Reclassification of Occitan: A Massive Update

My post on the reclassification of the Occitan language* has received a massive update. The piece has doubled in size to 59 pages. In addition, I increased the number of languages from 12 to 22. This was a ton of hard work, and it was hard to find good data on these questions. Unfortunately, most of the good data was in the French language, which luckily I can sort of read. Quite a bit was also in Occitan, which honestly I can hardly read at all.

Occitan, a sort of cross between Spanish and French, is spoken in the south of France. It is in extremely bad shape, although it has up to 3 million speakers. It receives no support at all from the Jacobin government in France. “French is the official language of the state,” it says right there in the Constitution. France can’t ratify the EU Charter on Minority Languages because it violates the French Constitution.

*Mostly of interest to people into linguistics, France or the Occitan language.

The Essential Unity of the Romance Languages

Let us take a look here.

English translation: She always closes the window before dining (or having dinner/supper).

Latin (Illa) claudit semper fenestram antequam cenat. Aragonese (Ella) tranca/zarra siempre la finestra antes de zenar. Aromanian (Nâsa/ea) încljidi/nkidi totna firida ninti di tsinâ. Asturian (Ella) pieslla siempre la ventana/feniestra enantes de cenar. Bergamasque (Lé) la sèra sèmper sö la finèstra prima de senà. Bolognese (Lî) la sèra sänper la fnèstra prémma ed dsnèr. Catalan (Ella) sempre tanca la finestra abans de sopar. Corsican (Northern) Ella chjude sempre u purtellu primma di cenà. Corsican (Southern) Edda chjudi sempri u balconu prima di cinà. Emilian (Lē) la sèra sèmpar sù la fnèstra prima ad snàr. Extremaduran (Ella) siempri afecha la ventana antis de cenal. Franco-Provençal (Le) sarre toltin/tojor la fenétra avan de goutâ/dinar/sopar. French Elle ferme toujours la fenêtre avant de dîner/souper. Friulian Jê e siere simpri il barcon prin di cenâ. Galician (Ela) fecha sempre a fiestra/xanela antes de cear. Italian (Ella/Lei) chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino) Eya syémpre serra la ventana antes de senar. Ladin (Val Badia) (Ëra) stlüj dagnora la finestra impröma de cenè. Leonese Eilla pecha siempre la ventana primeiru de cenare. Milanese (Le) la sara semper sü la finestra prima de disnà. Mirandese Eilha cerra siempre la bentana/jinela atrás de jantar. Mozarabic Èlla cloudet sempre la fainestra abante da cenare. (reconstructed) Neapolitan Essa nzerra sempe ‘a fenesta primma ‘e magnà. Norman Lli barre tréjous la crouésie devaunt de daîner. Occitan (Ela) barra sempre/totjorn la fenèstra abans de sopar. Picard Ale frunme tojours l’ creusèe édvint éd souper. Piedmontese Chila a sara sèmper la fnestra dnans ëd fé sin-a/dnans ëd siné. Portuguese Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar/cear. Romanian Ea închide totdeauna fereastra înainte de a cina (înainte de cinare).[2] Romansh Ella clauda/serra adina la fanestra avant ch’ella tschainia. Sardinian Issa serrat semper sa bentana antes de chenare. Sicilian Idda chiudi sempri la finestra avanti ca pistìa/cena. Spanish (Ella) siempre cierra la ventana antes de cenar. Umbrian Essa chjude sempre la finestra prima de cena’. Venetian Ea a sara sempre la fenestra vanti de disnar. Walloon Ele sere todi li finiesse divant di soper.

Fascinating. Just how many language are we dealing with here anyway? One language (Latin) with 36 dialects or 36 languages?

I can see 33 languages up there. North and South Corsican are dialects of a single dialect called Corsican, which is a dialect of Italian. Ladino is a dialect of Spanish. All of the rest are absolutely separate languages. There is less than 9

Check Out Moselle Franconian

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPjaa_7cisU&feature=related]

This is one Hell of a bizarre sounding language. I guess it sounds more like French than anything else, but it doesn’t sound much like French either! It doesn’t sound like much of anything!

Truth is, they are actually speaking and singing German in this video, as bizarre as that sounds. Yes, this is actually German. German with a very heavy French influence, but German nevertheless. It’s Moselle Franconian, a middle Franconian language in this case spoken in France in Sarreguemines right on the German border. It’s probably intelligible with other Moselle Franconian languages spoken over the border. I have heard that Germans visiting the city of Trier say that the Moselle Franconian spoken there might as well be Chinese!

These are Middle German languages that developed off the same tree – Franconian – that went to Dutch. The Low Franconian languages went to various forms of Dutch, and the Middle Franconian languages went to German. The Luxembourgish spoken in Luxembourg sounds something like this.

Check Out Arpitan

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChH5xBq1VTg&feature=related]

This is the first I have ever heard of the Arpitan language. This segment is the Evolénard dialect spoken in the Valais region of Switzerland. This language sounds completely strange to me. Every now and then, it sounds something like French, but mostly it’s just sui generis. I could not pick up one word of this.

Arpitan split from proto-langue d’oil around 800-900. This is really the intermediate langue between North Gallo-Romance and South Gallo-Romance.

What is Gallo-Romance? Gallo-Romance is that branch of Romance that is derived from the Vulgar Latin that arose from Gaullic speaking regions. The north went to the langues d’oil and French. Langues d’oil started to split around 900 or so. The south went to Rhaetian in the Alps -Romansch and Ladin and the Gallo-Romance languages of northern Italy. It is true – the Italian languages of northern Italy are closer to French than they are to Italian.

Arpitan is said to retain a strong resemblance to Latin itself – it is very archaic.

Check Out Occitan – North Auvergne Dialect

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLCxYpn-OQQ&feature=player_embedded#!]

This is Occitan, strange language that borders Spanish and French. In different regions, it sounds like different languages. In the Aran Valley of Spain, Occitan is so heavily influenced by Catalan, Spanish and Aragonese that it seems I can almost understand it. But here, North Auvergne is under heavy French influence. Honestly, this just sounds like French to me, but every now and then it sounds so odd that you think that could not possibly be French. Might be interesting to see if any French speakers can understand more of this than I can.

Despite the fact that my Spanish is pretty good, I could not understand one single word of this.

Language Death Can Occur Very Rapidly

Case in point, Pyrenean Gascon spoken in the High Pyrenees of France. It is apparently a separate language, unintelligible even to the Gascon spoken on the plains. Gascon is a language within Occitan that is spoken in southwestern France near the Spanish border in a region called Gascony. Gascon is probably at least 3 separate languages in itself. Gascon is often said to be quite healthy, with up to 500,000 speakers.

However, these figures are very misleading as the language is in bad shape in France. In Spain, where a dialect called Aranese is recognized as an official language of Spain in the Aran Valley west of Andorra on the French border, the language is in much better shape as it is still spoken by children.

For instance, in the High Pyrenees, only 20 years ago, 4

How did this happen? Nearly half the population was elderly, and so were 9

Amazing. Language speakers collapsed from 4

*Note: Careful with the links. Some of them are in French. I can sort of meander my way through French, but you may not be able to.

Militant Secessionist and Autonomist Movements in Europe

We already went over the IRA struggle in a previous post.

I support most of these movements.

I support the armed Corsicans in Corsica fighting for independence from France. They are very careful about their bombs and bullets and rarely even hurt an innocent person, much less kill one. They mostly blow up unoccupied second homes being built on the coast. Sometimes there are people in the homes. In that case, they evacuate them so they can blow it up. Sometimes they strafe police cars and police stations, but that usually doesn’t cause any casualties. Sometimes they bomb police stations, but that usually doesn’t cause any casualties either.

I can hardly think of a more moral guerrilla movement. All they do is cause property damage and scare people. So what?

I also support the ETA in the Basque Country. They’ve declared a cease-fire anyway, and since then, they’ve been hit with endless raids and arrests. If that’s the way it’s going to be, why not take up arms again? Even when they were fighting, they just killed security forces and sometimes a few traitors. They gave ample warning of all their bombs so people could get out of the way.

Plus all of the Basque pro-independence youth movements and political parties have been outlawed as “wings of the ETA.” There are continuous arrests of these unarmed militants. Now that peaceful struggle is outlawed, why not take up arms again? However, the Basque language is in quite good shape these days. They have really turned things around in the past 30 years. It’s not in good shape in France, but even there, things are looking up.

The truth is that Spain and France are basically fascist countries. The fascists never left power in Italy, Spain or Portugal. They’ve been ruled by the Hard Right behind the scenes ever since fascism started. That’s who really runs those countries, no matter how many ruling “Socialist” parties there are. That’s why the Basques and Corsicans have to fight. Until they get a vote for self-determination, they need to fight.

It’s true that Spain has done better than France. Basque, Aranese and Catalan are recognized as official languages of France. The Catalan government mandates schooling in Catalan, TV and radio is in Catalan, signs must be bilingual, etc. This reasonable state of affairs has caused the Spanish speakers to rise up and scream that they are being discriminated against by Catalan fascists. Ridiculous, no?

I also support the Catalan movement, but it’s generally unarmed these days. Surely, they have a right to self-determination too? The Catalan language is actually in pretty good shape, but the Catalans are always screaming about it anyway. There are a few warning signs here and there, and there’s some hostility to Catalan on the part of local governments, especially in Murcia, France, the Balearic Islands and Valencia.

In Brittany, the movement is in very bad shape. I support autonomy there, not independence. The armed movement is dead. A bomb in a MacDonald’s in 2001 killed a young girl employee, and since then, the Breton movement has been more or less unarmed due to public revulsion over the act. The Bretons were very careful to try not to hurt innocent people with their bombs, but it looks like in this case, they fucked up.

