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Um yeah, because I don't know what p(b)umping into "any of you" in Buckhead, Atl (predominately black middle to upper class area, i believe) have to do with the problems you have with certain imixers who are spread across the world? How many imixers that you have problems with actually live in Buckhead for you to ass-ume that DJ's comment was an internet bravado claim? Hmmm, another attempt to twist, I see.

Yup, limited deductive abilities. If he had been stating that i not go to a certain area, my stating that I could care less if any of them were in the area is not affected by where they are or not. I could care less if you were in Buckhead for that matter.

Nice try. But you claims only make an ass out of you as you try to make it bigger than a misunderstanding.

I think that this would be a good time to put into Maat the rebuttal of the claim that Diop “proved that the Egyptian mummies were of black people.” This claim is made over and over but when you trace the source it comes from just one paper in which no evidence is presented only assertions.. ..

Diop, C. A. 1973. “Pigmentation des anciens Egyptiens. Test par la Mélanine,” Bulletin de l’IFAN, XXXV, B: 515-531. Cited over and over by Afrocentrists and by Diop himself in Civilization and Barbarism [BOM translation]

General considerations
The following analysis aims to show:
1. that the amount of melanin is a fundamental racial characteristic;
2. that this amount can easily be measured in practice by various laboratory methods for all races and for living or dead mankind.

“We then applied the method to several Egyptian mummies preserved in the Anthropology Laboratory of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Thanks to the kindness of Mrs. Chamla, Head of the Department and of her aides. We used the technique of thin slices observed by ultraviolet or natural light; the preparations were graciously mounted by Mrs. J.Guillen, technician at the Physiology Laboratory of the Faculte de Science de Dakar and Mr.Mamadou Cissé, Head of the Department of Vertebrates of the IFAN. The results speak for themselves; one can ascertain that, contrary to every widespread opinion, (1), the mummification processes do not destroy the epidermis to the point that the method would be inapplicable in most cases. In particular, it would certainly permit the analysis of the skin of all of the royal mummies of the Museum of Cairo which are in a perfect state of conservation; Thutmoses III founder of the 18th Dynasty the conqueror of all of Western Asia, Seti I the founder of the 19th dynasty, his son the famous Ramses II, etc. The result is worth the effort and this is the reason why I tried to obtain samples to analyze. The curator of the Cairo Museum, Dr. Ryad, had promised to send some to me, but I have been waiting for over a year.

It is surprising that such an analysis has not long ago been attempted and carried out by other researchers. We can affirm that such an examination reveals, with no doubt possible, an amount of melanin which is unknown among the “leucoderm” [white] races and which indubitably places the ancient Egyptians among the Africans of Black Africa.”

This is the sum total of the evidence. No detailed experimental results or illustrations of the slides. This is NOT the usual way in which melanin concentrations are measured (usually a spectrocope is used) Alain Froment (physical anthropologist) has published a number of papers on Diop and his methodology. Here are the relevant comments:

Alain Froment, 1991. “Origine et evolution de l’Homme dans la Pensée de Cheikh Anta Diop: une Analyse Critique,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines. XXXI-1-2: 29 64.

p. 44-45. Autopsies of mummies
In mummies, despite the desiccation, the characteristics of the face are partially preserved which offers a tremendous advantage over a bare skeleton.
Their scientific examination and histologic study goes back to the beginning of the century but people became interested has again because of new investigatory techniques (Cockburn & Cockburn 1980). The exceptionally dry climate of Egypt allows, besides embalmed bodies, the recovery of buried cadavers whose skin is intact going back five thousand years. Thus there is in the Nile Valley an exceptionally long continuity of specimens available for extensive biological investigations.

