From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1998 #325 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Tuesday, November 24 1998 Volume 1998 : Number 325 ane Mashriqian ane Historical Linguistics ane RENCONTRE ASSYRIOLOGIQUE 1999 CANCELLED Re: ane Mashriqian ane Re: Historical Linguistics ane Historical atlas ane Proto-"Semitic"? Re: ane Historical linguistics and "genetic" relationships Re: ane Re: Historical Linguistics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 16:20:23 +0200 From: Naccache Subject: ane Mashriqian On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Peter T. Daniels wrote: > >"ANE" of course reflects the European viewpoint of the founders of >"Orient"al studies; in view of the Said argument, it seems odd for an >Arab scholar to advocate returning to "Oriental" translated into Arabic. My proposal to name the group of linguistic instances known as "Semitic" under the name "Mashriqian" is advanced in order to align it with the general movement in linguistics to name "family" or "stock" according to the name of the area where they are/were being used, and not by the ethnic name of some people who spoke them at some point. "Mashreq/Mashriq" is the name given by the local Arab inhabitants to their part of the Arab World (From the Gulf to the Ocean), as opposed to the African part, the "Maghreb". So it is the name of the place in the majority language of the inhabitant of the place. Furthermore, there are no "Western" name used consistently for that area (the Arabian Peninsula and the "Fertile Crescent"). Therefore it is the most appropriate denomination to use. It has nothing to do with Said's argument. It is a geographical term. Sincerely, Albert Naccache Beirut, Lebanon anaccash@nidal.com p.s.: Still working on my answer to R. Ratcliffe. Thanking very much R. Whiting for his masterly presentation. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 08:21:10 -0800 From: Louise Hitchcock Subject: ane Historical Linguistics I teach Linguistic Anthropology. It is considered one of the 4 fields of anthropology (the others being, Cultural Anth, Physical Anth, and Archaeology). Linguistic Anthropology actively distinguishes Historical Linguistics from other forms of linguistic study. Good introductions include: Language, Culture, and Society by Z. Salzmann and more recently, Linguistic Anthropology by A. Duranti Louise Dr. Louise A. Hitchcock Research Associate, Institute of Archaeology, UCLA - ---------------------------------------- Research Associate, Near Eastern Studies Center, UCLA - ---------------------------------------- Dept. of Anthropology, CSU Dominguez Hills ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 11:23:50 -0600 From: "Charles E. Jones" Subject: ane RENCONTRE ASSYRIOLOGIQUE 1999 CANCELLED Forwarded on behalf of the undersigned, to whom responses and inquiries should be directed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx RENCONTRE ASSYRIOLOGIQUE 1999 (NAPLES) CANCELLED In the course of October the organizers of the 46e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, to be held in Naples in July 1999, have informed the International Steering Committee that they are unable to realize their plans due to logistic problems. "Among other things, this is mainly due to a massive overlapping of various major public events (first of which the 200 years' celebration of the 1799 Neapolitan revolution)," that have almost entirely exhausted the availability of adequate hotel accommodations. The Steering Committee, after consultation, has approached a number of assyriologists and institutions in different university cities in Europe and Canada, but none of them was able to take over the burden of organization at such short notice. The Committee now has decided, with much regret, that in 1999 no Rencontre Assyriologique will take place. The next one will convene in Paris, in July 2000. The Steering Committee is planning to meet between now and spring 1999 to consider the organization and nature of future Rencontres (those of 2001 and 2003 already have been assigned, to Helsinki and London respectively), taking into account also the fact that there now exists a biannual International Congress of Near Eastern Archaeology. Leiden, 24-XI-1998 For the Steering Committee Klaas R. Veenhof Institute of Assyriology, Secretary Leiden University POB 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail Veenhof@Rullet.LeidenUniv.NL ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:45:44 -0500 From: "Peter T. Daniels" Subject: Re: ane Mashriqian Naccache wrote: > > On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Peter T. Daniels wrote: > > > >"ANE" of course reflects the European viewpoint of the founders of > >"Orient"al studies; in view of the Said argument, it seems odd for an > >Arab scholar to advocate returning to "Oriental" translated into Arabic. > > My proposal to name the group of linguistic instances known as "Semitic" > under the name "Mashriqian" is advanced in order to align it with the > general movement in linguistics to name "family" or "stock" according to > the name of the area where they are/were being used, and not by the ethnic > name of some people who spoke them at some point. Actually there is a trend toward using river names, esp. for naming larger groupings that don't have indigenous terms. > "Mashreq/Mashriq" is