There’s a pretty simple solution to all of these conflicts. Just give the separatists or autonomists a vote. In Brittany, they want simple stuff like Breton classes or bilingual or immersion programs in school. They badly need this because frankly, the Breton language is in catastrophic shape.

The French have always resisted this, a centralizing tendencies dating back to Jacobinism. The French Left has always been infected with Jacobinism due to the history of their Left, hence the somewhat fascist nature of the French Left. They frequently attack movements for minority languages as a reactionary indulgence.

Unfortunately, Jacobinism has sunk deep roots into the French body politic, and most French are Jacobins out of instinct alone it seems. At this point, they are probably genetically selecting for it.

Threatened Languages of France

The French Constitution declares that French is the only language of France. Although France has declared some regional languages to be language of France, France is prevented from ratifying the EU Treaty on Minority Languages due to its Constitution.

A UNESCO report on endangered languages ​​shows that French is seriously threatening 26 languages ​​or dialects in France, including: Basque, Burgundian, Breton, Champenois, Corsican, Flemish, Franche-Comté, Moselle Franconian, Rhine Franconian, Francoprovençal (Arpitan), Gallo, Ligurian, Lorrain, Norman, Occitan (Auvergne, Gascony, Languedoc, Limousin, Provençal), Picard and Poitevin-Saintonge.

Of these, the following are langues d’oil, related to French: Picard, Gallo, Burgundian, Champenois, Franche-Comté, Lorrain, Norman,and Poitevin-Saintonge. These are actually separate languages or patois. They are not dialects of French. Many of them split from langue d’oil long ago. In general, they are quite incomprehensible to French speakers. Let’s look at them:

Burgundian is spoken in Burgundy around Dijon. It is not in good shape, but it still has a lot of speakers. Not intelligible with Standard French. It has about 2,000 native speakers.

Champenois is spoken in Champagne around Reims and in neighboring Belgium, where it is a regionally protected language. I don’t have much information on it, but it’s probably not in good shape. Not intelligible with Standard French.

Franche-Comté is still spoken in Franche-Comte around Besancon. It still has some elderly speakers, but it’s probably not in good shape. Not intelligible with Standard French. It has 3,700 speakers in Switzerland. Figures for France are not known.

Gallo is spoken in eastern Brittany around Rennes. It is still in reasonably good shape. Not intelligible with Standard French. 28,000 speakers. 200-400,000 with at least passive knowledge.

Lorrain is spoken in the northwest of France in the Lorrain region around the city of Nancy, the Vosges Mountains and even into Belgium. Not intelligible with Standard French.

Norman is spoken on the coat of Normandy around Le Havre and on the Channel Islands. This is actually several separate languages. It is not doing well, and is doing especially poorly on the Islands where the influence of English is very strong. Not intelligible with Standard French. Up to 243,000 speakers.

Picard has about 700,000 speakers in far northwest France around Calais, Lille and Dunkirk and in Belgium. It is probably actually two separate languages. Not intelligible with Standard French.

Poitevin-Saintongeais is spoken on the west-central coast of France and around Poitiers. Eleanor of Acquitaine was actually a Poitevin speaker. This is actually two separate languages. Saintongeais is still widely spoken. Poitevin is doing well and has 150-500,000 speakers.

There are actually other langues d’oil, but I won’t list them.

Basque is spoken by only about 1

Breton is the Gaelic language related to Welsh that is spoken in Brittany on the northwest edge of France. This language does have 200,000 speakers, but most of them are over age 50. There are also 500 schools or diwans teaching the language. Although this sounds promising and Breton is in better shape than the other languages listed here, there are a lot of worries about this language. For one thing, the French won’t allow it to be taught in French schools.

Corse is spoken on the island of Corsica by about 4

Flemish is still spoken by about 20,000 speakers in the far northwest of France around Dunkirk. It is not in good shape at all.

Francoprovençal or Arpitan is an old language with 112,000 speakers that split away from the langue d’oil at about the time it was first becoming consolidated around 800-900. Arpitan split from Catalan-Occitan around 600. This language is also spoken in Italy and Switzerland. It is probably actually 10 or more languages, since there is poor communication among the dialects. It is spoken in the part of France near Switzerland, in the Savoy and around Lyon, Grenoble and St. Etienne to the west of Switzerland.

This language is doing very poorly in France but was still very widely spoken until the 1970’s and 1980’s. It probably resembles French more than any other language.

Ligurian is a Gallo-Romance language similar to a cross between French and Italian. It is mostly spoken around Genoa in Italy, but it is spoken in several dialects along the coast of southeastern France near the border with Italy in the Maritime Alps. Up to 2 million speakers total, but the language is still thought to be in poor shape because few young people are learning it.

Moselle Franconian is spoken in an area of the Alsace-Lorraine on the border with Germany. The variety spoken in France is called Lorraine Franconian and is not in good shape. This German language is not intelligible with Standard German. 78,000 speakers.

Occitan (Auvergnat, Gascon, Nissart, Mentonasque, Monegasque, Languedoc, Limousin, Cisalpine, Provençal dialects) is spoken in the south of France by up to 7 million people understand the language, and 1 million speak it as a first language. It is probably doing better than most of the languages listed in here, but it does not have a secure position.

This is the ancient language of the Troubadours and it is closely related to Catalan, having split from Catalan around 1000. Catalan-Occitan started to split away as a separate language around 800. Occitan itself split from langue d’oil in the 800’s. From 1000-1600, Catalan and Occitan evolved along similar lines.

It is quite unintelligible to French speakers. Sort of a cross between French and Spanish. The question of whether or not the dialects can understand each other and to what degree is a thorny one that does not have good answers. Nissart, Gascon, Limousin, Cisalpine and Languedocien are definitely separate languages.

Rhine Franconian is spoken in France in the same general region as Moselle Franconian, except a bit to the west. It is intelligible with Standard German or with Moselle Franconian. It is not doing very well.

Catalan TV

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WwWTWFRMzw]

This is the first video I have uploaded that shows the Catalan language.

I could only make out a few words here and there, and I was helped by the visuals about what they were describing. If this was on the radio, I would have done a lot worse. Keep in mind I can understand Spanish pretty well. If you understand Spanish, you most definitely cannot understand Catalan very well! It is for sure a completely different language. Also note that there are many complaints that Catalan TV uses a heavily Castillianized version of Catalan. If this is what the Castillianized version sounds like, I’d hate to hear the pure Catalan.

If any of you speak French, it might be interesting to play this video and see if you can pick up any more of this language than I can coming from Spanish. The best way to listen to it is to not watch the video, just listen to it like it’s on the radio.

On the other hand, I heard a guy speaking a short video about Catalan in which he spoke very slowly and carefully, and I could actually figure out a good part of it.

A Look at Some Spanish Dialects

One thing that is interesting once you learn to speak Spanish fairly well is that you can start to pick up the differences in various Spanish dialects. I am told that people who don’t know Spanish well can’t pick up the differences at all. Hearing a divergent Spanish dialect is a very strange experience. You hear Spanish words, but the accent is so off and weird that you think that they can’t possibly be speaking Spanish. A frequent mistake it to think that they are thinking some closely related Romance language like Catalan, French, Portuguese or Italian.

I’ve written about this before, but now that we have more Hispanics and even Mexican nationals reading the blog, maybe we can get some good feedback.

Mexican Spanish is fairly uniform at least around these parts. However, there are some differences.

Oaxacan Spanish: I have heard older Oaxacan Indians speaking a very strange and harsh form of Spanish. I assume it was some Oaxacan Indian Spanish.

Morelos Spanish: Spoken in the state of Morelos near just south of Mexico City. I heard a woman speaking this to her kid. She looked very White, and for some reason I thought she was Iranian. I listened to her for several minutes and I was sure she must have been speaking Farsi. However, she told me she was speaking Morelos Spanish. I looked it up on the Net and it is a distinctive dialect.

Jalisco Spanish: Spoken in the coastal state of Jalisco. This does seem different from the other varieties of Mexican Spanish. I heard a White looking guy speaking it in the store and I asked him what language he was speaking. He was speaking Jalisco Spanish. It had a very European sound to it – like Castillian or Catalan.

Veracruz Spanish: I was in a store and there was a guy on the phone speaking some strange language. There were Spanish words but the accent was insane. After a bit, I said, “No way are you speaking Spanish.” The guy practically fell over himself laughing and he said he was indeed. He looked sort of South Indian, so I thought he was speaking some Indian language like Hindi.

He said he spoke regular Spanish, but he came from the Caribbean coast of Mexico, and he was talking to someone from there, and he was speaking Mexican Caribbean Spanish. This is the most whacked version of Mexican Spanish I have ever heard.

Guatemalan Spanish: A neighbor speaks this. It’s Spanish all right, but it’s not Mexican Spanish at all. Has an odd but recognizable accent. And she speaks incredibly fast and slurs her words together in the worst way.

Salvadoran Spanish: Different from Mexican Spanish, but not dramatically so. It’s immediately identifiable as Spanish.

Puerto Rican Spanish: Caribbean Spanish in general is just nuts. I heard a group of mixed race folks speaking it at a store. I listened for a while, very confused. Then I walked over to them and asked if they were speaking Portuguese, because that was what it sounded like. They said they were speaking Puerto Rican Spanish. The mixed race group had not a trace of racism, and among them were some of the most dignified looking Blacks or mulattoes I have ever seen. A quiet dignity you rarely see in US Blacks.

Colombian Spanish: One of the strangest Spanishes of them all. I knew an upper class Colombian woman from the Zona Rosa in the north of Bogota. She spent about half her time in Spain. She had the sexiest, most breathiest Spanish I have ever heard, almost like a super sexy French accent. It was also very European sounding. It had a very Castillian and almost French flavor to it. I heard her sister talk too, and she talked exactly the same way.