This is why a histological examination of skin to measure the amount of melanin is necessary. Unfortunately Diop’s (1973) article sheds no light on this. In fact in twelve pages of text and sixty references only three lines deal with the results: “We can affirm that such an examination reveals, with no doubt possible, an amount of melanin which is unknown among the “leucoderm” [white] races and which indubitably places the ancient Egyptians among the Africans of Black Africa.” This is followed by long digressions on prehistory as well as biochemistry in a scientific jargon which is highly documented but fails to mask the absence of results. No histological illustrations, a sketch of quantification, comparative examinations of skin with different stages of tanning, or reference to other studies of mummies (European, Peruvian, etc.) are provided. Cheikh Anta had photographs about his work circulated at the Cairo Colloquium (UNESCO 1980, p. 799); unfortunately no trace of these remains in any publication and it should all be repeated more rigorously. The Rabino-Massa team (1972, 1981) went much further, but skin of the mummies, unlike the internal tissues, is often altered by baths of the preserving liquids. Moreover, as Szabo (1975) points out, “light microscopic sections from a dark Mediterranean skin can be very similar to those from a Negroid skin,” thus more refined techniques such as electronic microscopy should be employed.


Alain Froment.1992. “Origines du Peuplement de l”Egypte Ancienne: l’Apport de l”Anthropobiologie,” Archéo-Nil no. 2 (October): 79-98.

p. 84 2) the skin
One can sometimes distinguish in places the natural color of the skin, for example white in the case of Ramses II and an anonymous princely mummy, according to Fouquet (1886) who opened their sarcophagi. However, most mummies have a black carbonized appearance; this color is either the result of a process of slow organic combustion or of a bituminous substance which substantially hinders examinations by the naked eye and which probably came form Mesopotamia and Palestine (Connan 1991) in the same way as the embalming resins reserved for the wealthiest came from Lebanon(Leca 1976). The blackening effect of the “oil of the mineral” is mentioned in a papyrus of the Roman Era (no, AE/N5158 of the Louvre) cited by Connan. This is why it is necessary to examine histological slices of skin to measure the melanin, if one wishes to know the true pigmentation of the bodies. Diop (1973a) following Sandison (1967) observed grains of melanin but his article does not contribute anything useful; he had photographs about his work circulated at the Cairo Colloquium (UNESCO 1980, p. 799); unfortunately no trace of this remains in any publication. The Rabino-Massa team (1972, 1981) also detected melanin without quantifying it but skin of the mummies is unlike the internal tissues often altered by baths of the preserving liquids. Moreover, as Szabo (1975) points out, “light microscopic sections from a dark Mediterranean skin can be very similar to those from a Negroid skin.” Thus requiring us to use more refined techniques such as electronic microscopy as well as the mucosal membranes of the mouth.
Diop’s whole approach is problematic because the techniques used in mummification (including the pouring of resins and in later years of bitumen) make the mummies darker. Even without these additional factors mummification would make Diop’s claims false. Bob Brier replicated the process of mummification using Egyptian natron.

M.R. Zimmerman, B. Brier, and R.s. Wade. 1998. "Brief Communication: Twentieth Century Replication of an Egyptian Mummy: Implications for Paleopathology" American Journal of Physical Anthropology107: 417-420.

B. Brier and R.S. Wade. 1997. "The Use of natron in Human Mummification: A Modern Experiment" ZAZ 124: 89-100.

The papers stated that the process “turned his body "quite brown, almost black", but they did not indicate what the mummified body had been. I wrote Brier and was informed that the body had been a Caucasian.

Diop was sadly lacking in linguistics training. here a couple of posts. Miguel is a professional linguist

From: "hungfy@sbu.ac.uk" <hungfy@sbu.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.history.ancient-worlds,soc.culture.african.american,sci.archaeology,sci.anth ropology
Subject: Re: Black Egypt
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:18:41 +0000

manansala@my-dejanews.com wrote:

> In article <36C02C4C.5499@sbu.ac.uk>,
> hungfy@sbu.ac.uk wrote:
> > manansala@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> > >
> but supremely because there are now
> > well-established and politically-immune methods in comparative and
> > historical linguistics, which would reveal any politically-motivated
> > pseudo-science.
>
> Would you mind briefly explaining these methods?

It is no more possible to "briefly" explain these methods than it would
be to "briefly" explain the methods of other _scientific_ disciplines
such as evolutionary biology and quantum physics.
I refer you to some textbooks on Historical Linguistics. Those by Lyle
Campbell, T.Crowley, and Winfried Lehmann will do as starters. There are
bigger and weightier works (e.g. by Hock) if you want to dig deeper.
Largely consistent and predictable phonetic, phonemic, semantic, and
morphological connections (not necessarily, indeed not usually,
identity) are perhaps the most basic principles, but there's much more
to it than that. If a professional linguist reads this, perhaps (s)he
could put it more accurately and elegantly, but will not be able to do
much more, because real linguistics, like all worthwhile scientific
fields of study, is not something you can pick up in a few minutes.