the name given by the local Arab inhabitants to their > part of the Arab World (From the Gulf to the Ocean), as opposed to the > African part, the "Maghreb". So it is the name of the place in the > majority language of the inhabitant of the place. Furthermore, there are > no "Western" name used consistently for that area (the Arabian Peninsula > and the "Fertile Crescent"). Therefore it is the most appropriate > denomination to use. That would seem to make it a rather chauvinistic name, since not only Arabic-speakers, but also Aramaic-, Ethiopic-, and (revived) Hebrew-speakers' traditions ought to be taken into account! > It has nothing to do with Said's argument. It is a geographical term. It's a *relative* geographic term. Why would one want to name a whole language family using the name that speakers of one branch of it use for half (or so) of their territory? - -- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:59:19 -0500 From: "Peter T. Daniels" Subject: ane Re: Historical Linguistics Louise Hitchcock wrote: > > I teach Linguistic Anthropology. It is considered one of the 4 fields of > anthropology (the others being, Cultural Anth, Physical Anth, and > Archaeology). Linguistic Anthropology actively distinguishes Historical > Linguistics from other forms of linguistic study. > > Good introductions include: > Language, Culture, and Society by Z. Salzmann > > and more recently, Linguistic Anthropology by A. Duranti The question concerned distinguishing historical linguistics, which is the study of attested older/ancient languages, from comparative linguistics, which is the study of the histories of languages and the reconstruction of earlier stages in the absence of earlier attestation. Does the linguistic anthropologist then say it is impossible to do historical linguistics on the languages of Papua New Guinea? I think not! I think the distinction Bob seemed to imply in his posting is peculiar to a very small subset of the language sciences, and I'm trying to discover what that subset is. - -- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:39:57 -0500 From: "Peter T. Daniels" Subject: ane Historical atlas It looks like the Vidal-Naquet atlas *is* the Harper Atlas of World History (amazon.com says it's OP, but I do have one). Vidal-Naquet is listed quite a few times, in disparate areas. - -- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 21:38:48 -0500 From: NYOKABI@kingcon.com Subject: ane Proto-"Semitic"? On Nov 22 P Daniels wrote >NYOKABI@KINGCON.COM wrote: > >> A little odd to quarrel about the use of the term "east" >> on a list titled the "Ancient Near East" (east of where?)! >> I would think Mashriqian could simply be understood as >> Eastern Afro-Asiatic. > [P.D.] >But that would be wrong. It would seem to revive the false >distinction between Semitic and "Hamitic," which referred to >Egyptian/Berber/Chadic/Cushitic/Omotic, which, however, is >not a legitimate linguistic grouping. > I never suggested that the whole of the rest of Afro-Asiatic would be a unit in opposition to Mashriqian or Eastern Afro- Asiatic. I am simply suggesting that Mashriqian is no different than calling the various branches of Kushitic Eastern Kushitic, Southern Kushitic, or Central Sudanic, Eastern Sudanic, Northern Sudanic,etc. If we were to do this with Afro-Asiatic, we could call Berber NW Af-As, Chadic, SW Af- As, Kushitic, SE Af-As, Semitic E Af-As, Egyptian C.Af-As, Omotic, South Central Af-As... I am not advocating this, I just don't think Naccache's suggestion of a label based on general geographic location in relation to the other branches of the family is to be so easily dismissed. The real point is that just as we have junked Hamitic, we really should junk Semitic because it is almost as laden with historical confusion and irrational connotations as was the other. Who created the idea that there was some larger [racial? linguistic? cultural?] grouping called Ham to which both Egyptians and Canaanites and sundry others belonged? Was it not some people who considered themselves of the seed of Shem, and superior to those of Ham? That they themselves, having perhaps lost their ancestral tongue of Shem, now spoke a language of Canaan, of Ham, is irrelevant. It is as if the fact that black African-Americans now speak English, and not Yoruba or KiKongo, obliterates the antagonistic polarity based on the historical experiences involving race. I think it was Tabari who expressed what the ancients meant by Shem most crudely: he said all fair-faced peoples, such as the Arabs and Persians,all people of property, sages and savants, are descended from the race of Shem. Ham and Japheth were punished [another version says "are deformed"?]. That we should have taken this ancient racial/ethnic polarity and have tried to turn it into linguistic labels was obviously a disaster from day one. Getting rid of "Hamitic" is only the first step. [PD quoting EA:] >> The problem with the label "Semitic" in relation to the >> biblical narratives is that it may have been placed on >> the wrong family of languages.