She used to write me emails, and I couldn’t make heads or toes of the Spanish because it was so full of figures of speech, slangs and colloquialisms. Running it through a translator was useless. For all intents and purposes, she wasn’t even writing in Spanish.

I was at a store and a group of Colombians was in line, all young adults. I heard Spanish words, but the accent was so whacked that I thought it had to be something else. I approached them and asked if they were speaking Italian, because that is what it sounded like. They laughed and said they were speaking Colombian Spanish.

Once again, this was a very sensual language. The 30-something beauty talking to me seemed like she was openly flirting with me, but finally I thought that was just how she talked. They were all talking like they were either heading to an orgy or just got back from one, but once again, I think that was the way they talked all the time. These people live in their bodies, fully sensual, and the language pumps right out of their emotional heart. The words seem to sway and move with their bodies. One sexy language!

I recently heard another woman speaking Colombian Spanish, this time from the Caribbean coast. A fruity, delightful language with words that sway in the sun on the golden sands. A sound as juicy as papayas, mangoes and bananas. You want to reach out and grab the words as they fly through the air and take a bite of them.

Peruvian Spanish: I knew some Peruvian women and used to talk to them a lot. The Spanish is not too crazy accentwise, but it has a ton of slangs in it. They didn’t really speak English, so they couldn’t explain what the slangs meant. One thing was that they spoke very, very fast! I kept telling them to slow down, but they could not seem to slow it down no matter how many times you asked. Peruvian has only one speed – very fast.

Chilean Spanish: Sounds very Castillian, but it’s immediately recognizable as Spanish. One problem is the mountain of slang in this dialect. I don’t think there is any Spanish that has as much slang as Chilean. It’s literally chock full of all kinds of weird slangs. They are also the pickiest Spanish speakers I have ever met. Almost like the French, almost correcting your Spanish. Most Spanish speakers are very gracious, but Chileans want you to speak it right!

Argentine Spanish: This is one weird Spanish. You hear it spoken and you hear Spanish words, but the people speaking it look like Europeans and the accent sounds Italian! Or sometimes it sounds like some other European language – Catalan, French or Castillian. This is one insanely whacked out Spanish!

Catalonian Spanish: I heard a group speaking this, and I thought no way is that Spanish. I asked them what they were speaking, and they said Spanish. They said they were from Catalonia. Their Spanish sounded like Catalan! It didn’t sound like Spanish at all. This was one of the bizarrest Spanishes I have ever heard.

In 1880 in France…

It was said among Army recruits that only 2

What were the rest of the soldiers speaking? Many of them may have been speaking patois. Patois are generally other langues d’oil, related to Parisien. There are many of them, but they are dying out. In general, patois are not intelligible with Standard French.

Many also spoke Occitan, a language between Spanish and French spoken in the south of France. Further, some Occitan dialects are hardly even understandable to other Occitan speakers. French speakers are quite lost when listening to an Occitan speaker.

130 years ago, there were probably many speakers of Breton in Brittany. Breton is related to Welsh, and a French speaker can’t understand a word of it.

Surely, there were many speakers of Basque in the southwest of France. Basque is incomprehensible to a French speaker.

In far northeast France, Flemish is still spoken, and it was much more spoken 130 years ago.

In the part of France near Luxembourg, varieties of German are spoken, Moselle Franconian, Lorraine Franconian and Luxembourgian. These are actually three separate languages. They were much more commonly spoken 130 years ago.

To the south, Alsatian was spoken in the Alsace Lorraine. A traveler to this region wrote that in some areas people speak German, in others they speak French, and in others they speak some language that is neither German nor French. Alsatian is a German dialect that is declining. But it was very widely spoken 130 years ago.

In the far southeast of France, Nissart, Monegasque, Montenasque, and Intermelian are spoken. The last two are dialects of Ligurian, a language spoken in Italy. The first two are Occitan dialects with a heavy Ligurian mixture. All of these were spoken much more 130 years ago.

In Corsica, Corse is spoken. Corse is related to Standard Italian. It is declining, but was widely spoken 130 years ago.

In the area near Switzerland, a language called Arpitan or Franco-Provencal is still spoken. It was much more widely spoken 130 years ago.

In the far southwest of France in Rousillon, Catalan is spoken. It is dying out, but was probably widely spoken 130 years ago.

As you can see, the notion that only Standard French is spoken in France is quite mistaken. It was even less true 130 years ago, when only 2

Neoslavonic Website

Here.

Neoslavonic is a new constructed language, or conlang. These languages have a history of not being very successful for some odd reason, but they are definitely a good idea. For instance, in Esperanto it takes about 1 year to get to a fluency level that it takes one 8 years to get to in English.

Neoslavonic was created from mixing together the major Slavic languages, presumably Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. These languages are fairly similar anyway and there is a fair amount of intelligibility between them. The notion of a Pan-Slavic language is a good idea.

The website is very well done and there seems to be some time and money behind it. Seems to be run out Czechoslovakia.

An Anatolian Homeland For Indo-European?

That may be, but the part about “proto-Europeans” coming from the Lower Volga is bullshit. All archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, and genetic evidence (not to mention, evidence from indigenous pagan religions/mythologies) point to an Anatolian origin of the Indo-Europeans.

During the LGM, European hunter-gatherer groups gathered in some refugia in South Central Europe (Iberia, Western Balkans, Ukraine…) and Northern Europe was almost entirely covered in glaciers, as were the Alps, Caucasus, Pyrenees, and other major mountain ranges.

After the LGM, the scant remnant of Upper Paleolithic survivors moved back north, but Southern Europe was depopulated, only to be repopulated again by Near Eastern agriculturalists at the dawn of the Neolithic. These agro-pastoralists from the Anatolian-Levantine refugium brought farming, livestock, and copper to Europe. Among the earliest farmers were the Anatolian proto-Indo-Europeans.

The Basques are probably remnants of the Mesolithic survivor population. The purest descendants of these Near Eastern settlers are the Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and at least some Italians – also the Turks, who inhabit the PIE origin land – ironically Turks, who speak a non-Indo-European Altaic language, are probably more Indo-European than most Indo-European speakers, especially Brits or Indians.

Of course, there were other migrations around that time. A people closely related to the Mongols expanded westward across Siberia, over the Urals and into Scandinavia following the deglaciation. They introduced Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Lappish) into Europe, and the Lapps are their most direct descendants.

But we have strong reason to believe that Indo-European spread from the Near East (most likely North-Central Anatolia) chiefly due to agriculture, not from Western Europe (as some White Nationalists might believe), from India/Pakistan (as many Hindu nationalists believe), or from Gimbutas’ fanciful Kurgan patriarchs (which Wikipedia deems as “official” and which you appear to take for granted).

[Actually, it surprises me that so many people take for granted some nutty hypothesis proposed by the Marxist-feminist Jewess Marija Gimbutas despite the lack of evidence or historical precedent. At least the Paleolithic Continuity Model is based on some evidence (albeit misinterpreted), and the Out-of-India hypothesis is based on understandable wishful thinking.]

Consider the following:

* As per your own model, virtually all Europeans cluster closely with each other and with Persians, Kurds, Caucasus folks, Jews, Turks, and some Semitic-speaking Levantines. Basques, North Africans, Arabs, and “West Asians” (i.e. Afghans) are minor outliers.

This interrelatedness suggests a strong demic diffusion and also implies that the stat that Europeans are 8

* While Indo-Europeans are/were indeed fairly heavily male-dominated (Gimbutas was at least correct about this), this follows from a Near Eastern origin, as the Middle East was, and still is, very patriarchal. Ironically, Gimbutas located the homeland of those “evil patriarchal invaders” who decimated the “feminist utopia” that neolithic European society (allegedly) was in Scythia, which is believed to be the source of the Amazon legends…

* Indo-European languages show relatively strong affinities to Semitic languages, and probably Kartvelian and Pelasgian languages (the latter may have actually been Indo-European, related to Hittite), possibly Ligurian (probably Indo-European and related to both Celtic and Italic languages), and even Etruscan (controversially). No such closeness to Iberian (Basque), Ural-Altaic, or Dravidian languages.

* The oldest evidence of Indo-European languages comes from Anatolia (Hittite) and the Aegean (Greek in Linear B). Minoan (in Linear A) remains undeciphered and may have been related. Archaeological records demonstrate a settled native population.

* Even the pagan religions seem to cluster near the Anatolian center. Zoroastrianism and the Indic religions both descend from the Indo-Aryan religion, but the Persian religion is more similar to ancient European religious traditions than the Dharmic faiths are (because Hinduism absorbed some Harappan/Dravidian pre-Aryan influences.)

Greco-Roman and Germanic religions were more alike than either was akin to Celtic (Druidic) paganism, the Celts being more matriarchal and probably influenced by relatives of the Basques in Western Europe and the British Isles.

All this points to an origin for Indo-European in Neolithic Anatolia, but you are probably correct that the Aryans (Indo-Iranians, not blonde Germanic supermen) came into Iran and India via Central Asia. Most likely route being a clockwise migration around the Caspian Sea…

Excellent commentary, fascinating stuff.

I actually agree with an Anatolian homeland for PIE, however, I also agree with a secondary spread from the Lower Volga. So things are complicated. In fact, I argue that Indo-European is actually Indo-Hittite, with Anatolian being so far removed from the rest that it is actually a sister to the rest of the family. Just a look at Hittite shows you how archaic it is compared to the rest of the family.

The part about the Turks, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and at least some Italians being the remnants of the original IE people is probably true. So, in a sense, these are really the “original Whites.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nordicists.

