Theos-Talk Archives (January 2003 Message tt00220)

1-12-03 ANSWER TO STEVE STUBBS PART 1
 
Dear Steve,

Actually you ask good questions. The only reason I haven't answered 
your
other good letter (and letters by other folks) is that due to my 
health, my
productivity is very low, and since I receive so many emails and 
calls a
day, I am regrettably very behind in responding all of the time. 
Still I am
going to try to get to your other letter and to answer this one 
timely.

my comments are below at ///

----- Original Message -----
From: <stevestubbs@yahoo.com>
To: <Blavatskiana@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 10:24 AM
Subject: [Blavatskiana] Questions and comments on BAG's interesting 
posts


> Dear BAG:
>
> Many thanks for the interesting comments. I have some stupid
> questions for you.
>
> Even if the Vedas are 7000 years old as you say, which would make
> them about contemporaneous with the earliest manuscripts of the I
> CHING, what do you make of the fact that the human race is believed
> to have originated at least 50,000 years ago according to some
> reckonings, and as many as 2m years ago by others? If Vishnu is
> real, why did he wait so long to reveal himself?

/// The 7000 is someone's speculation, I generally don't like fixing 
earliest
dates for a particular version of something when there is so little
evidence. Here is my opinion.

/// The Vedas are the Rig, Sama, Atharva and Yajur Veda. Together 
these 4
Vedas, or books of knowledge (OIDA in Biblical Greek ! and YEDA in 
Hebrew !)
are the testimony of an ancient 'high' civilization. They evidence 
the
existence of people who had a complex theo-centric sacramental social 
order,
a monotheistic religious faith expressed in devotion to God and His 
Shakti /
Prakrti through a multiplicity of emanations, theophanies and 
incarnations,
a beautiful and sophisticated 'sacred' language (Vedic Sanskrit),
agriculture, time keeping, travel and trade, and all the other things 
that
make-up a 'high' civilization. Such a civilization does not really 
just
appear over night. However in the geological / archeological record 
the
sudden 'dawn' of high civilizations is one of the most perplexing 
facts.
However one is inclined to assign dates to an ancient text like the 
Rig
Veda, the 'oldest' of the Vedas, one must always keep in mind that 
whatever
is existing in the text is much older than the text itself. There 
are over
1000 hymns in the Rig Veda ! Many consider, based on linguistic 
and / or
astronomical evidence that some of these hymns are 5000 or more years 
old.
The 'oldest' hymn, based on current speculation of many scholars is 
the
Purusha Sukta. This hymn clearly describes that the cosmic 
manifestation,
including all the Devas, Arya Civilization and the Vedas Themselves, 
have
all been born from the Self-Sacrificed Body of God as Purusha Yupa 
Dhavaja.

/// Now there are two questions. The first, confining our inquiry to 
the
Sanskrit Text at hand, is why are we trying to date the civilization 
by
dating an extant text ? Which leads to the second question. Granted 
that
the civilization existed long before the preserved text that we have, 
should
we not look for evidence of things IN THE TEXT outside of the text, to
'date' the civilization ? The interdisciplinary way that I inquire 
is to
look at the text in the context of what is known about the society 
that
produced and preserved it. Then I look at that society in the 
context of
the natural world and other societies. Nothing can really be excised-
out
and studied 'separately' without losing significant meaning.  
Everything
must be approached in its context as much as possible, and studied in 
an
interdisciplinary manner to get the Whole, Big Picture as much as 
possible.
So, for example, what we can know from the 'separated' study of the 
Vedas
and I CHING is magnified many times over by a comparative study of 
these
ancient source-works. When we analyze the Earliest Chinese and Vedic
evidence of high civilization, we find very many striking 
parallels. These
are at the religio-cultural roots of 'both' civilizations. If we 
think of
the ARYAS as one race or language group, then we are faced with the 
problem
of the same religio-cultural factors appearing in two 'different' 
racial and
linguistic groups in the same time period. This forces us to 
postulate that
one group 'got it' from the other at some earlier time. While there 
are
many clear histories of innovation and diffusion in the human 
adventure, the
universalism of certain features of ancient civilizations should 
raise some
questions for us regarding ANY racist or ethno-centric assumptions 
about
'who had it first'. The farther back we go, the farther back the
connections go.

/// This is where we come to your excellent question

>"what do you make of the fact that the human race is believed to 
have
originated at least 50,000 years ago according to some
> reckonings, and as many as 2m years ago by others? If Vishnu is 
real, why
did he wait so long to reveal himself?