On the other hand it is quite easy to briefly explain the methods of
pseudo-scientific linguistics as used by e.g. Heyerdahl and Diop in
their attempts to "prove" connections between languages. You look around
at two languages and, lo and behold, after a while you come up with
certain "similarities". If you have difficulty in finding more than a
few, you then look at the neighbouring languages, and so on. The
similarities do not have to be consistent (you might find that two
languages have e.g. similar words for "five", "bullfrog", and "pregnant
woman", and then announce their relationship - this is a hypothetical
example BTW). In this way, anyone with a bit of time and effort could
"prove" the relationship of any languages you wish. Anthony West has
been brilliantly spoofing this sort of approach on another thread in
this NG.

> Why then is there so much disagreement between the claims of
> Greenberg, Nostraticists, Proto-World folk, and practically in
> every regional classification scheme?

Very simple. These theories are at the _cutting edge_ of theoretical
research in historical linguistics at the present. Just so there is
considerable disagreement amongst physicists about the precise nature of
the beginnings of the universe, its end (if any), the evolution of
various types of galaxy, the nature and relationship of various
elementary particles, the nature of time, etc.etc. (see any issue of
"Scientific American" for starters). Similar disagreements exist over
the workings of biological evolutionary theory. If you were to suggest
to scientists working in these fields that this meant that the basic
principles of theoretical physics and evolutionary biology were thereby
fundamentally wrong, you would either emerge as the greatest genius ever
- if you could, using scientifically credible, evidence really prove
your case - or be dismissed as an ideologically motivated crackpot.

Regards

Frank
******
From: mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology
Subject: Re:Black Egypt
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 22:00:38 GMT

On Wed, 10 Feb 1999 17:37:46 GMT, cwinters@kiwi.dep.anl.gov
wrote:

>This is untrue, Diop uses the same comparative methods used by all linguist.

Strange then that Diop's conclusions are at odds with the conclusions that all linguists have reached. The linguistic facts are clear enough: Wolof (which I believe happens to be Diop's native language), is a West-Atlantic language, most
closely related to Serer and Fulani, and is linked to the other Niger-Congo languages of West Africa and the Bantu linguistic area. It's not demonstrably related to Ancient Egyptian or any other Afro-Asiatic language. For instance, if we look at the system of personal pronouns, which was of decisive value in
classifying the Chadic langages, such as Hausa, as Afro-Asiatic, we see that the Wolof system bears no resemblance at all to the Afro-Asiatic set of personal pronouns. Wolof has noun classifiers, like most other Niger-Congo languages, and not a trace of the Afro-Asiatic feminine in *t, etc. etc.

>[...]
>I beleive that until
>you demonstrate examples of cognition between African and Egyptian languages,
>which you dispute with "proof" that Diop is wrong and you are right you
>should remain silent on this issue. Until you present specific linguistic
>examples your contention is groundless.

Oh, there are good examples of cognition between Egyptian and other African languages, such as Berber, Hausa, Beja, Somali, etc. Those are, like Ancient Egyptian, Afro-Asiatic languages. Wolof is not. Diop's collection of chance resemblances between Wolof and Egyptian, ignoring both the comparative Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo evidence, is of little value.