Gimbutas’ theory has always ween a bit nutty. There were no ancient matriarchies. As a female friend once said, men have always ruled. Why? She answered, “Men are bigger, men are stronger, men push women around and make them do what they want them to do.” Well, of course, and women are too weak to fight back.

As it is now, as it’s always been. In gender relations, it’s the law of the jungle. I also feel that matriarchies might have been inherently unstable, as I’m not sure that “female rule” works very well. We are having enough problems with what matriarchy we have in the West.

Patriarchy or male rule is sort of a bad deal for women, but at least it seems to “work.” And I have noticed that women from patriarchal cultures seem to be happiest in their femininity and in general. The men are masculine, the women are feminine, and everyone’s happy.

The more women rule, the more miserable women seem to be, and men never seem to be happy under female rule. For one thing, oddly enough, female rule tends to make women act masculine and men act feminine.

Neither is a normal role model, and I argue that the more masculine a woman is, the more unhappy she is, and the more feminine a man is, the more unhappy he is. That ‘s possibly because they are violating nature itself. When you do that, nature fights back, possibly by making you miserable.

Surely IE is related to Afro-Asiatic and Kartvelian, but I disagree that it is less related to Uralic or Altaic, and I also disagree that Uralic and Altaic represent some family. Ligurian and Pelasgian are probably IE, but no one knows what Etruscan is.

I definitely agree that almost all Europeans are quite close to Persians, Kurds, Caucasus folks, Jews, Turks, and some Semitic-speaking Levantines. It is interesting how close the Caucasians are to each other. Most Caucasians are much closer to each other than other major races are. There is much larger differentiation among NE and SE Asians, Aborigines, Papuans and for sure Africans than there is among Caucasians.

All around, a great comment. The rest of you may feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts or anything to add.

The Out of India Model for Indo-European

Related to “There was no Aryan Invasion” folks, mostly Hindu nationalists and Indian nationalists. Out of India Model. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page makes it seem somewhat plausible. It’s not. Not plausible, that is. It’s nonsense. Indo-European speakers did not come out of India. India is not the homeland of the Indo-Europeans. The true homeland is in far southern Russia north of the Caucasus, or, even better, in Anatolia. This is what really happened: an Indo-Aryan migration. Read through that piece and it becomes quite clear that this is what really happened. Part of the problem is with the word invasion. There was no invasion. They just moved in. Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist, has been in the forefront of attacking the Out of India model. Here is a good page savaging most of their arguments. He takes apart one of their leader proponents, N. Kazanas of Greece, a guy who is little more than a dilettante. It takes a little while to get through this stuff as it’s a bit heavy going, but I was able to do it. Once you do it, the Out of India Theory lies in ruins. One of the OOI arguments is that Indo-Aryan peoples have no memory of a migration. But who does anyway? Most IE peoples do not remember their obvious migrations either. Romans said they came from Troy. This is a lie. Gypsies say they came from Egypt. Fiction. Here is an argument against an Indo-Aryan incursion:

we have an archaeologically attested culture of many centuries if not millennia with undoubted literacy but without any traces of religious texts, legal codes, scientific works and even simple secular fables (except most laconic legends on indecipherable seals), and, in quick succession, even as the older culture declines, an intrusive illiterate people with no archaeological attestation at all who yet produce within a few centuries (according to the AIT) all the literature that was missing from the previous culture. This is a unique situation that makes little sense.

However, this very thing happened in Greece. First, a Minoan cult, a Helladic civilization, but no literary texts, then, in a few centuries, then, within a few centuries, an explosion of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy, the Homeric texts, etc. Further, it does not produce “all the literature that was missing from the previous civilization. It produces new literature at a very rapid pace – see the Yayoi invasion of Japan from Korea and the rapid replacement of the Jomon culture for something similar. Another argument is that archeologically, the record of civilization in India is continuous – that is, there is no obvious disruption dating from an Aryan invasion. However, as a general rule, culture, archeologically, is continuous in all parts of the world. Culture is continuous in Europe too, and we know full well that Indo-Europeans took over and supplanted earlier groups. Is there a record of this takeover culturally? Well no, but it happened. However, keep in mind that horses and chariots showed up with the Indo-Aryans and were not found in India previously. OOI folks say silly things like, “Egyptians had chariots too” (Point being?). Anyway, horses and chariots did not develop in India. They came down from the steppes with the I-A speakers. Surely if OOI is true than Sanskrit would be the most ancient IE language. It’s not at all. It only goes back 3,500 years too. The Anatolian branch may well date back 8,000 years. If OOI is true than borrowings from other Indian languages such as Dravidian and Munda would be found in all branches of IE, no? But of course they are only found in Indic, which we would expect if Indic speakers migrated into India and not out of it. Going back to pre-Indo-Aryan times, paleontologists find differences between bones even between Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Also, there are no I-A bones found here. Of course not. Aryans will not show up for 1000’s of years. Yes, Harappans built wheels, but they built no spoke-wheeled chariot. This came only with the Aryans. OOI folks have no explanation for this. Indeed, Aryan chariots are built from woods from the Punjab plain, not wood from say the steppes. But this is not a valid OOI argument. Invaders always use whatever is available. Aryan immigrants brought chariot technology with them from the steppes. To make chariots in their new homeland, they used local wood. This is surprising?

Journeys in Asian Prehistory

Repost from the old site. In this post we will look at the prehistory of the Asian or Mongoloid Race and some its subgroups. After humans came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, they moved along the coast of Arabia, Southwest Asia, South Asia and eventually to Southeast Asia.

One Asian man’s rendering of modern Asian expansion, contrasted with the typical model. I don’t agree with either model, but I like the one on the left a little better. For starters, the yellow line on the map to the left should be hugging the coast quite closely and the brown and red lines should be radiating out from a base somewhere along the yellow line. Unfortunately, my artistic skills are not good enough to draw my own map.

We think that these people looked something like the Negritos of today, such as those on the Andaman Islands. At some point, probably in Southern China, the Mongoloid Race was born. The timeline, as determined by looking at genes, was from 60,000-110,000 years ago. As humans are thought to have only populated the world 70,000 years or so ago, it is strange that the timeline may go back as far as 110,000 years. One thing that is very interesting is that there is evidence for regional continuity in Asia (especially China) dating back 100,000’s of years, if not millions of years. This is called the multiregional hypothesis of human development. Though it is mostly abandoned today, it still has its adherents. Some of its adherents are Asian nationalists of various types, especially Chinese and Indonesian nationalists. They all want to think that man was born in their particular country. Others are White nationalists who refuse to believe that they are descended from Africans, whom they consider to be inferior. The problem is that the Asians can indeed show good evidence for continuity in the skulls in their region. A good midway point between the two, that sort of solves the conundrum, is that humans came out of Africa, say, ~70,000 years or so ago, and when they got to Asia, they bred in with some of the more archaic types there. The problem with this is that the only modern human showing evidence of pre-modern Homo genes in Mungo Man in Australia from 50,000 years ago. There is evidence that as late as 120,000 years ago, supposedly fully modern humans in Tanzania were still School kids in Hothot, a town in Inner Mongolia. There is some question about whether China really has a right to control this area. These Northeast Asians originally came from a homeland in SE Asia near the China-Vietnam border. As this race is only 9,000 years old, NE Asians could not possibly have gone through an Ice Age that molded their brains for high intelligence, as the racist liar and scientific fraud Richard Lynn claims .

There is even evidence that the Altaics of Siberia originated from the SE Asian homeland. They are thought to have A Mongolian man on the steppes with a grazing animal and possibly a yurt in the background. Yurts are conical structures that the Mongolians still live in. I believe that Mongolians also eat a lot of yogurt, which they cultivate from the milk of their grazing animals. Note the pale blue eyes and somewhat Caucasian appearance. My astute Chinese commenter notes: “While Mongolians do have ‘Caucasian genes’, they look distinct from Uighurs, who are mixed. I’m thinking Mongolians and Central Asians lie in a spectrum between Caucasoids in West Asia and “Mongoloids” in Northeast Asians, while Uighurs were the product of Central Asian, West Asian, and Northeast Asian interbreeding.” In fact, all of these populations are on the border genetically between Caucasians and Asians. A Mongolian woman. Note short, stocky appearance with short limbs to preserve heat in the cold. Note also the long, moon-shaped, ruddy face, possibly red from the cold weather. Are those ginseng roots in her hand? More Mongolians, this time with what look like grazing reindeer in the background. Mongolians herd reindeer? Note once again the long, flat, moon-shaped face, the almost-Caucasian features and especially the pale blue eyes of each woman. I cannot help but think that both of these women also look like Amerindians. Neither would be out of place at a pow wow. More Mongolians, this time a Mongolian boy. Other than the eyes, he definitely looks Caucasian. He looks like a lot of the kids I grew up with in facial structure. Mongolians are anywhere from 1

From their Altaic lands, especially in the Altai region and the mouth of the Amur River, they moved into the Americas either across the Bering Straight or in boats along the Western US Coast. Another line went north to become the Northeast Asians. And from the Northeast Asian homeland near Lake Baikal, another line went on to become the Siberians.

An Evenki boy with his reindeer. Prototypical reindeer herders, the Evenki are a classical Siberian group. Strangely enough, they are related to both NE Asians and other Siberians and also to Tibetans. This indicates that the genesis of the Tibetans may have been up near or in Siberia.

From 10-40,000 yrs ago, the Siberian population was Mongoloid or pre-Mongoloid. After 10,000 yrs BP (before present), Caucasians or proto-Caucasians moved in from the West across the steppes, but they never got further than Lake Baikal. This group came from the Caucasus Mountains. They are members of the Tungus Race and are quite divergent from most other groups genetically.

