The result was delete. Comment: I'm going with delete. Missvain (talk) 19:37, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
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The topic is not notable. The phrase "Cushitic peoples" occurs relatively rarely in academic literature, and generally as a shorthand for 'groups that speak Cushitic languages'; it almost never occurs as the subject of a book or academic article. There are further problems with this specific page, but the core justification for deletion is the topic's unnotability. I propose (following discussion on the article's talk page) to turn this into a redirect page for Cushitic languages. Pathawi (talk) 07:55, 18 May 2021 (UTC)
I think I've provided evidence of the above in my comments below. It appears to me that this article is indeed reflective of existing mainstream scholarship, even if its concepts are presented in a way that is untenable to a number of trained linguists. I would be interested to know if you have the same sense after examining some of the sources cited below.O.M. Nash (talk) 13:43, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
References
SailingInABathTub (talk) 10:15, 18 May 2021 (UTC)
First, Ehret 2002 (The Civilizations of Africa) never explicitly assigns to the early "Cushitic peoples" an ethnicity, but he does talk about language, material culture, & population groups as bound together (in a way that most current archæologists reject, but more on that later). However, the book is a history of the entire continent up to the beginning of the nineteenth century; Ehret's latest mention of "Cushitic peoples" is in chapter four, covering the period 3500 to 1000 BCE. The present article is explicitly talking about a contemporary agglomeration of peoples. The reason for this three millennium discrepancy is that Ehret is not talking about the subject of this article. He is using "Cushitic peoples" as an abstraction to talk about evolution toward the contemporary African linguistic landscape—not as a descriptor of existing ethnic groups. Literally nowhere in the book does this latter characterisation—the topic of the present page—occur. Ehret's work supports nothing like the statements on religion, music, archæogenetics, or even history in this article. He uses the term "Cushitic peoples" because he does not know how the peoples in question at the time he's writing about described themselves (see, eg, p62 on "Northern Sudanians"). As soon as it becomes possible to distinguish finer grained groups of people, he does, & "Cushitic peoples" disappear.
Second & second-&-a-halfth: Among the notability criteria is significant coverage. From WP:GNG:
I think we're on shaky ground, here. In the 460 pages of Ehret 2002, there are five mentions of "Cushitic peoples" tout court. In Ehret 2011 (History and the Testimony of Language) there are two. I don't see any sources cited in this article which are stronger sources. Drawing from these sources alone, one could assemble perhaps a half dozen sentences about what Ehret has to say about "Cushitic peoples". Synthesising all the Ehret sources, you might be able to pull together three paragraphs."Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
Third: I have read Ehret. I have also read Grover Hudson's 1989 reconstruction of Highland East Cushitic, which does not cite Ehret. I have read Maarten Mous & Roland Kießling's 2003 reconstruction of West Rift Southern Cushitic and David Appleyard's 2006 reconstruction of Agaw, which cite Ehret only to reject his reconstructions. I don't think Ehret is "fringe" in this encyclopædia's sense, but his is a marginal view within the mainstream. When you read work by current linguists working on Cushitic languages, Ehret's work—when cited—is almost always accompanied by some form of hedging. Most citations are simply acknowledgments of the "notwithstanding Ehret (1980)…" variety. I don't know the archæological literature well, but my impression is that he's even further from the mainstream in archæology than he is in historical linguistics. (I will be happy to concede that I was wrong if someone with familiarity with the archæological literature can demonstrate otherwise.) None of this disqualifies Ehret as a valid, reliable source for Wikipedia. Christopher Ehret is not on trial. But what it points to is that it is hard to place this particular work within a broader body of scholarship: the core issue of notability. So, great: We find Ehret mentions "Cushitic peoples" (again, see my first paragraph, with a different meaning from that in this article) seven times in two monographs. Maybe if we comb everything we can find, we can get thirty mentions of "Cushitic peoples" by Ehret over the past four decades. But where's the article where he deals with Cushitic peoples themselves (rather than Cushitic languages) in more than a passing manner? & much more importantly, where's the body of broader scholarship that is in dialogue with Ehret about this specific topic? Note: WP:3REFS & WP:GNG:
"Multiple publications from the same author or organization are usually regarded as a single source for the purposes of establishing notability."
Fourth: If we don't have a broader body of scholarship, then we really aren't in a place to write an article about "Cushitic peoples". Given the paucity of detail on "Cushitic peoples" in Ehret's work, an article like any of those on specific theoretical accounts of histories—France profonde, The Geographical Pivot of History, &c—treating his work on Africa as a whole (Cushitic, Nilo-Saharan, Bantu…) might be in order. It would remain to be demonstrated that Ehret's historical reconstructions are in & of themselves notable, but I think that the review literature & the citation within history broadly (not within archæology or historical linguistics) would probably support that. I don't propose writing that article—I'm perfectly satisfied with his work appearing in the History sections of Cushitic languages, &c.: I'm just talking about what kind of article that material would support.
Finalth: You seem to have a mistaken understanding of how a Google Scholar search works. It is not by default a search of titles. It is a text search. I searched for the term "Cushitic peoples" & looked at all results that seemed plausible. If you'll look at the conversation at Talk:Cushitic peoples you'll find that another editor did the same with similar results. I didn't draw my conclusions from titles. That is a weird & unnecessarily ungenerous assumption.
The above is quite a lot. I am anxious about avoiding bludgeoning, as AfDs are so ripe for the practice, but I felt compelled to reply when there was an ad hom. Pathawi (talk) 08:07, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
a five-minute JSTOR search on the exact phrase "Cushitic peoples" turned up dozens of articles that use the phrase in exactly the same manner as the article under discussion). After the Ehret reference, I am interested to see what follows (including the actual topic of these articles). –Austronesier (talk) 12:05, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
I'm going to check out of this specific conversation now: It's nothing personal, but my feeling is that we've probably both made our cases adequately & at this point I'm beginning to repeat myself. Your job isn't to convince me or vice versa: We've got to make our cases & then allow others to make theirs. Pathawi (talk) 07:51, 21 May 2021 (UTC)