/// I have shown elsewhere that the worship of Vishnu as Purusha, the 
primal
Deity of the Rig Vedic Civilization, was the social-organizing 
impetus of
that civilization. For example high civilization in Egypt developed 
out of
the alliances of HERU-ASU worshiping Temple Communities, which grew 
into
city-state Nomes which were allied by their common faith. Whether we 
believe
in God as a Transcendent Being or some peoples' invention, we can use 
the
same scientific methodology when we are trying to determine what 
someone
else's beliefs and experiances were, and what these beliefs and 
experiances
impelled and compelled them to do or refrain from doing. So, taking 
a
scientific approach to the study of religion at the heart of 
civilizations,
let us consider whether God (or the Gods of various peoples) 
did 'wait'
until the recording of the extant Rig Veda or other roughly 'datable'
ancient texts to reveal Himself.

/// Sources

/// 'Super linguistics' or Linguistic archeology, physical 
archeology, genetic
studies, astronomy, even the study of diseases, zoology, climate and 
botany
etc. can contribute to our understanding of the global experience of
humankind, and humanity's relationship to the Divine (however 
defined). For
the simplist way to grasp what I am saying about the worship of 
Purusha and
Prakriti at the heart of human civilization, let us just consider two 
facts.
I have previously shown, and the new field of SuperLinguistics is
demonstrating more every day, that there are some word roots that are 
found
in language families previously thought to have been unrelated.   
What makes
these in-common word roots important is that they are not late 
borrowings
between the major linguistic groups, but are at the very ancient-most 
heart
of the different language families! Fact one is that this common
linguistic heritage MUST go back to before the geograpical isolation 
THAT
CREATED THE SEPARATED LINGUISTIC FAMILIIES ! Fact two is that the 
evidence
of these common roots parallels recent findings in genetic research.  
Thus
the diffusion of our ONE human race is attested to by both genetics, 
and
these few in-common word roots. Genetics tells the story of our 
spread,
archeology tells the story of our daily life, accomplishments and set-
backs
over time, and comparative linguistics tells the story of what we were
thinking about before and after we 'put it in writing'.

/// Where my unique contribution comes into this emerging picture is 
that in the
1960s while studying the Names of God Ess in the Bible and related 
regional
traditions, I observed that some of these in-common BIJA (Sanskrit for
'seed') Names of God Ess (Hebrew ISHISH = ISIS) were quite obviously 
there
in the earliest EXTANT Afro-Egyptian Sources, The Bible and West 
Semitic
Sources, and in the European Sources. Studying the etymology of 
Greek,
Latin and other European Deity Names and words, I understood the
relationship of these to the ancient Vedic Sanskrit. Thus from the 
start of
my studies, I was particularly interested in the connections between 
the
Afro-Egyptian, Sumero-Semitic and Indo-European language families.   
At the
core of these connections was MONOTHEISM, and it was quite obviously 
the
SAME MONOTHEISM !