It's not unthinkable that Afro-Asiatic is related at a deeper level with other language families, such as Niger-Congo (and/or Nilo-Saharan, and/or Basque, and/or Indo-European, etc.). But the only way to go about investigating these question is to take into account all the comparative evidence of the reconstructed proto-languages (and if no such reconstruction are extant, there
lies the first priority). Comparing miscellaneous items from just one AA language, Egyptian, with a random lot of "African" languages, featuring prominently Wolof, proves nothing at all, except that you can guess Diop's nationality was Senegalese even if you didn't know that.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@wxs.nl
Amsterdam

It seems to me that since we are getting all sorts of claims of genetic relationships of languages it would be useful to post a nice outline by Peter Daniels. He originally wrote this in regard to Diop's claims, but I deleted those specific passages, below that a few quotes from Trask's book on historical linguistics:

What it looks like, is that Diop feels that if there are any sort of resemblances between language A and language B, then languages A and B must be genetically related. What does "genetically related" mean said of languages? --It has nothing to do with the physical types of the speakers of the languages. This is quite obvious simply from the fact that African Americans speak English and not any language indigenous to Africa, Chinese Americans speak English and not any of the Chinese languages, etc. Any human child learns the language of the community in which it is raised, regardless of the ethnic or "racial" affinities of its parents. --Genetically related languages are the languages of communities that, generations ago, used to speak the same language, but have since separated and lost communication with each other. Language is constantly changing (but at a rate slow enough that it is usually not noticeable), and as long as all the members of the community remain in communication with each other, the changes percolate among them all, and they all continue to understand each other (though there may be social or regional differences, called dialects, within such speech communities).

Moreover, the changes that languages undergo are systematic. If, for instance, a "d" at the end of some word comes to be pronounced "t" (this is a very common sort of change), then probably every "d" at the end of a word will become "t" (of course we're talking about sounds, not spellings; most of the world's languages have never been written down). Futhermore, if "d" becomes "t", then probably "g" becomes "k" and "b" becomes "p" as well. All three pairs show a "voiced stop" changing to a "voiceless stop".

But if something splits a community, such as migration to more hospitable lands, or invasion of some other group within a formerly coherent territory, then the resulting two new communities go their own ways and their languages continue to change--but in randomly different ways. After a while, the changes add up so that members of the two new communities first have trouble understanding each other, and eventually can't understand each other at all: new languages have arisen. (Maybe in one community the voiced stops became voiceless, and in the other they stayed voiced.)

One of the tasks of comparative linguistics is to try to get at the earlier stages of the history of languages. Sometimes, we come across languages that have not diverged very much, such as the various Slavic languages, including Russian, Polish, etc., or the various Turkic languages, such as Turkish, Khazak, Uzbek, etc. In these cases, we can get a pretty good idea of what the common parent language (indicated with the prefix "proto-") was like. As is well known, the "Romance" languages of western Europe--Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, and several others--are descended from Latin. In this case, probably uniquely in the world, we can compare reconstructed proto-Romance (what we come up with by comparing all the Romance languages) with what the ancestral language actually was like (because of the thousands of documents written in Latin dating from the time when the language was in living use). Unfortunately, it turns out that proto-Romance is quite different from Latin! For instance, Classical Latin uses a system of cases (nominative, genitive, etc.) on its nouns. And not a trace of this survives in modern Romance! So this very precious case tells us immediately both that modern languages can differ greatly from their ancestors just 1500-2000 years earlier, and that we will probably never have an accurate picture of languages known only from their descendants thousands of years later.

It follows from this that if languages are distantly related--through many of the sort of community-splits I described, or at great time-depth, or both-- they will exhibit very minimal similarities, and such similarities as there are will be very difficult to identify. (They will be masked by what information science calls "noise".) The linguist immediately becomes suspicious of long lists of proposed similarities between languages that are at best distantly related; an enjoyable pastime is to open a dictionary of some exotic language and try to match each word with a word in English (or whatever). Try it--it's not all that hard!

The way we decide whether languages are related is to look for systematic correspondences between their sounds. It's not enough that many words in two languages are similar. They must be similar in a regular, explainable way (as in the earlier example, voiced word-final stops in one language correspond to voiceless ones in the other). Given plenty of time, there can be dozens or more of such correspondence-sets. Each time a speech-community diverges, more correspondences arise. So we try to find the languages that are most similar, discover what they have in common, try to account for why they differ, and describe the proto-language of this small group of languages. We then do the same thing for group after group. Eventually, if the initial data are good, we have a number of proto-languages that we can in turn compare with each other, find their commonalities, account for their differences, etc. In this way, after much labor (to which many scholars contribute), we end up with a decent idea of what an ancestral language might have sounded like. In the case of Indo-European, we are fortunate in having very ancient texts from a number of different groups (Hittite, Vedic Sanskrit, Mycenaean & Homeric Greek, Early Latin), and can commence reconstructing some 2500-3500 years ago. (It's only the antiquity of the materials that makes it possible to have an idea of what proto-Indo-European might have been like ca. 4000 BCE. If we had to rely only on the modern languages of Europe and India and Iran, our picture of Indo-European would be very vague.)