More Evenkis, members of the Tungus Race, this time some beautiful women and kids in traditional costumes. But this photo was taken in some Siberian city, so they may have just been dressing up. They probably have some Caucasian genes, as the nearby Yakuts are

Soon after the founding of the Asian homeland in northern Vietnam 53,000-90,000 yrs ago, the proto-Asians split into three distinct lines – a line heading to Japanese and related peoples, another heading to the North and Northeast Asians, and a third to the Southern Han Chinese and SE Asian lines.

A beautiful royal member of the Southern Han Dynasty in Hong Kong, member of the South China Sea Race. This race consists of the Filipinos, the Ami and the Southern Han from Guangdong Province. The Ami are a Taiwanese Aborigine tribe who made up the bulk of the Austronesians who populated much of island SE Asia over the past 8,000 years. These Southern Chinese people never went through any Ice Age, and the SE Asian Race is only 10,000 years old anyway. So why are they so smart? Unlike some NE Asian groups, especially those around Mongolia, the Altai region, the Central Asian Stans and Siberia, the Han have no Caucasian in them. A bright Chinese commenter left me some astute remarks about the South Chinese IQ: “Some possible reasons for high South Chinese IQ’s: Chinese culture is very… g-loaded. For example, understanding the language requires good pitch, recognizing Chinese characters takes visual IQ and good memory, Chinese literature and history span 3,000-4,000 years for references, etc. For several thousand years testing determined your social position (and it still does to some extent in Confucian nations). Those left in the countryside were periodically left to famine and “barbarian” invasions (slaughter). Likewise, when Chinese people interbreed, there is strong pressure to breed into the upper class of a native population. Whatever caused the high selection when Chinese and Mon-Khmer/Dai groups interbred probably gave the Chinese immigrants leverage to marry into the upper classes when they did. This is something the Asian diaspora still tends to do.” Regarding South Chinese appearance, he notes, “Lastly, the Chinese in Fujian have distinct features. They have thicker lips, curlier hair, more prominent brow, less pronounced epicanthic folds, etc. I’m in Taiwan now and I do notice it. I was at a packed market a while ago and was noting the way people look.”

As a result of this split, all Chinese are related at a deep level, even though Northern Chinese are closer to Caucasians than to Southern Chinese. Nevertheless, we can still see a deep continuum amongst Asian populations.

A Northern Chinese man with distinctly Caucasian features. Although they have no Caucasian genes that we can see anymore, they are still closer to Caucasians than to the Southern Chinese.

The major genetic frequency found in Japan, Korea and Northern China is also found at very high levels in Southern China, Malaysia and Thailand, and at lower levels in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. Incredibly, even higher levels are found in Southern China, Malaysia and Thailand than in Northern China. The proto-NE Asian or North Asian homeland was around Lake Baikal about 35,000 years ago. The Ainu and a neighboring group, the Nivkhi, are thought to be the last remaining groups left from this line. The Ainu are related to the Jomon, the earliest group in Japan, who are thought to have originated in Thailand about 16,000 years ago and then came up to Japan on boats to form the proto-Jomon. The Jomon culture itself formally begins about 9,000 years ago. Japan at that time was connected to the mainland. Jomonese skulls found in Japan look something like Aborigines. Later, around 2,300 years ago, a group called the Yayoi came across the sea from Korea and moved into Japan.

The woman on the left is more Yayoi and the one on the right is more Okinawan. The Okinawans, members of the Ryukyuan Race, seem to be related to the Ainu, and they have a long history in the south of Japan. The Ryukyuan Race is a very divergent grouping. Most Japanese are members of the Japanese-Korean Race (like the Yayoi woman at left) but there is a divergent group in the South called the Southern Japanese Race, made up of the Honshu Kinki (the people around Kyoto) and the island of Kyushu. They may be more Okinawan than the rest of the mainland Japanese.

Over the next 2,300 years, the Yayoi slowly conquered and interbred with the Ainu until at the present time, the Ainu are nearly extinct as a cultural and racial entity. The Ainu have always been treated terribly by the Japanese, in part because they are quite hairy, like Caucasians. The hairy body is thought to be a leftover from proto-NE Asian days, as some other groups in that area also have a lot of body hair. Despite the fact that they look down on the Ainu, about 4

The Ainu. Though despised by the Japanese in part due to their Caucasian-like “monkey hair” on their bodies (note the guy’s hairy legs), the Japanese themselves are about 4 A photo of Ainu Yasli Adam in traditional garb. I love this photo. Note that he could be mistaken for an Aborigine or a Caucasian. For a long time, the Ainu were considered to be Caucasians, but recent genetic studies have shown conclusively that they are Asians. The Ainu language is formally an isolate, but in my opinion it is probably related to Japanese and Korean and thence to Altaic, nevertheless I think that both Japanese and Korean are closer to Altaic than Ainu is. Genetically, the Ainu are closest to NE Asians but are also fairly close to the Na-Dene Amerindians. Cavalli-Sforza says they are in between NE Asians, Amerindians and Australians.

At this time, similar-looking Australoids who looked something like Papuans, Aborigines or Negritos were present all over Asia, since the NE Asians and SE Asians we know them today did not form until around 10,000 years ago. There are still some traces of these genes, that look like a Papuan line, in modern-day Malays, coastal Vietnamese, parts of Indonesia and some Southwestern Chinese. The genes go back to 13,000 years ago and indicate a major Australoid population expansion in the area at that time. Absolutely nothing whatsoever is known about this Australoid expansion.

God I love these Paleolithic types. A Papuan Huli man, member of the Papuan Race, who looks somewhat like an Australian Aborigine. Although it is often said that Papuans and Aborigines are related, they are only in the deepest sense. In truth, they really do form two completely separate races because they are so far apart. Once again, while Afrocentrists also like to claim these folks as “Black”, the Papuans and Aborigines are the two people on Earth most distant from Africans, possibly because they were the first to split off and have been evolving away from Africans for so long. I don’t know what that thing in his mouth is, but it looks like a gigantic bong to me. There are about 800 languages spoken on Papua, including some of the most maddeningly complex languages on Earth. NE Asian skulls from around 10,000 years ago also look somewhat like Papuans, as do the earliest skulls found in the Americas. The first Americans, before the Mongoloids, were apparently Australoids.

The proto-NE Asian Australoids transitioned to NE Asians around 9,000 years ago. We know this because the skulls at Zhoukoudian Cave in NE China from about 10,000 years ago look like the Ainu, the Jomon people, Negritos and Polynesians.

Waitress in Hothot, Inner Mongolia. Zhoukoudian Cave is not far from here. Note the typical NE Asian appearance. Mongolians are members of the Mongolian Race and speak a language that is part of the Altaic Family.

We think that these Australoids also came down in boats or came over the Bering Straight to become the first Native Americans. At that time – 9-13,000 years ago, Zhoukoudian Cave types were generalized throughout Asia before the arrival of the NE Asians.

Northern Chinese prototypes from a photo of faculty and students at Jilin University in Northern China. People in this area, members of the Northern Chinese Race, are closely related to Koreans. Note the lighter skin and often taller bodies than the shorter, darker Southern Chinese. The man in the center is a White man who is posing with the Chinese in this picture. My brother worked at a cable TV outfit once and there was a Northern Chinese and a Southern Chinese working there. The Northern one was taller and lighter, and the Southern one was shorter and darker. The northern guy treated the southern guy with little-disguised contempt the whole time. He always called the southern guy “little man”, his voice dripping with condescension. This was my first exposure to intra-Chinese racism. Many NE Asians, especially Japanese, are openly contemptuous of SE Asians, in part because they are darker.

Native Americans go from Australoids to Mongoloids from 7,000-9,000 years ago, around the same time – 9,000 years ago – that the first modern NE Asians Prototypical NE Asians – Chinese in Harbin, in far northeastern China. This area gets very cold in the winter, sort of like Minnesota. Keep in mind that this race is only 9,000 years old. Note the short, stocky body type, possibly a cold weather adaptation to preserve heat.

Some of the earliest Amerindian skulls such as Spirit Cave Man, Kennewick Man, and Buhl Woman look like Ainu and various Polynesians, especially Maoris.

A Hawaiian woman, part of the Polynesian Race. Kennewick Man does not look like any existing populations today, but he is closest to Polynesians, especially the virtually extinct Moiriori of the Chatham Islands and to a lesser extent the Cook Islanders. Yes, many of the various Polynesians can be distinguished based on skulls. Other early Amerindian finds, such as Buhl Woman and Spirit Cave Woman also look something like Polynesians. It is starting to look like from a period of ~7,000-11,000 years ago in the Americas, the Amerindians looked like Polynesians and were not related to the existing populations today, who arrived ~7,000 years ago and either displaced or bred out the Polynesian types. Furthermore, early proto-NE Asian skulls, before the appearance of the NE Asian race 9,000 years ago, look somewhat like Polynesians, among other groups.