/// In the current correlation of peoples and languages, 'genetic 
distance' is
spoken of, and in the science of Linguistic Superfamilies,
linguistic changes are traced over long periods of time in tiny 
increments
of change, analogous to the tiny increments of adaptive change in the
genetic record. Glottochronology projects linguistic changes back 
into prehistory. For example, in the below 
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/BeforeBabel.ht
m Proto-Nostratic is theorized as having been spoken about 15,000 
years ago. However the Nostratic Superfamily does NOT include the 
African NIGER-KORDOFANIAN or NILO-SAHARAN language families, which my 
research shows Nostratic connections to. The Niger-Kordofanian 
language group covers most of Central Africa. It includes the Bantu 
group, which Swahili, Zulu and Tswana are members of, and Niger-
Congo, of which Yoruba is a member. My own independent research has 
shown connections between the Supreme Deity's Names in these two 
major African Language Families, and those of the Afro-Asiatic 
Superfamily. Since the Afro-Asiatic Language Family is part of the 
postulated Nostratic Superfamily, WHEN I am proven correct in the 
connections I have been describing since the 1960s, we will then be 
ADMITTEDLY confronted with a primal tongue of humanity. Fortunately I 
do not have to fight the battle to establish my own 1960's 
discoveries as fact. The whole field of Super Linguistics is 
gradually creating the context for acceptance of 'my' discoveries.  
So it does not really matter in one since that I am unpublished and 
few people know about my work. What I have been saying from the 
1960s is being independently discovered more and more by others every 
day, and it is just a matter of time until the Whole Big Picture 
emerges with or without my input about Monotheism. IN TERMS OF TIME-
DEPTH, IF THE POSTULATED SUPER LINGUISTIC 'MOTHER TONGUE' INCLUDES 
ANY OF THE PRIMARY NAMES OF PURUSHA -PRAKRITI, WE ARE CONFRONTED WITH 
THE FACT THAT THIS ORIGINAL FATHER-MOTHER GOD ESS DID NOT 'WAIT' TO 
REVEAL HIM-HER SELF TO HUMANITY. How far back does Superlinguistics 
trace the diffusion and changes of language ? Well, the genetic 
studies are paralleling the Super Linguistics studies, so whenever 
the genetic time-distance indicates, that is where we can look for 
related linguistic evidence. The fact is that where ever we find 
communites of humans, and what ever we think about the time-frame of 
their presence in an area, both the gross physical and linguistic 
evidence shows that they were religious beings with social-order 
inspired by religious sentiments. The evidence shows that these 
ancient humans had a sense of origins and ancestry. They cared for 
their living AND THEIR DEAD. As a FATHER-MOTHER GOD ESS MONOTHEISM 
is and was common in African Tribal traditions, it was also common in 
these other ancient civilizations. The genealogogy of the Monotheism 
of the Adi (Former, Original) Purusha and Prakriti therefore is as 
old as humankind itself.  
 
/// Clearly Vishnu and Shakti did not wait until the Rig Veda to 
reveal Themselves to Their children. They have been with their 
children all along. Thus the Supreme Father God of the Niger-
Kordofanian Language Family is OLU, Who is clearly the Predynastic 
Egyptian Supreme Deity HERU, Who is none-other than the Semite's ELI, 
the Indo-Europeans HELI / SOLE / SURA or HARI and the Sumerians ILU.  
 
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REFERENCES SECTION 
 
THE NIGER-KORDOFANIAN LANGUAGE FAMILY
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0856502.html
Niger-Kordofanian
The Niger-Kordofanian family has two branches, Niger-Congo and 
Kordofanian. The Kordofanian tongues are spoken in Sudan and form 
five small groups (Koalib, Tegali, Talodi, Tumtum, and Katla). Niger-
Congo is an enormous branch whose languages are found throughout S 
and central Africa and in most of W Africa below the Sahara. It is 
generally subdivided into six groups: West Atlantic; Mande; Gur, or 
Voltaic; Kwa; Benue-Congo; and Adamawa-Eastern.

The West Atlantic branch includes many languages, among them Wolof 
(in Senegal), Temne (in Sierra Leone), and Fulani, the tongue of 
several million people inhabiting an area from Senegal to a region E 
of Lake Chad. The Mande group consists of languages prevalent in the 
Niger valley, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, such as Mende in Liberia and 
Malinke in Mali. Gur, or Voltaic, is made up of several language 
groups and includes Mossi, the dominant tongue of Burkina Faso, as 
well as the Dagomba and Mamprusi of N Ghana. The Kwa languages, 
spoken chiefly in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Nigeria, and Liberia, 
include Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo, Nupe, Bini, Ashanti, and possibly Ijo 
(which is sometimes considered a separate branch). Benue-Congo 
includes the huge Bantu group of hundreds of tongues found throughout 
central and S Africa (see Bantu languages), as well as such non-Bantu 
languages as Tiv, Jukun, and Efik, which are spoken in Nigeria and 
Cameroon. The Adamawa-Eastern branch, to which Banda, Zande, and 
Sango belong, is composed of a number of languages spoken in Nigeria, 
Cameroon, and an area north of the Bantu territory to Sudan.

A characteristic feature of most of the Niger-Congo languages is the 
use of tones. Case inflection is entirely lacking, and gender marking 
is almost unknown in the Niger-Congo family. The verb root tends to 
remain unchanged; moods and tenses are denoted either by particles or 
by auxiliary verbs. For example, in a number of languages the 
infinitival is the auxiliary designating the future. Typical of the 
Niger-Kordofanian stock as a whole is the division of nouns, which 
has been compared to the gender system of the Indo-European tongues. 
However, Indo-European features only three classifications 
(masculine, feminine, and neuter), whereas some of the Niger-
Kordofanian languages have as many as 20 noun classes. One class, for 
example, designates human beings, another is used for liquids, and a 
third class is used for animals. Each class has its own pair of 
affixes to indicate the singular and the plural.