Even before we can begin to look for regular correspondences between sounds in a pair or small group of languages, we need to find likely candidates to check. Sometimes, when the time-depth is small, this is easy: the languages of Europe fall into clear-cut groups, and in the early 19th century not much thought was given to why we compared first French, Spanish and Italian; English, German, and Icelandic; Irish and Welsh; etc. The similarities and differences were obvious; moreover, every learned person in Europe had already learned a large sampling of the languages of Europe. But when European philologists began to take an interest in languages spoken elsewhere in the world, they faced a problem. There were thousands of languages out there, none of them were familiar, and for almost all of them, there were no written records. For a while, people were seizing on the most bizarre characteristics for comparing languages--among them the physical characteristics of the speakers (the first major compilation of information on all the languages known was organized into volumes and parts by the kind of hair the speakers had). Fortunately, during the course of the 19th century, some principles of the way the Indo-European languages had developed were identified (such as the final voiced stop example), and, more important, it was found that apparent exceptions to patterns of regular correspondence could be explained by somewhat more sophisticated analysis of somewhat deeper patterns. (The example usually given is "Verner's Law", which explains significant exceptions to "Grimm's Law" within the Germanic family--you can find it in any textbook of historical linguistics--but dozens of such patterns have been identified within Indo-European.)

So a big, but strictly empirical, question was whether patterns like Grimm's and Verner's Laws could be found to operate within other language families. One of the great successes of early-20th-century American linguistics was the demonstration that they could indeed: the languages of Native America worked just the same way as the languages of the Old World. Of course they sound very different, and their grammatical patterns can differ strikingly, but at base all human languages share an essential similarity. (And we do not expect to find literal repetitions of the actual facts of Grimm's Law operating in other language groups!) cont.

Explorers and missionaries in Africa of course took an interest in the languages of Africa. At first they were overwhelmed by the diversity of African languages; but over many decades, patterns came to be indentified. African languages could be placed in small groups according to their inherent characteristics. Unfortunately, the period of learning the languages of Africa coincided with the period of classifying languages by the physical characteristics of their speakers, so a lot of nonsense got written about why languages X and Y had to be related because their speakers had the same head- shape or whatever. By the 1940s, a large number of small groups of clearly- related languages had been agreed upon, and for some of them, patterns along the lines of Grimm's and Verner's Laws had been worked out, and groupings based on speaker-characteristics had either been properly rejected or had been legitimated by purely linguistic characteristics. The state of the art at this stage was summed up in an unfinished series of books edited by A. N. Tucker and Margaret Bryan.

But little could be said, as yet, of larger-scale groupings of African languages. The similarities between Egyptian and Semitic had been recognized almost as soon as Egyptian was deciphered. When the Cushitic languages of Ethiopia and the Berber languages of North Africa became known, they could immediately be added to the superfamily. (The resemblances are not numerous, but they are deep--the time-depth for Afroasiatic is at least twice that of Indo-European, and note that early records exist for only two of the branches.) The name "Semitic" was invented in 1781 (taken from Noah's son Shem), so when "brother" languages to Semitic were encountered, it was natural to call them by the name of his brother, Ham--we now know, however, that the non-Semitic languages of this superfamily are not more similar to each other than any of them is to Semitic, so the old name "Hamito-Semitic" is misleading and has largely been abandoned in favor of the purely geographic term, Afroasiatic, which was suggested by Joseph Greenberg because it describes the only family spoken indigenously in both Africa and Asia.

From time to time, it was suggested that both Hausa and Fulani (aka Fula, called Peul in French), two of the most important languages of West Africa, were also "Hamitic". But again, the great time-depth and lack of historical documents in these languages made it difficult to be certain of their affiliation. With augmented research, it emerged that Hausa is one among some 300 languages in the Chadic family--and that Chadic is indeed a fifth member of Afroasiatic (so the earlier supposition about Hausa was correct). Fulani, however, has turned out to be a "West Atlantic" language.