[Was it Schmolzer, Schlozer? >>who made this fatal choice of names in 1871? [PD]: >Schlözer, 1781. I've no idea what these whole two paragraphs >are about.Is it simply saying that the Genesis 10 genealogies >don't reflect historical reality as reconstructed? Well, sure, >so what? No that's not what it's about.In the first place I don't regard what we have reconstructed as reflecting historical reality in any sense that Genesis 10 does not. In other words we are one age, they were another. We may have dug up more stuff, but they were closer in time. They knew what they meant by making family trees that we cannot yet unscramble. We could say six of one, half dozen of another, but I usually give the ancients a 60/40 edge, just to counteract our modernocentrism. In the second place my two paragraphs are about a discussion that went on in academic journals as to whether Schlozer [haven't figured out how to make oomlauts yet with this new software!] was mistaken in bestowing the name "Semitic" onto the language family to which Hebrew Aramaic, Arabic and "Assyrian"/ [as the Mashriqian language being deciphered from cuneiform tablets was then being called, Accadian then denoting Sumerian!] . Schlozer's choice of names was obviously derived from Genesis 10: since the Hebrews and the Arabs claim to descend from Shem, and since the Gen 10 includes Assur and Aram in the line of Shem, then surely this language family must be the daughter languages of the proto-language of Shem. To which his opponents, more than a century later, were still offering the challenge: but Hebrew is the language of Canaan and bears certain distant relationships with Egyptian, and "Assyrian" is the language of Babylon and Agade and therefore the language of the land of Nimrod [as Micah? calls Assyria], so in spite of what the rabbis may say about Hebrew as the sacred language of Shem, they are mistaken: Abraham adopted the language of Canaan when he immigrated. The Arabs were more honest in being able to admit that their language was originally spoken by children of Ham, whom presumably they drove away or assimilated, but this loss of whatever original language they may have spoken did not cause them to give up their traditional self-identification as descended from Shem. If then the name "Semitic" is a misnomer for a family of languages originally spoken by children of Ham residing in Asia, then where were the original languages of the peoples identifying themselves as Shem in their traditions of origin? The misnomer was as gross as if some French-speaking Guadeloupians and Spanish-speaking Afro-Cubans and some Portuguese-speaking Afro-Brazilians, all left texts in the Miami area describing their descent from the distant eponymous ancestor Africus and their devotion to their various related West African gods, thus leading some future philologists? linguists? to conclude that the language family to which all the texts belonged should be called Afric. The two paragraphs were also about people who suggested that the language of Shumer may have been the original language of Shem, which died out and was replaced by " E. Hamitic" languages [i.e. E. Afro-Asiatic languages, the term A-A hadn't been invented yet! - i.e. Mashriqian, which solves the whole terminological problem...]. This idea that the cultural racial identification of "children of Shem" stemmed back to Shumer and not to Akkad coincided with cultural revelations suggesting connections between Sumerian traditions and those of the OT etc. My second paragraph was an excursus on applying this theory to the list of sons of Shem in Genesis 10, an attempt on which the earlier theorists bogged down, lacking the linguistic details we now have on the formerly so-called "Asianic" languages, which we might call pre-Mashriqian or better, non- Mashriqian languages of the ANE or better, the AM. This discussion was difficult to follow because I used "Semitic" to mean "Sumerian" {helping out by calling it Semitic/Sumerian; if I used "Hamitic" to refer to Akkadian, as I did a couple of times to imitate the flavor of the era in which these discussions took place, the confusion and seeming irrationality peaked. Thus part way into the discussion I began to use the term Mashriqian as it was the perfect replacement for all the confusing terminology. Instead of our modern "Semitic" Akkadian vs. "non-Semitic" Sumerian, we would have, according to this theory which never took off, thank God, for it turns everything familiar on its head, we would have Mashriqian Akkadian vs. "Semitic" Sumerian... Unfortunate that I couldn't have done this at this moment with the quotes of the time, I keep thinking Albright and Poebal had something to say about it too, because this makes it sound as if it's my theory. I regard this theory as a virus which is difficult to shake any time I let it in again, I prefer to lock it up in its box with other such shattering ideas... Hoping this has helped, but it has probably only made it more confusing... E. Adams ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 07:49:12 +0200 (EET) From: Robert Whiting Subject: Re: ane Historical linguistics and "genetic" relationships On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Peter T. Daniels wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: > > > > There seems to be a good deal of confusion about what historical > > linguistics is and isn't. Historical linguistics is not a > > history of linguistics. It is an attempt to reconstruct the > > changes that a language or a group of languages have gone through > > over time. For historical linguistics it is essential that there > > be a record of the languages over time. Without a historical > > record, there is no historical linguistics -- there is only > > generative grammar. This is not to say that generative grammar > > is of no historical value; it is rather a matter of degree. > > This is only the second time I've encountered someone saying that > "historical linguistics" and "comparative linguistics" aren't synonyms > -- that "hist. ling." is specifically the study of _texts_ through time. > (The other was in the ms. of Patrick Bennett's *Comparative Semitic > Linguistics: A Manual* (Eisenbrauns, 1998); he's primarily an > Africanist. The qualification was taken out because I suggested it would > confuse the novice American linguist or Semitist the book is addressed > to.) Can you identify a tradition that uses the distinction actively? I'm not sure that I was arguing that historical linguistics and comparative linguistics are not the same thing. Although now that I think of it a case could be made that they are not (at least not all the time), I have always used them synonymously. I also would object to a definition of historical linguistics as the study of texts through time. I do not insist that there must be records written in the language to do historical linguistics, only that there must be a record of the language. These two are not necessarily the same thing; otherwise an expression like "the historical linguistics of Pre-Columbian North America" would be an oxymoron. And there is certainly a historical linguistics of Pre-Columbian North America; its problem is that its conclusions have to be based on comparative linguistics without much historical depth. The point about a historical record was not that a language has to be written before it can be used for historical linguistics, but that the language must be recorded somehow before it can be used in a comparison. Now if a linguist goes out to the wilds of New Guinea or Manchuria and records a language he should come back with a grammar and a lexicon that can be used for comparisons with other languages. This grammar and lexicon is no less valuable for comparisons than the philologist's hard-won grammar and lexicon of a dead language extracted from the texts (probably it is more valuable since the philologist has no native informants to tell him when he has things the wrong way around like the linguist does). But the only thing that the linguist can come back with is a synchronic grammar, or to keep to my metaphor, a "snapshot" of the language at the particular point in time that the study was done. If she compares this with a "snapshot" of another language, it may be possible to say that there are similarities between the languages, but without any historical depth to the languages it is impossible to say whether these similarities are the result of related languages diverging or different languages converging. This is why I say that the historical value of synchronic grammars is a matter of degree. Given any similar forms, it is possible to construct a protoform. But whether this protoform has any basis in reality cannot be determined on the basis of two snapshots. To get back to the difference between historical linguistics and comparative linguistics (if any), I suppose it is possible for a linguist to compare two (or more) languages without making any judgements about their relatedness or possible paths of development, but I find it hard to imagine anyone doing this, else what is the point of comparing the languages except to look for universals. But even the search for universals needs historical linguistics, since to be a universal, a feature must have always been in the language (all languages). A universal that a language originally didn't have and then borrowed from another language is hardly a universal. So in my usage, anyone who is doing historical linguistics is doing comparative linguistics (even if only working with one language since this still involves the comparison of different stages of the language) and I suppose that it is theoretically possible to do comparative linguistics without doing historical linguistics, but what would be the point. But the problem with doing historical linguistics with languages that don't have a (recorded) history is that there is no way to check the direction of the historical development. It's sort of like doing a connect-the-dots picture without the numbers. You need a lot of dots very close to each other to make sure that you've got the right picture. Bob Whiting whiting@cc.helsinki.fi ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 22:35:27 -0800 From: Louise Hitchcock Subject: Re: ane Re: Historical Linguistics What you are calling comparative linguistics, is what I would call historical linguistics, that is, the historical development or diachronic study of a language. I would just call the study of older/ancient languages the study of language x. I would think that the term comparative linguistics implies some sort of comparison between two or more different languages. Louise Dr. Louise A. Hitchcock Research Associate, Institute of Archaeology, UCLA - ---------------------------------------- Research Associate, Near Eastern Studies Center, UCLA - ---------------------------------------- Dept. of Anthropology, CSU Dominguez Hills ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1998 #325 **************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html