 
THE NILO-SAHARAN LANGUAGE FAMILY
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0856503.html
Nilo-Saharan
The Nilo-Saharan language stock has six branches: Songhai (spoken in 
Mali), Saharan (including languages spoken both near Lake Chad, as in 
Kanuri, and in central Sahara), Maban (a group of tongues found E of 
Lake Chad), Furian (comprising only Fur, an important language of 
Sudan), Koman (a group of languages of Ethiopia and Sudan), and Chari-
Nile, the principal branch of Nilo-Saharan, composed of the Eastern 
Sudanic languages, the Central Sudanic languages, and two additional 
tongues, Kunama and Berta; the Chari-Nile tongues are spoken in 
Sudan, Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African 
Republic, Kenya, mainland Tanzania, and Ethiopia. The Eastern Sudanic 
subdivision of Chari-Nile itself has ten branches, the two most 
important of which are Nubian and Nilotic, both found in Sudan. 
Nubian is unique among modern African languages in that it has 
written texts of the medieval period. The Nilotic tongues include 
Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, Masai, Turkana, Nandi, and Suk. The Central 
Sudanic subdivision of Chari-Nile consists of a number of languages, 
among them Mangbetu, spoken in Congo (Kinshasa), and Efe, used by the 
pygmies. Like the Niger-Congo languages, most of the Nilo-Saharan 
languages use tones; some Nilo-Saharan tongues inflect their nouns 
according to case, and still others have gender. The verb in many 
Nilo-Saharan languages has a system of verb derivation.

 
DO THE NIGER-K. AND NILO-S. FAMILIES HAVE A COMMON HERITAGE ?
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0802671.html
 
Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan are two large families of 
languages spoken exclusively in Africa. These languages are spoken in 
all parts of the continent, from the extreme south up to the 
territory of the Hamito-Semitic languages of N Africa. The Hamito-
Semitic, or Afroasiatic, family is also spoken in the Middle East. 
Some authorities believe that the languages spoken in the Niger-
Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan families are sufficiently similar to 
suggest that both stocks had the same ancestor language.
 
 
 
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A GLIMPSE INTO THE DISCUSSION OF AFRICAN AND AFRO-ASIATIC LANGUAGE 
GROUP CONNECTIONS
 
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-59.html
LINGUIST List 14.59, Thu Jan 9 2003, Qs: Ebonics/Writing Instruction, 
Afro-Asiatic Query
Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karen@linguistlist.org> 
 
************EDITED FOR BREVITY IN THIS POST*****************
 
2. pauline, Afro-Asiatic Question 

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Message 2: Afro-Asiatic Question
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 14:39:40 -0500
From: pauline <annf@videotron.ca>
Subject: Afro-Asiatic Question

Hi 

I'm a linguistics student at McGill University in Montreal. I've just
finished reading Theophile Obenga's Essay "Genetic Linguistic
Connections: Ancient Egypt and Black Africa." I have to admit that the
argument he puts forward for an African phylum including
Niger-Kordofanian, Egyptian-Coptic, Nilo-Saharan, Cushitic, Chadic,
seems very compelling. Are there any flaws with his method and if not
why are hasn't the linguistics community accepted this classification?
Is it possible that these correspondences are simply coincidental
given the immense number of languages in Africa? Are there any books
that deal with this issue? I have read that Obenga published a larger
work detailing linguistic similarities, is this credible (Origine
commune de l'egyptain ancien, du copte et des langues negro-africaines
modernes)? Examples of his writing can be seen at
http://www.ankhonline.com/langue1.htm

A few examples from the essay:

Words for "Name"


African super-phylum Indo-European  

Ancient Egyptian: rn Latin: nomen  

coptic: ran, ren, lan. Sanskrit: nama  

shilluk: rin Avestic: nama  

galke: rin Gothic: namo  

pormi: rin Hittite: laman  

ngumi: rin Welsh: enw  

panjama: rin Ancient: Irish ainm  

mbe: len  

bantu: rina, lina, dina,

fante: dzin

Asante: din



Semetic

Akkadian: sumu, shumu

Ugaritic: sem, shem

Hebrew: sem, shem

Aramaic: sum, shum

Ethiopian: sem (he doesn't say if it's Geez or Amharic)