An archaeologist who worked on Kennewick Man says Amerindians assaulted him, spit on him and threatened to kill him because he said that Kennewick Man was not an Amerindian related to living groups, and that his line seemed to have no ancestors left in the Americas. Furthermore, most Amerindians insist that their own tribe “has always been here”, because this is what their silly ancestral religions and their elders tell them. They can get quite hostile if you question them on this, as I can attest after working with an Amerindian tribe for 1½ years in the US. To add further insult to reason, a completely insane law called NAGPRA, or Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, mandates that all bones found on any tribe’s territory are the ancestors of that tribe and must be returned to the tribe for reburial. This idiotic law is completely anti-scientific, but most Amerindians, even highly educated ones, get pretty huffy about defending it (Trust me!). Hence there has been a huge battle over the bones of Kennewick Man. Equally idiotically, White Nationalists insist that Kennewick Man is a Caucasian, so that means he is one of theirs. They also use this to conveniently note that Whites occupied the US before the Indians, and therefore, that the Amerindians implicitly have no rights to the place and that the land-theft of Amerindian America by Whites was right and proper. This is even more insane than Zionism by orders of magnitude. First of all, Kennewick Man is not a Caucasian! He just sort of looks like one. But that is only because Polynesians, the Ainu and even Aborigines look somewhat Caucasian. This is not due to Caucasian genes, but is instead simply a case of convergent evolution. These dual episodes above, like the Asian paleontologist morons above, adds weight to my hypothesis that ethnic nationalism, and nationalism in general, turns people into dithering morons. Among other reasons, that is why this proudly internationalist blog casts such a wary eye on nationalism of all kinds. The prehistory of SE Asia follows a similar storyline. Once again, all of SE Asia was inhabited by Australoids. They probably looked something like the Negritos of today. Skulls from 9,000-11,000 years ago in SE Asia (including Southern China) resemble modern-day Australoids. The oldest skulls in Vietnam Andaman Islands Negritos. This type was probably the main human type all throughout SE Asia, and a variation of this type was in NE Asia too. These are really the first people to come out of Africa. Afrocentrists like to say that these people are Black, but the truth is that these people are very far away from Black people – in fact, they are Asians. Andaman Islanders have peppercorn hair like the hair of the Bushmen in Africa. This would differentiate this group from the woolly-haired Negritos in the Philippines. Genetic studies have shown that the Andaman Islanders are quite probably the precise remains of the first people to come out of Africa. Genetically, they tend to resemble whatever group they are living around, with some distinct variations. In truth, this group here, the Andamans, is one of the “purest” ethnic groups on Earth, because they have been evolving in isolation for so long. This is known as genetic drift. At the same time, I think there is little diversity internally in their genome, also due to drift. The Andaman Negritos are part of the Andaman Islands Negrito Race. Their strange and poorly understood languages are not related to any others, but there is some speculation that they are related to Kusunda in Nepal, a language isolate. I tend to agree with that theory. One of the problems with genetic drift is after a while you get an “island” effect where the population lacks genetic diversity, since diversity comes from inputs from outside populations. Hence they tend to be vulnerable to changes in the environment that a more genetically diverse population would be able to weather a lot better. Although racist idiot Richard Lynn likes to claim that all people like this have primitive languages, the truth is that the Andaman languages are so maddeningly complex that we are still having a hard time making sense out of them. As in the case of Melanesians, Papuans and some Indian tribals, Afrocentrists like to claim that the Negritos are “Africans”, i.e., Black people. The truth is that Negritos are one of the most distant groups on Earth to existing Black populations. Negrito populations tend to be related, though not closely, with whatever non-Negrito population are in the vicinity. This is due to interbreeding over the years. Furthermore, most, if not all, Negritos are racially Asians, not Africans. Another misconception is that Negritos are Australoids. Genetically, the vast majority of them do not fall into the Papuan or Australian races, but anthropometrically, at least some are Australoid. There is a lot of discrimination against these people wherever they reside, where they are usually despised by the locals. White Supremacists have a particular contempt for them. As a side note, although White Supremacists like to talk about how ugly these people are, I think these Negrito women are really cute and delightful looking, but do you think they have large teeth? Some say Negritos have large teeth.

Around 8,500 years ago, the newly minted NE Asians, who had just transitioned from Australoids to NE Asians, came down from the north into the south in a massive influx, displacing the native Australoids. We can still see the results today. Based on teeth, SE Asians have teeth mixed between Australoids (Melanesians) and NE Asians. Yet, as noted above, there are few Australoid genes in SE Asians.

8,500 years ago, NE Asians moved down into SE Asia, displacing the native Australoids and creating the SE Asian race. If NE Asians are so smart though, I want to know what these women are doing wearing bathing suits in the freezing cold. Compare the appearance of these Northern Chinese to other NE Asian mainland groups above.

A prominent anthropology blogger suggests that a similar process occurred possibly around the same time in South Asia and the Middle East, where proto-Caucasians moved in and supplanted an native Australoid mix. One group that was originally thought to be related to the remains of the original SE Asians is called the Yumbri, a group of primitive hunter-gatherers who live in the jungles of northern Laos and Thailand. Some think that the Yumbri may be the remains of the aboriginal people of Thailand, Laos and possibly Cambodia, but there is controversy about this.

Yumbri noble savages racing through the Thai rain forest. The group is seldom seen and little is known about them. They are thought to number only 200 or so anymore, and there are fears that they may be dying out. This paper indicates via genetics that the Yumbri are a Khmuic group that were former agriculturalists who for some odd reason gave up agriculture to go back to the jungles and live the hunter-gatherer way. This is one of the very few case cases of agriculturalists reverting to hunting and gathering. The language looks like Khmuic (especially one Khmu language – Tin) but it also seems to have some unknown other language embedded in it. Genetics shows they have only existed for around 800 years and they have very little genetic diversity. The low genetic diversity means that they underwent a genetic bottleneck, in this case so severe that the Yumbri may have been reduced to only one female and 1-4 males. It is interesting that the Tin Prai (a Tin group) has a legend about the origin of the Yumbri in which two children were expelled from the tribe and sent on a canoe downstream. They survived and melted into the forest where they took up a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The Khmu are an Austroasiatic group that are thought to be the indigenous people of Laos, living there for 4,000 years before the Lao (Thai) came down 800 years ago and largely displaced them from the lowlands into the hills. The Austroasiatic homeland is usually thought to be somewhere in Central China (specifically around the Middle Yangtze River Valley), but there are some who think it was in India. They moved from there down into SE Asia over possibly 5,000 years or so. Many Austroasiatics began moving down into SE Asia during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties due to Han pushing south, but the expansion had actually started about 8,500 years ago. At this time, SE Asia was mostly populated by Negrito types. The suggestion is that the Austroasiatics displaced the Negritos, and there was little interbreeding. The Austroasiatic languages are thought to be the languages of the original people of SE Asia and India, with families like Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Indo-European and Dravidian being latecomers. There are possible deep linguistic roots with the Austronesian Family, and genetically, the Austroasiatics are related to Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai and the Hmong-Mien speakers.

There is an interesting paradox with the Southern Chinese in that genetically, they look like SE Asians, but they have IQ’s more like NE Asians, around ~105. There do not seem to be any reasonable theories about why this is so. It is true that NE Asians came down and moved into SE Asia, but they moved into the whole area, not just Southern China, yet SE Asian IQ’s are not nearly as high as Southern Chinese IQ’s. Of relevance to the IQ debate is that Asians, especially NE Asians, score lower on self-esteem than Blacks, yet they do much better in school. This would tend to argue against the contention of many that Black relatively poor school performance is a consequence of them not feeling good about themselves. This seems to poke one more hole in Richard Lynn’s theory that a journey through the Ice Age is necessary for a high IQ, as the Southern Chinese made no such sojourn. As a result of the Northern and Southern mix in Southern China, groups such as the Yunnanese are quite a mixed group. Yunnanese are mostly southern and are extremely distant from NE Asians. The Wa are a group in the area that is almost equally mixed with northern and southern admixture.

Two pretty Laotian girls being starved to death by murderous Communist killers in Laos. The Lao are related to the Thai and are members of the Tai Race that includes the Lao, Thai, Aini, Deang, Blang, Vietnamese, Muong, Shan, Dai and Naxi peoples. The Lao language is a member of the Tai language family. The Thai are related to the Tai group in Yunnan in Southern China. They evolved there about 4,000 years ago and then gave birth to a number of groups in the region. The modern Thai are latecomers to the region, moving into the area in huge numbers only about 700 years ago to become the Lao, Thai and Shan. The Lao are the descendants of recent Tai immigrants who interbred heavily with existing Chinese and Mon-Khmer populations. Gorgeous Dai women in China. The Dai are an ethnic group in China, mostly in Yunnan, who are related to the Thai – they are also members of the Tai Race and speak a Tai language . It looks like the Thai split off from the larger Dai group and moved into Thailand in recent centuries. The Dai were together with the Zhuang, another Yunnan group, as the proto-Tai north of Yunnan about 5000 years ago. They moved south into Yunnan and split into the Zhuang and the Tai. There were also Tai movements south into Vietnam via Yunnan. More Dai, this time two young Dai men from Thailand. They do seem to look a bit different from other Thais, eh? They look a little more Chinese to me. The Thai are not the only ethnic group in Thailand; there are 74 languages spoken there, and almost all are in good shape. These people apparently speak the Tai Nüa language. A proud Dai father in China, where they Dai are an official nationality together with the Zhuang. He’s got some problems with his teeth, but that is pretty typical in most of the world, where people usually lack modern dental care. A photo of a Thai waitress in Bangkok getting ready to serve some of that yummy Thai food. Note that she looks different from the Dai above – more Southeast Asian and less Chinese like the Dai. The Thai are also members of the Tai Race. Another pic of a Thai street vendor. The Thai are darker and less Chinese-looking than the lighter Dai. The Tai people are thought to have come from Taiwan over 5,000 years ago. They left Taiwan for the mainland and then moved into Southwest China, which is thought to be their homeland. Then, 5,000 years ago, they split with the Zhuang. The Zhuang went to Guangxi and the Tai went to Yunnan. A Thai monk. Am I hallucinating or does this guy look sort of Caucasian? In Thai society, it is normal for a young man to go off and become a monk for a couple of years around ages 18-20. Many Thai men and most Lao men do this. I keep thinking this might be a good idea in our society. Khrushchev used to send them off to work in the fields for a couple of years at this age.

