!) in the main article Afroasiatic homeland. The homeland section in this article can be reduced to a short summary of the key points of the main article, of course with due weight (which latter we collectively have to establish). As you will see, the genetics section of the main article is filled with WP:SYNTH Y-haplogroup "cruft" and badly needs a fresh breeze, so pieces like the introduction by Pagani and Crevecoeur are very welcome there (and even might be mentioned here if the text of Afroasiatic homeland is consolidated). But adding things only here and not there turns the summary section of this article into an undesirable WP:content fork.
One thing we should avoid is to bring in literature that does not directly address the AA homeland question, such as Fregel's chapter that was added at an earlier occasion[2]. A great work, but it's not ours to link this research to the AA homeland question unless other reliable sources do and that in turn we could cite. Since you haven't added it again, I presume that's spilled milk. Btw, a bit off-topic and OR/SYNTH on my part: why did you clip the quote from Fregel only to include the Loosdrecht part, but did not include the Lazaridis narative, which Fregel appears to consider just as plausible? The Dzudzuana ancestry is so old, that the "back migration" might have preceded the time when Proto-AA spoken by many, many millenia. That's a bit like tracing (pre-pre-)Proto-IE to Siberia based on the fact that the Yamnayans carried 50% EHG ancestry, which in turn largely derived from the ANE population of Siberia. Quite a stretch, isn't it (but well, some Old Kids on the Blogs still do these things...)?
Back to the core issue: this is the article about AA languages. We can mention things like the possibile location of the homeland (= source of dispersal; there is no other definition of homeland) and correlations with findings from population genetics (again, provided it's not us who do the correlation). Linguistic spread does not necessarily have to correlate one-to-one with demic spread that is detected via archeogenetics (language shift without much geneflow is very real and not as uncommon as many non-linguists apparently often believe), and we should not give undue weight to overly naive models that take Y-haplogroups (especially when restricted to present-day populations!) as infallible proxies of demic spread. But: Proto-AA is the deepest we can get linguistically, so this article does not need look farther back than that. Sure, reliable sources (well, at least one) do undertake the tenuous endeavor of further tracing the genetic ancestry of the presumed population of Proto-AA speakers back to earlier populations of completely (and principally) unknown linguistic affliation. These are details probably worth mentioning in Afroasiatic homeland, but not here, which IMHO is strictly about the linguistic subgroup. –Austronesier (talk) 19:02, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
We hypothesize that a population with substantial Ethio-Somali ancestry could be the proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers. A later migration of a subset of this population back to the Levant before 6 ka would account for a Levantine origin of the Semitic languages [18] and the relatively even distribution of around 7% Ethio-Somali ancestry in all sampled Levantine populations (Table S6). Later migration from Arabia into the HOA beginning around 3 ka would explain the origin of the Ethiosemitic languages at this time [18], the presence of greater Arabian and Eurasian ancestry in the Semitic speaking populations of the HOA (Table 2, S6), and ROLLOFF/ALDER estimates of admixture in HOA populations between 1–5 ka (Table 1). The Ethio-Somali ancestry is found in all admixed HOA ethnic groups, shows little inter-individual variance within these ethnic groups, is estimated to have diverged from all other non-African ancestries by at least 23 ka, and does not carry the unique Arabian lactase persistence allele that arose about 4 ka. Taking into account published mitochondrial, Y chromosome, paleoclimate, and archaeological data, we find that the time of the Ethio-Somali back-to-Africa migration is most likely pre-agricultural.
((cite journal))
: CS1 maint: PMC format (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
My prediction is that Africa will turn out to be the cradle of Afroasiatic, though the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic were a reflux population from Southwest Asia.
((cite journal))
: Check date values in: |date=
(help); no-break space character in |first=
at position 7 (help)
@Ermenrich: I have removed the Table from Ratcliffe (2012) in the section "Consonant systems" with the edit summary "Since the prose of this section is about the synchronic typology of consonant systems in AA languages, this table is off-topic here. It also gives an inaccurate idea about the reconstruction of Proto-AA since visually, it might lead to the impression that Proto-AA in fact might have had such an impoverished inventory of consonants, whereas in Ratcliffe (2012), this table serves a different purpose"
.