Arabic: ism

ECT

Using this evidence he comes at three distinct families

Indo European: name, nom, nama, namo ect

African: ran, lan, rin, din, dina

Semetic: sem, suma, shuma, ism


Some other examples are "sun"

African:ra, re, arriso, ayro, orr'ah, ra, ra, ra

Indo-European: sun, soleil, sura, sauil, sol, sonne, helios, haul

Semetic: samas, shamash, sps, semes, sams


"Earth, country, region"

Semitic: ersetu, ars, eres, ara, ard, ardh,

African: ta, to, to, u-to, si, thau

I've also read in an article by Ilya Yakubovich that the Afro-Asiatic
languages with the exception of Semitic cannot be connected to
Nostratic, how does this relate to Obenga's claim that Semitic is a
separate linguistic family?
(http://popgen.well.ox.ac.uk/eurasia/htdocs/nostratic.html).

Given the level of interaction between groups in North Africa and the
Middle East is it possible that similarities between Afro-Asiatic are
simply the result of borrowing? I've also read that Semitic has been
connected to Indo-European and also that Semitic is connected to
Afro-Asiatic, but that it is difficult to connect Afro-Asiatic to
Indo-European
(http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-1998.4/msg00124.html),
does this support the idea of borrowing between Afro-Asiatic
languages? Is it possible to connect Semitic to languages in the
Chadic or Omotic family which are geographically separate from
Semitic? I've heard that the Northern Afro-Asiatic languages (Berber,
Egyptian, Semitic) form a group separate from other Afro-Asiatic
languages, how does this impact on he idea of borrowing?
(www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/NACAL_1997.html) Perhaps the
similarities between these languages are the result of their being
adjacent and not their being derived from a common Proto-Afro-Asiatic
ancestor. I've also heard that some linguist such as Gerhard Doerfer
reject completely the idea that Afro-Asiatic as a valid family
(http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-1998.4/msg00124.html).
Could it be that Afro-Asiatic is simply too distant in the past (15,
000 years www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/NACAL_1997.html) much,
much older that Indo-European? Could it be that this language family
is more akin to a super or macro family such as Nostratic? Indeed I've
read that "Afro-Asiatic could well be a group comparable to the rest
of Nostratic and to Sino-Caucasian"
(www.webcom.com/petrich/writings/NostraticRefs.txt). I've also read
that Niger-Congo could very well by related to Nilo-Saharan in a
super-family called Niger-Saharan or Congo-Saharan
(http://web.syr.edu/~mdlattim/e_dox/africa/lang_African.html). This
idea has been championed by Gregerson (1977 Language in Africa )and
more recently by Roger Blench (The Niger-Saharan hypothesis III:
further evidence and the issue of verbal extension). How does this
impact on Obenga's thesis that some languages classified as
Afro-Asiatic (Chadic, Cushitic; both interestingly tone languages much
like other African languages) are related to other African Languages?
It also seems that Greenberg in his Afro-Asiatic chapter in "Languages
of Africa" attempts to link the so called Nilo-Hamitic (Maasai)
languages with the so called Hamitic (Somali) languages into a larger
family. How does this relate to Obenga's thesis?

Thanks for your response          
Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home 
page|Top of issue 
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HERE IS ONE ONLINE SOURCE FOR YOUR LINGUISTIC QUESTIONS 
"ASK A LINGUIST"
http://linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/index.html
 
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I SUGGEST THAT YOU DO AN INTERNET SEARCH FOR THE TERMS MACRO 
LINGUISTICS, MACRO FAMILIES, SUPER FAMILIES, Glottochronology, 
lexicostatistics, correspondencies, NOSTRATIC SUPERFAMILY, EURASIATIC 
SUPERFAMILY and AUSTRIC SUPERFAMILY. 
 