For several decades, work within the Afroasiatic family has concentrated on uncovering the "Grimm's Law"-type patterns by which cognates in the modern languages might be recognized. This involves working with dozens of languages, and subgroupings within Chadic are now known. Cushitic, though, has turned out to be a rather illusory group. What was formerly considered the West Cushitic sub-branch is now considered to be a whole separate family, called Omotic (these days it has become customary to name African language families for major rivers in their territory), which was the earliest to diverge from the main Afroasiatic group. Beja (aka Bedawye), formerly Northern Cushitic, is now regarded as a separate group on its own, close to Cushitic but not sharing certain innovations.

This notion of "shared innovations" has become crucial in classifying languages. Just as paleontology has in the last couple of decades become organized around "cladistics"--a notion borrowed from linguistics, though linguistics has never used the term--whereby evolutionary branches are identified by a single characteristic shared by all the descendants of a particular population--so also has it been recognized that the best way to identify genetically related languages is to discover some feature that they all share, that sets them apart from their kin. For example, a defining characteristic of the Semitic family is that it has developed the three- consonant root system out of the two-consonant root system shared with the rest of Afroasiatic. A defining characteristic of the Aramaic group within Semitic is that the th-type sounds became t-type sounds.
%%%%
R. L. Trask. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold.

p. 21. [Borrowing] Calque or loan translation is a new word or phrase constructed by taking a foreign word or phrase and translating it morpheme-by-morpheme. The Romans frequently used this technique to expand the vocabulary of Latin by appealing to the more prestigious Greek. For example, the Greek word sympathia ‘sympathy’ consists of two morphemes: a prefix syn- ‘with’ and a stem pathia ‘suffering’. The Romans rendered this with the Latin prefix con- ‘with’ and the stem passio ‘suffering, obtaining the calque compassio, which therefore became the Latin word for ‘sympathy.’ Centuries later the Germans in turn calqued the Latin word into German by using their preposition mit ‘with’ and the noun Leid ‘grief’, obtaining Mitleid, the German word for ‘sympathy’ or ‘compassion.’


p. 219-222. [Problems in identifying genetic resemblances-- borrowing]
[Urdu, Swahili, Turkish, Arabic similarities-- due to prestige of Arabic] In this case , the borrowing took place in historical times, and it is trivial matter to identify these numerous loan words and to exclude them from consideration. But loan words are not always so easy to identify. There is no reason to doubt that the borrowing of words has been going on for as long as human beings have had two different languages to speak. Hence, some loan words have been present in the borrowing languages so long that they are almost indistinguishable from native words. Identifying such ancient loans is thus a crucial issue: if we inadvertently accept several dozen ancient loans as native words, we may be fatally misled into seeing a genetic link where none exists.
p. 220. The best way of coping with this problem, when searching for possible genetic links, is to confine ourselves to what I called basic vocabulary in Chapter 2: pronouns, grammatical words, body-part names, the lower numerals, and other high frequency items which are not often borrowed, while words like ‘news’, ‘book’, and ‘service’ are far more likely to be borrowed. Hence, if we can’t find any evidence of a genetic link when comparing the basic vocabularies of two candidate languages, we should be rather suspicious if we then stumble across apparent ‘cognates’ with meanings like ‘chariot’, ‘caterpillar’, ‘stocking’, or ‘bronze’: they might very well be ancient loans.
There is another potential pitfall, which looks innocuous at first glance. But which has in practice often produced monumental confusion among linguists who were not sufficiently aware. ... Table 8.13