In case you agree with this: maybe we can replace it with a table that visualizes the typological diversity of documented of historical and contemporary AA languages? It is not really necessary since the prose has it all, but if you have come across a table/checklist etc. in one of the sources, it might be a nice addition. We could of course do a feature-based table on our own based on the information in the sources (e.g. Lateral fricatives [y/n], pharyngeals [y/n], ejectives [y/n]), but such a DIY table would rightfully deem as OR to many WP editors, I guess. Austronesier (talk) 09:32, 18 June 2023 (UTC)
Proto-Afroasiatic language now has a fairly detailed section on Numerals (which is basically just proposed cognates given the state of PAA reconstruction). My question is: is the section here with the numerals comparison still worth keeping? Is it giving our readers useful information? (I'm not arguing in favor of removing it necessarily, I'd just like to make sure that there isn't too much overlap/mismatched content between the articles).--Ermenrich (talk) 17:04, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
The most recent sources from 2018 to 2023 clearly state that the majority of scholars place the origin in NORTHEAST Africa, not simply "Africa" in general. We should reflect what the studies actually say. This is what is stated in both proto-Afroasiatic and Afroasiatic homeland articles. Also, it is made clear that although the languages likely diversified from proto-Afroasiatic in northeast Africa, their ultimate origin prior to this is in the Levant in the Paleolithic, as per ALL of the genetic studies. The people who spoke proto-Afroasiatic are from the Paleolithic to early Neolithic Levant according to the sources, and that needs to be stated here. 50.100.222.203 (talk) 17:39, 1 August 2023 (UTC) "First, present-day ancestry in North Africans is characterized by an autochthonous Maghrebi component related to a Paleolithic back migration to Africa from Eurasia. ... This result suggests that Iberomaurusian populations in North Africa were related to Paleolithic people in the Levant..." [1]
In the light of this continuation of edit warring, especially by the IP using the sources I included previously to the article Afroasiatic homeland. I voice my disagreement with the IP. The case has been discussed and was closed, the reappearance of this dispute is bad faith. I advice the IP to stop it. Concenus is three users against you IP. Just stop it! The sources which mentioned North Africa or Northeast Africa were referenced inline to Ehret and Keita. It was discussed and explained why not to use Northeast Africa. Do us a favour and stop. This dispute was already dealt with.Krause96 (talk) 15:43, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
References
@Daniel Power of God:. I do not believe that the source given for Campbell's views is a good one. It is a summary of his thoughts and not the original source, for one thing. It is primarily discussing Nilo-Saharan for another. And thirdly, Campbell, while a highly respectable historical linguist, is not a specialist in Afroasiatic linguists. I believe his views on Afroasiatic have been discussed elsewhere on this page or at Proto-Afroasiatic possibly and that in most publications he appears to accept the family.
As for Hodge, his book was published in 1990. Quite a bit has happened since then. Furthermore, I do not believe that Hodge was cited fairly, as the intention appeared to be to make the existence of Afrosasiatic appear questionable, (and possibly to suggest that scholars are afraid to say this?). What Hodge actually says is: For position [that Afroasiatic cannot be reconstructed] we have only occasional statements, often unpublished. Presumably those holding this view consider the time depth too great for sufficient comparable material to have survived
. The way this was framed in the edit suggested instead that those who believed that Afroasiatic cannot be reconstructed questioned the validity of the family, like Campbell is implied to have done via indirect citation. We already have more recent statements here and at Proto-Afroasiatic that show that many scholars are skeptical of Afroasiatic reconstructions due to time depth.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:19, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
I agree that Campell's views are not quite adequately represented in Schadeberg's chapter; while C. lists several families and macro-families that he considers unproven, he does not necessarily put them on par. A better impression of Campbell's views can be taken from Campbell & Poser (2008), Language Classification: History and Method. Their skepticism (NB not entire rejection) is mentioned in Güldemann (2018) and thus might also be woven in here with a short mention (note that even the "splitter" Güldemann considers Campbell & Poser's skepticism as exaggerated). –Austronesier (talk) 18:41, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Afroasiatic probably is a valid genetic grouping, at least large parts of what is postulated to belong in it, even though we are reticent to accept traits that may have other explanations and thus are not fully persuasive of that relationship.While he's clearly more skeptical than most Afroasianists, he does not reject the group.--Ermenrich (talk) 21:04, 2 June 2024 (UTC)