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HERE IS A SUMMARY OF THE CURRENT DEBATE FROM A RATHER SKEPTICAL-
SOUNDING LINGUIST
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/BeforeBabel.ht
m
 
Notes to the film "Before Babel"

Linguists today hotly debate the issue of linguistic 
monogenesis vs. polygenesis. How can this question be settled? The 
scientific way to study language origin is to uncover systematic 
differences and similarities between living languages or between 
languages written down in the past. This method is known as the 
comparative method, and began in 1787 when Sir William Jones put 
forward his Indo-European hypothesis by declaring that most languages 
of Europe, Iran, and India must have "sprung from some common 
source." Linguists using the comparative method (comparativists) 
which Jones helped develop belong to the school of comparative, or 
genetic, linguistics. The task of proposing genetic relationships 
between living languages has yielded concrete scientific results 
(everyone today concurs with the Jones's Indo-European hypothesis) as 
well as much quasi-scientific speculation. Some languages are 
obviously related to one another, as shown by the presence of 
systematic differences: English and German, Swahili and Zulu. Hebrew 
and Arabic. Hawaiian and Maori. No one would dispute that each of 
these pairs "sprung" from a common proto language and thus 
genetically related through descent from a common ancestor.  
Sometimes evidence for such a genetic relationship is questionable, 
as in the case for Japanese, Korean and Mongolian. Similarities 
between such languages, for instance, might be due to undocumented, 
prehistoric language mixing. Linguists who focus on the importance 
of language mixing in historical linguistics are called creolists.  
Finally, many languages seem completely unrelated: Navaho, English, 
Swahili.  

When comparativists discover that a group of languages descends 
from a common ancestor, they try to reconstruct the original form of 
that language, which they call a proto language. Obviously, there is 
no way to check such results conclusively, and historical linguistic 
reconstruction is necessarily a highly speculative endeavor. 
Comparative linguists today debate whether or not certain languages 
should be grouped together into families. In this regard, linguists 
are either lumpers or splitters. Lumpers (notably Stanford's Joseph 
Greenberg -the old guy with the New York accent and lots of 
notebooks - and Merritt Ruhlen - the young, enthusiastic guy standing 
under the tree) have narrowed the number of proto-languages to about 
two dozen (see your copy of Ruhlen's map and my comments to it).  
Note that there are a few languages that do not fit into any family.  
These are the language isolates and include Basque (in Spain), Ket 
(in Siberia), and Burushaski (in Northern India), which are probably 
fossil remnants of formerly large families spoken in prehistoric 
Eurasia (before farming and animal husbandry gave certain linguistic 
groups a demographic edge over others). Splitters (such as Donald 
Ringe, the young, serious linguist from the U. of Pennsylvania) are 
much more cautious in drawing conclusions about genetic 
relationships. A splitters' map of the Americas, Australia, and New 
Guinea would contain dozens of families rather than a few.

Since the 1960's there have appeared linguists who might be 
called super lumpers. Besides Ruhlen and Greenberg, these include 
the Russians Aharon Dolgopolsky, now in Israel (the guy with the 
sloppy library); Vitaly Shevoroshkin, now at Michigan (the tall, 
white-haired gentleman); and their late mentor Vladislav Illich-
Svitich (who was killed when he walked in front of a car). These 
linguists developed the Nostratic theory in Moscow in the 1960's, 
which claims that most languages of Europe, North Africa, and North 
Asia are related to a single mother tongue called proto-Nostratic, 
spoken perhaps 15 thousand years ago. Some lumpers are convinced that 
they will eventually reconstruct not only Nostratic, but even proto-
world, the putative original human Mother Tongue. Their findings 
have been criticized by most linguists for consisting of too little 
data and too much speculation. This most recent theory of 
monogenesis, the proto-world theory, has evolutionary rather than 
religious origins. Greenberg's hypothesis holds that the original 
language developed in Africa among early Homo sapiens. As Homo 
sapiens spread across the world, they took their language with them.  
That single language diverged over time into several thousand very 
diverse forms. Recent evidence from molecular genetics (Luigi Cavalli-
Sforza) strengthens the hypothesis of language superfamilies. 

So far no one has found conclusive proof that all human 
languages are descended from a common source. And even if the 
lumpers find a way to prove the existence of the "Mother Tongue," the 
most interesting questions will still require answers: precisely how 
did languages diverge and later mix during the thousands of years 
that Homo sapiens have lived on the planet? 

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SOME SEARCH REFERENCES TO "NOSTRATIC SUPERFAMILY" TO GET YOU STARTED
 
   
     
Advanced Search Preferences Language Tools Search Tips  
  
  
Web Images Groups Directory News-New!   
Searched the web for "NOSTRATIC SUPERFAMILY". Results 1 - 10 of 
about 25. Search took 0.11 seconds. 
 