Hawaiian ancient Greek
aeto ‘eagle’ aetos ‘eagle’
noonoo ‘thought’ nous ‘thought’
manao ‘think’ manthano ‘learn’
mele "sing’ melos ‘melody’
lahui ‘people’ laos ‘people’
meli ‘honey’ meli ‘honey’
kau ‘summer’ kauma ‘heat’
mahina ‘month’ men ‘moon’
kia ‘pillar’ kion ‘pillar’
hiki ‘come’ hikano ‘arrive’
...
The explanation is this: we are looking at a bunch of pure coincidences. Entirely by chance, Hawaiian and Greek happen to have settled on some words which are very similar in form and meaning. That’s all there is to it: no Greeks in the Pacific, no Hawaiian migrations from Greece, nothing interesting at all- just pure chance. It is possible that you find this very hard to believe. Many people with little experience in comparative linguistics are incredulous when they are told that such impressive-looking lists are the result of sheer coincidence; they protest indignantly, ‘But this just can’t be coincidence. Look at the words for “honey” they are absolutely identical! There must be another explanation.’ ....
Well, sorry, but they are wrong. Every language has thousands of meanings to provide forms for , and only a small number of speech-sounds to construct these forms, and hence, by the ordinary laws of probability, any arbitrary languages will always exhibit a number of such coincidences-- maybe only eight or ten, maybe dozens, depending chiefly on how similar their phonologies are and how willing you are to accept some pair of words as similar.
...
There are two things you can do. First, we can insist on systematic correspondences and deny the value of mere resemblances. This is what most historical linguists do: aware that mere resemblances can always be the result of chance, they assign full weight only to systematic correspondences, which (once loan words have been excluded) can result only from a genetic relationship. Second, we can apply statistical tests to our data.. To see whether we have anything more than we would expect by chance alone. Both of these are good policies. But, whatever we do, we must not allow ourselves to be persuaded that a mere list of arbitrary and unsystematic resemblances, however long, by itself constitutes persuasive evidence of anything. It is sad to report that a number of linguists have failed to grasp this elementary point and have as a result squandered their careers in collecting lists of resemblances among whichever languages have caught their eye (always with success, or course). They have proudly announced their ‘findings’ and declared them to be evidence of an ancient link between the languages they are looking at, and they are baffled and hurt when no one pays attention.
Bernard

If it were only about interpretation, it wouldn't be an issue. Ignoring evidence is a whole different matter.


Again, evidence. If you beleive there has been tampering of evidence, then present evidence of that tampering. Many claims have been rebutted by showing the flaws in the evidence. But claiming the evidence is false is not enough. You must show why.

If one shows you the 'why' and it does not coincide with your foundation of evidence , then it is wrong. Do you think that leaves much room for debate and/or education of the masses?

Its quite simple. First you discuss the evidence and get a consensus of what evidence is valid, then you extrapolate conclusions from the evidence accepted by both sides. Once you come to a conclusion, you can talk of that as settled territory, then yu address the controversial evidence using what is already settled.

Ahhhh!!! I see now! It's starting to make sense. you use of scientific theory is valid. However, I beleive the key issue is the logic. Logic implies that a+b=c. The error in that method of thinking is that history itself is not logical in nature. Therefor, history cannot be right or wrong. evidence is relative to one's expereince. i may view someone as a racist and you may not becuase of your relative expereince, which is completely different from mine.

Interpretation of history isn't. Written history is biased of course.
That's all we have unless you look at what our griots/storytellers have apssed down orally. No offense, but you don't seeem like the "lemme sit down and gain some knowledge" type of individual.

But as we study history as written in nature, we get a more accurate picture.

So what you're saying is that your information is based on genetic science/study as opposed to personal/individual theory?

It is only the interpretation that is biased.

Therefore peer review and double blinds and what not.

What not WHAT?? I do not understand

To make it as unbiased as possible. Still room for error, but at least much more accurate than a claim made without this process. Either the middle passage occured or it didn't. That it occured is a historical fact most anyone would not dispute based on the evidence. Some might dispute quantities based on the records. But the truth is out there. Some of it we will be able to verify, and some we will just have to assume.

Good synopsis, however once again, I hope that you are open enough to admit that the pendulum of evidence/interpretation swings both ways.


As for racism, it goes by the definition. You may debate if the definition truly applies, but if you can show the elements of the definition, it is racism. Benign, unintentional, antagonistic, whatever.. Still racism.

-sighs-

That's all we have unless you look at what our griots/storytellers have apssed down orally. No offense, but you don't seeem like the "lemme sit down and gain some knowledge" type of individual.