Sponsored Links  
Indo-European & Nostratic
Books and Monographs on I-E and
possible links to other languages
www.jies.org
Interest:  
 
 
See your message here... 
shamash.org/listarchives/mail-jewish/volume15/v15n25
... in v15n12, in which he speculates that the gene allowing adult 
humans to digest
lactose may have spread together with the Nostratic superfamily of 
languages. ... 
15k - Cached - Similar pages 

Georgian: An Outline Grammar
... More speculative hypotheses include the Kartvelian languages in 
the Nostratic 'superfamily',
while the other groups have been assigned to the Sino-Caucasian ... 
www.armazi.demon.co.uk/georgian/grammar1.html - 44k - Cached - 
Similar pages 

Scientist at Work: What We All Spoke When the World Was Young
... His concept of Eurasiatic was derived independently but overlaps 
with the proposed
Nostratic superfamily, the theory of which has been developed in the 
last 30 ... 
www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/ archaeo-language.html - 17k - 
Cached - Similar pages 

LSU Libraries: Linguistics Listservs
... NOSTRATIC. Discussion of the Nostratic superfamily of languages, 
of similar
language groupings, and of the methods used in their 
reconstruction. ... 
www.lib.lsu.edu/soc/ling/list.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages 

[PDF]On The Classification Of Indic Languages
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... The characterization of the Nostratic superfamily is based on the 
as- sumption
that the relationship was defined at the pre-expansion phase. ... 
www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/indic.pdf - Similar pages 

[PDF]Score: _______ out of 40 LINGUISTICS 1: ASSIGNMENT 6
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... Pinker, p. 258 ff.] (d) Which, if any, of the three families in 
the data table of
question IV have some linguists claimed belong to the 
Nostratic "Superfamily ... 
www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/gunlogson/assign6.pdf - Similar pages 

Glottochronology, lexicostatistics, correspondencies...
... natural that the Amerindian languages are much harder to deal 
with (as far as these
methods are concerned) as well as that the Nostratic superfamily is 
much ... 
www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/ msg02124.html - 
6k - Cached - Similar pages 

Re: Glottochronology, lexicostatistics, correspondencies...
... that the Amerindian languages are much > harder to deal with (as 
far as these methods
are concerned) as well as > that the Nostratic superfamily is much 
easier ... 
www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/ msg02134.html - 
8k - Cached - Similar pages 

Classical genetic variation in Asia
... family of which there remain the traces just mentioned, later 
largely replaced
by the expansion of familes belonging mostly to the Nostratic 
superfamily. ... 
popgen.well.ox.ac.uk/eurasia/htdocs/cavalli.html - 6k - Cached - 
Similar pages 

[PDF]LINGUISTICS 1: ASSIGNMENT 5
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... (d) Of the three families in the data table of question #5, which 
one(s),
if any, have some linguists claim belong to the 
Nostratic "Superfamily"? ... 
www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/ 
schuh/lx001/PDF_files/F02_Assig_05.pdf - Similar pages 



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>From Library Journal
Though more readable than Voegelin and Voegelin's Classification and 
Index
of the World's Languages (Elsevier, 1977), this also will probably 
find its
primary use as a reference tool. Ruhlen offers some advantages over
Voegelin. He includes data discovered since 1977. He employs a tabular
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HERE IS A REVIEW OF A BOOK OF ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING AND 
CONTROVERSIAL AUTHORS IN THE FIELD OF SUPERLINGUISTICS. HE HAS BEEN 
DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED BY THE OLD-SCHOOL ARYANISTS WHO CANNOT STAND 
THE ASSERTION THAT ANY 'INDO-ARYAN' WORDS ARE DEEPLY RELATED TO WORDS 
FROM THE AFRO-EGYPTIAN OR SEMITIC LANGUAGE GROUPS. THE EARLY 
ARYANISTS WANTED ANY SIMILARITIES TO BE THE RESULT OF LATE BORROWINGS 
BY THE INFERIOR RACES FROM THE SUPERIOR ARYANS. THE ORIGINAL MODERN 
LINGUISTIC 'HELLENO-SEMITICIST', CYRUS GORDON, WAS VICIOUSLY 
PERSECUTED BY THE ARYANISTS FOR DARING TO COMPARE GREEK AND SEMITIC 
LANGUAGES. I ALSO WAS ACADEMICALLY DAMNED FOR DOING IT. NOW THE 
SUPERLINGUISTS, AND AFRO-ASIATIC LANGUAGE SCHOLARS ARE DOING IT ALL 
THE TIME. 

The Origin of Language : Tracing the Evolution of the Mother 
Tongue

by Merritt Ruhlen

Paperback - 239 pages (August 1996)
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471159638 ; Dimensions (in inches): 
0.69 x
9.17 x 6.14
Other Editions: Hardcover

Reviews
Amazon.com
As a sophomore in college, I desperately wanted to major in
theoretical linguistics, but I knew only three languages, and I was 
advised
that this was insufficient for the major. Things might have been 
different
if this book were available then: unlike most books about language
evolution, Ruhlen's Origin of Language actually gets you involved in
applying standard linguistic techniques to carefully chosen examples--
by the
end of the book, you will have constructed a family tree of the 
world's
languages. And you needn't know any other than your mother tongue 
when you
start, but you'll probably want to go out and learn several more 
languages
by time you are done. Recommended.
>From Booklist , May 1, 1994
Believing that doing is learning, Ruhlen encourages his readers 
to try
their hand (and eye) at classifying languages. This exercise helps us
appreciate the challenges inherent in the fascinating and 
controversial
science of comparative linguistics. The theory behind this discipline 
states
that languages evolve, travel, and interrelate. Working backward in 
time and
history, Ruhlen describes the family of languages most familiar to his
audience, the Indo-European, but soon has us scanning lists of words 
from a
selection of African, Asian, and Native American tongues. Just as in a
family tree, genetic linguistics links daughters to mothers to 
grandmothers,
all the way back to prehistoric ancestors. At each crucial juncture, 
Ruhlen
summarizes the pioneering work of linguists Sir William Jones, Joseph
Greenberg, and Edward Sapir, each of whom discovered a protofamily at 
the
root of hundreds of languages worldwide. The story of why these 
revelations
were met with such resistance and resentment is a study in prejudice 
and
close-mindedness. Ruhlen confidently concludes with a convincing 
argument
for a common origin of all extant languages, whether that offends our
cultural pride or not. Donna Seaman
Copyright© 1994, American Library Association. All rights
reserved --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

>From Kirkus Reviews , March 15, 1994
A world-class linguist demonstrates similarities among the 
globe's
5,000 languages to argue the case for a single, unifying Mother 
Tongue.
Ruhlen (A Guide to the World's Languages, not reviewed) lets the lay 
reader
share in the thrill of discovery with his hands-on lessons in 
classifying
languages and reconstructing hypothetical proto-languages. A Stanford
prot,g, of controversial language- classification giant Joseph H. 
Greenberg
(cited in the ample bibliography), the author aggressively takes on 
academic
opponents who disdain comparative vocabulary studies in favor of 
regular
sound correspondences in the establishment of language families. 
After the
reader finds the cognate patterns among (unlabeled) words from 
different
languages in a given table, the author lets us know that our findings 
would
be rejected by the Indo-Europeanists who deny that Aryans have any
linguistic relatives (read: No people of color need apply). With the 
help of
global genetic studies, these old white racist farts are shown to be
perpetuating ``one of the great hoaxes of twentieth-century 
science.'' While
many of us can cheer that ``it's a small world after all,'' Ruhlen 
has his
own tilt towards a pan-racial homeland in Africa. He thus parts with 
the
well-publicized founders of Nostratic, the language superfamily that 
points
to an origin in the Near East, where both the Bible (never mentioned 
here)
and archaeology place the oldest talking humans. The reader does not 
get to
hear or test theories on the whys and hows of linguistic diversity, 
but from
Ruhlen's word tables, language trees, and maps there emerges a well-
argued
thesis against the Eurocentrists and for a monogenesis of language. A
courageous, eloquent book of great significance to all who care about 
where
we came from. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

Anthropological Science
A powerful statement [and] also a wonderfully clear exposition 
of
linguistic thinking about prehistory...[Q]uite solid and very well
presented.

Book Description
Ruhlen is a leader in the new attempt to unify the theory of 
language
development and diffusion.--Library Journal "A powerful 
statement...also a
wonderfully clear exposition of linguistic thinking about
prehistory."--Anthropological Science One of the world's foremost 
language
researchers takes readers step-by-step through the hotly contested 
evidence
that all modern languages derive from one "mother tongue" once spoken 
by
primitive humans in Africa. With The Origin of Language, Merritt 
Ruhlen
makes this fascinating science accessible to readers with no 
linguistic
background. MERRITT RUHLEN, PhD (Palo Alto, California) is the author 
of A
Guide to the World's Languages

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