Nevertheless, most Yunnanese have SE Asian More beautiful women, this time from Yunnan, in Communist-controlled China. Look at the miserable faces on these poor, starving women as they suffer through Communist terror and wholesale murder. Yunnan was the starting point for most of peoples in the region, including the Tai, the Hmong, the Mon-Khmer, the Vietnamese, the Taiwanese aborigines and from there to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. In a sense, almost all of SE Asia was settled via a southward and southeastward movement out of Yunnan. Why so many groups migrated out of Yunnan is not known, but they may have being pushed out of there via continuous southward movements by Northern Han. Yunnan was seen as a sort of rearguard base and sanctuary for many Chinese ethnic groups who were being pushed out of their areas, mostly by Han expansions. The terrain was rough but fertile. At some point, the Han started pushing down into Yunnan and that is when many southward expansions into SE Asia over the last 5000 or so years took place. A discussion of Asian racial features and their possible evolution is here.

Tibetans are close to NE Asians genetically, though they are located in the South. This is because they evolved in NE Asia and only recently moved down into Tibet. After coming into Tibet, they moved down into Burma. Many of today’s Burmese came from Tibet.

A Tibetan tourist in India. This woman has more of a classic Tibetan look than the younger woman below. Tibetans characteristically have darker skin than many NE Asians – Tibetans are actually NE Asians displaced to the south in fairly recent times. Although it is high and cold in Tibet, the region is at a more southerly latitude. Nevertheless, UV radiation is very intense in Tibet, which probably accounts for the darker skin. It looks like all humans were pretty dark at the start and in some cases have lost melanin in cold climes where they needed to lighten to get Vitamin D. White skin in Europe is merely 9,000 years old, so European Whites never went through any brain-sharpening Ice Age either. Tibetans are members of the General Tibetan Race, which includes the Tibetan, Nakhi, Lisu, Nu, Karen, Adi, Tujia, Hui and Kachin peoples. They speak a Tibeto-Burman language, part of the larger Sino-Tibetan family. My observant Chinese commenter notes about the Tibetans: “As for the Tibetans, they seem to be primarily Northeast Asian (they look to be the most “yellow” of any Asians) with some other (South Asian-looking) element that interbred with them fairly recently. They tend to also be more ruddy, and have skin tones from reddish to yellow to brown. You can see some similarities with Burmese, but they are distinct. Another thing to note is that the prevalence of colored hair and eyes is relatively higher in Tibet.A gorgeous Tibetan woman, but to me she does not look typically Tibetan. Note that she seems to have put some whitening powder on her face – note contrast between her face and her darker hand. Although this blog supports Tibetan freedom and opposed the colonial Chinese takeover and racist ethnic cleansing of the Tibetan people by the Chinese Communists, it should nevertheless be noted that the wonderful regime that the Dalai Lama apparently wants to bring back was one of the most vicious forms of pure feudalism existing into modern times, where the vast majority of the population were serf-slaves for the Buddhist religious ruling class. Yes, that wonderful religion called Buddhism has its downside. The Buddhist paradise of Burma, run by one of the most evil military dictatorships on Earth (No satire in that sentence). I thought Buddhists were supposed to be peace loving? A Burmese woman with classic Burmese features. The Burmese, better known as the Bamar, are members of the General Tibetan Race. Boy, she sure is cute. And yes, I do have a thing for Asian women. I think I need to retitle this post Hot Asian Babes.

There are several interesting points in the sketch above. First of all, much as it pains them to be compared to people whom they probably consider to be inferior, all NE Asians were originally Australoids similar to the Australian Aborigines. NE Asians like to accuse SE Asians of being mostly an “Australoid” group, an analysis that is shared by many amateur anthropologists on the web. We will look into this question more in the future, but it appears that both NE and SE Asians are derived from Australoid stock. Further, there are few Australoid genes left in any mainland SE Asians and none in most SE Asians. It is true that Melanesians, Polynesians and Micronesians are part-Australoid in that the latter two are derived from Melanesians, who are derived from Austronesians mixed with Papuans. Any analysis that concludes that non-Oceanic SE Asians are “part-Australoid” is dubious. If anything, NE Asians are closer to Australoids than most SE Asians. The Japanese and Koreans are probably closer to Australian Aborigines than any other group in Asia. I am certain that the ultranationalist and racialist Japanese at least will not be pleased to learn this. Second, we note that all Asians are related, and that the proto-Asian homeland was in northern Vietnam. It follows that NE Asians are in fact derived from the very SE Asians whom the NE Asians consider to be inferior. A NE Asian who is well versed in these matters (He was of the “SE Asians are part-Australoid” persuasion) was not happy to hear my opinion at all, and left sputtering and mumbling. NE Asian superiority over SE Asians is a common point of view, especially amongst Japanese – the Japanese especially look down on Koreans (Their fellow NE Asians!), Vietnamese, Filipinos (the “niggers of Asia”), the Hmong (the “hillbillies of Asia”) and the Khmer.

The beautiful, intelligent, civilized and accomplished Koreans. Tell me, the Japanese look down on these people are inferiors why now? Note the rather distinct short and stocky appearance, possibly a heat-preserving adaptation to cold weather. Note also the moon-shaped face. The Koreans seem to have come down from Mongolia about 5,000 years ago and completely displaced an unknown native group, but don’t tell any Korean that. Koreans are members of the Japanese-Korean Race and the Korean language is said to be a language isolate, but I think it is distantly related to Japanese, Ainu and Gilyak in a separate, distant branch of Altaic. My Chinese commenter adds: “I get the impression that Koreans are at least comprised two major physically discernible groups. Some of them have a shade of skin similar to the Inuit or Na Dene. But I think they have intermixed quite a lot during some relatively stable 5,000+ year period, which results in a fairly even spectrum.”

Third, Richard Lynn’s Ice Age Theory takes another hit as he can explain neither the Southern Chinese high IQ, nor the genesis of high-IQ NE Asians from lower-IQ SE Asians, nor the fact that NE Asians do not appear in the anthropological record until 9,000 years ago (after the Ice Age that supposedly molded those fantastic brains of theirs), nor the genesis of these brainy folks via Australoids, whom Lynn says are idiots. Fourth, the Negritos, who are widely reviled in their respective countries as inferiors, are looking more and more like the ancestors of many of us proud humans. Perhaps a little respect for the living incarnations of our ancient relatives is in order.

Does Speaking Indic As a Native Language Help You Learn English?

Commenters are discussing this question. Mr. India first said that Indians speak English well because they speak an Indo-European language natively. First of all, it’s dubious whether most Indians speak an Indic language natively. Many speak Dravidian and Asiatic languages natively.

Wade: I doubt that the fact that both are Indo-European really matters a lot. I doubt learning Russian would be easy just because I speak English. The European countries don’t have a “native” English tradition implanted by colonialism like India does.Cyrus: Trust me when I say it does, Wade. It is more than just remembering words, but a way of thinking. For you to learn Russia would be simpler than if you tried to learn Chinese. Like wise, you could pick up Persian far easier than Turkish. I’ve seen that happen over and over again.

The problem is that the obvious cognates are few and far between. I know Indo-European studies pretty well, and I have been through a lot of the IE etymological dictionary (Pokorny). Indic is one of the most screwed up branches as far as cognates with English are concerned. Sure there are lots of cognates, but they look little or nothing like their English cognate words! Iranic is similar – there are almost no obvious cognates left that I’m aware of. The cognates are there, but they are badly mangled. Slavic is bad too, but I think maybe not quite as bad as Indo-Iranian. Baltic is bad, maybe the same as Slavic or closer. The closest to English are obviously Germanic and Italic, which obviously has lots of words in which cognates line up quite well with English words, though in many cases the only English word cognate anymore is a dead one from Old English or Middle English. For some reason, Celtic is actually ok as far as English cognates, but a lot of them are pretty removed from the English word, and it’s a stretch to see how the Celtic looks like the English word. But it’s probably second after Italic – Germanic. Greek is ok due to all the borrowings, but there’s not a lot there either, plus the alphabet is different, so that seems to ruin everything. Albanian and Armenian are disasters. There’s virtually nothing left, and the few cognates typically look almost nothing like the English word. I have known many speakers of Dravidian languages and many speakers of Indian Indic languages. The Dravidian speakers’ English is no better or worse than the Indic speakers’ English. Speaking Indic as a native language seems to be little or no benefit in learning English as opposed to speaking Dravidian as a native language.

A Rather Subjective Analysis of European Minority Languages

One way to see how well European minority languages is if you run a popular website that gets a lot of hits from all over Europe. I run one here on my old site, which is in the top 1200 blogs on the Internet (This blog is also in the top 1200). If you have a good weblog (a weblog allows a webmaster to monitor all of the visitors from your site), and I do, you can see what languages people are using on their browsers. When browsers come to the site, they are marked with language tracking. I am not sure if that is a language preference for webpages or if it is the language that the browser itself is written in. Minority lanugages are languages that are not the main spoken language of the country or languages that only have a small speaker base. In this piece, we will be dealing with Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Luxemburgish. Those I am quite sure are offered as language versions of the major browsers. Luxemburgish: Luxemburgish is the official language of Luxemburg, however, there are worries about it due to the small speaker base of only around 500,000. Further, there is a problem in that not enough new and technological words are coming into the language. Most browsers from Luxemburg are using the Luxemburgish language, so the language seems to be in pretty good shape. Catalan: Catalan is the most popular of the remaining five. However, considering how many readers I get from the Catalan region, very few Catalans are using Catalan browsers. Most are using Spanish language browsers. So the situation of Catalan does not look so good. Irish: I am amazed that there are any Irish browsers at all, but now and then, we do get one from Ireland. Needless to say, nearly all browsers from Ireland are using English. Still, everyone knows that Irish is in bad shape. Considering there are Irish browsers at all, I think Irish is in better shape than we think it is. Galician: I was quite shocked to find a few Galician browsers out there coming out of Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. This language is probably in better shape than people think it is. Most Galician browsers use Spanish. Welsh: Considering that most reports indicate that Welsh is doing pretty well, I was surprised that one almost never sees a Welsh browser. Almost all browsers coming out of Wales use English. I wonder if Welsh is in as good a shape as people say it is considering the dearth of Welsh browsers. Basque: I have yet to see a Basque browser! If browsers are indeed offered in Basque (uncertain) this is very bad news. I get quite a bit of traffic out of the Basque country, and 10 I can’t speak of other small languages in Europe because in general, browsers are not offered in those languages. This was an interesting little experiment though.

Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family

A more updated version of this paper with working hyperlinks can be found on Academia.edu here. There is much nonsense said about the mutual intelligibility of the various languages in the Slavic family. It’s often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. This is simply not the case. Method: It is important to note that the percentages are in general only for oral intelligibility and only in the case of a situation of a pure inherent intelligibility test. An inherent pure inherent intelligibility test would involve a a speaker of Slavic lect A listening to a tape or video of a speaker of Slavic Lect A. Written intelligibility is often very different from oral intelligibility in that in a number of cases, it tends to be higher, often much higher, than oral intelligibility. Written intelligibility was only calculated for a number of language pairs. Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. A number of native speakers of various Slavic lects were interviewed about mutual intelligibility, language/dialect confusion, the state of their language, its history and so on. In addition, a Net search was done of forums where speakers of Slavic languages were discussing how much of other Slavic languages they understand. These figures were tallied up for each pair of languages to be tabulated and were then all averaged together. Hence the figures are averages taken from statements by native speakers of the languages in question. Complaints have been made that many of these percentages were simply wild guesses with no science behind them. This is not the case, as all figures were derived from estimates by native speakers themselves, often a number of estimates averaged together. True science would involve scientific intelligibility testing of Slavic language pairs. The problem is that most linguists are not interested in scientific intelligibility testing of language pairs. Conclusion: Serbo-Croatian (Shtokavian) has 5 Chakavian has 8 Kajkavian has 8 Bulgarian has 8 Macedonian has 6 Czech has 9 Polish has 2 Russian has 8 Belarussian has 8 Ukrainian has 8 Slovak has 9 Eastern Slovak has 8 Saris Slovak has 8   Reactions: So far there have been few reactions to the paper. However, a Croatian linguist has helped me write part of the Croatian section, and he felt that at least that part of the paper was accurate. A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. He was a member of a group of linguists who met periodically to discuss the field. He printed out the paper and showed it to his colleagues at the next meeting, and they spent some time discussing it. Now onto the discussion. There is much nonsense floating around about Serbo-Croatian or Shtokavian. The main Shtokavian dialects of Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian are mutually intelligible. However, the Croatian macrolanguage has strange lects that Standard Croatian (Štokavian) cannot understand. For instance, Čakavian Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. It consists of at least four major dialects, Ekavian Chakavian, spoken on the Istrian Peninsula, Ikavian Chakavian, spoken in southwestern Istria, the islands of Brač, Hvar, Vis, Korčula, and Šolta, the Pelješac Peninsula, the Dalmatian coast at Zadar, the outskirts of Split and inland at Gacka, Middle Chakavian, which is Ikavian-Ekavian transitional, and Ijekavian Chakavian, spoken at the far southern end of the Chakavian language area on Lastovo Island, Janjina on the Pelješac Peninsula, and Bigova in the far south near the border with Montenegro. Ekavian Chakavian has two branches – Buzet and Northern Chakavian. Buzet is actually transitional between Slovenian and Kajkavian. It was formerly thought to be a Slovenian dialect, but some now think it is more properly a Kajkavian dialect. There are some dialects around Buzet that seem to be the remains of old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects (Jembrigh 2014). Ikavian Chakavian has two branches – Southwestern Istrian and Southern Chakavian. The latter is heavily mixed with Shtokavian. Some reports say there is difficult intelligibility between Ekavian Chakavian in the north and Ikavian Chakavian in the far south, but speakers of Labin Ekavian in the far north say they can understand the Southeastern Istrian speech of the southern islands very well (Jembrigh 2014). Čakavian differs from the other nearby Slavic lects spoken in the country due to the presence of many Italian words. Chakavian actually has a written heritage, but it was mostly written down long ago. Writing in Chakavian started very early in the Middle Ages and began to slow down in the 1500’s when writing in Kajkavian began to rise. However, Chakavian magazines are published even today (Jembrigh 2014). Although Chakavian is clearly a separate language from Shtokavian Croatian, in Croatia it is said that there is only one Croatian language, and that is Shtokavian Croatian. The idea is that the Kajkavian and Chakavian languages simply do not exist, though obviously they are both separate languages. Recently a Croatian linguist forwarded a proposal to formally recognize Chakavian as a separate language, but the famous Croatian Slavicist Radoslav Katičić argued with him about this and rejected the proposal on political, not linguistic grounds. This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). Kajkavian Croatian, spoken in northwest Croatia and similar to Slovenian, is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. Kajkavian is fairly uniform across its speech area, whereas Chakavian is more diverse (Jembrigh 2014). In the 1500’s, Kajkavian began to be developed in a standard literary form. From the 1500’s to 1900, a large corpus of Kajkavian literature was written. Kajkavian was removed from public use after 1900, hence writing in the standard Kajkavian literary language was curtailed. Nevertheless, writing continues in various Kajkavian dialects which still retain some connection to the old literary language, although some of the  lexicon and grammar are going out (Jembrigh 2014). Most Croatian linguists recognized Kajkavian as a separate language. However, any suggestions that Kajkavian is a separate language are censored on Croatian TV (Jembrigh 2014). Nevertheless, the ISO has recently accepted a proposal from the Kajkavian Renaissance Association to list the Kajkavian literary language written from the 1500’s-1900 as a recognized language with an ISO code of kjv. The literary language itself is no longer written, but works written in it are still used in public for instance in dramas and church masses (Jembrigh 2014). This is heartening, although Kajkavian as an existing spoken lect also needs to be recognized as a living language instead of a dialect of “Croatian,” whatever that word means. Furthermore, there is a dialect continuum between Kajkavian and Chakavian as there is between Kajkavian and Slovenian, and lects with a dialect continuum between them are always separate languages. There is an old Kajkavian-Chakavian dialect continuum of which little remains, although some of the old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects are still spoken (Jembrigh 2014). Kajkavian differs from the other Slavic lects spoken in Croatia in that is has many Hungarian and German loans (Jembrigh 2014). Kajkavian is probably closer to Slovenian than it is to Chakavian. Nevertheless, although intelligibility with Slovenian is high, Kajkavian lacks full intelligibility with Slovenian. Yet there is a dialect continuum between Slovenian and Kajkavian. Kajkavian, especially the Zagorje Kajkavian dialect around Zagreb, is close to the Stajerska dialect of Slovene. However, leaving aside Kajkavian speakers, Croatians have poor intelligibility of Slovenian. Chakavian and Kajkavian have high, but not full mutual intelligibility. Intelligibility between the two is estimated at 8 Molise Croatian is a Croatian language spoken in a few towns in Italy, such as Acquaviva Collecroce and two other towns. A different dialect is spoken in each town. Despite a lot of commonality between the dialects, the differences between them are significant. A koine is currently under development. The Croatians left Croatia and came to Italy from 1400-1500. The base of Molise Croatian was Shtokavian with an Ikavian accent and a heavy Chakavian base similar to what is now spoken as Southern Kajkavian Ikavian on the islands of Croatia. Molise Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. Burgenland Croatian, spoken in Austria, is intelligible to Croatian speakers in Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, but it has poor intelligibility with the Croatian spoken in Croatia. Therefore, for the moment, there are five separate Croatian languages: Shtokavian Croatian, Kajkavian Croatian, Chakavian Croatian, Molise Croatian, and Burgenland Croatian. Serbian is a macrolanguage made up to two languages: Shtokavian Serbian and Torlak or Gorlak Serbian. Shtokavian is simply the same Serbo-Croatian language that is also spoken in Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. It forms a single tongue and is not several separate languages as many insist. The claim for separate languages is based more on politics than on linguistic science. Torlak Serbian is spoken in the south and southwest of Serbia and is transitional to Macedonian. It is not intelligible with Shtokavian, although this is controversial. Torlakians are often said to speak Bulgarian, but this is not exactly the case. More properly, their speech is best seen as closer to Macedonian than to Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. The Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in both Macedonian and Torlakian is very similar, stemming from the political changes of 1912; whereas these words have changed more in Bulgarian. The Torlakian spoken in the southeast is different. It is not really either Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian, but instead it is best said that they are speaking a mixed Bulgarian-Serbo-Croatian language. In the towns of Pirot and Vranje, it cannot be said that they speak Serbo-Croatian; instead they speak this Bulgarian-Serbo-Croatian mixed speech. It’s also said that Serbo-Croatian can understand Bulgarian and Macedonian, but this is not true. However, the Torlak Serbians can understand Macedonian well, as this is a Serbo-Croatian dialect transitional to both languages. Intelligibility in the Slavic languages of the Balkans is much exaggerated. Slovenian speakers find it hard to understand most of the other Yugoslav lects except for Kajkavian Croatian. Serbo-Croatian intelligibility of Slovenian is 25-3 A lect called Čičarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. This is a Chakavian-Slovenian transitional lect that is hard to categorize, but it is usually considered to be a Slovenian dialect. Bulgarian and Macedonian can understand each other to a great degree (65-8 Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 5 However, Bulgarian-Russian written intelligibility is much higher. Bulgarian and Russian are close because the Ottoman rulers of Bulgaria would not allow printing in Bulgaria. Hence, many religious books were imported from Russia, and these books influenced Bulgarian. Russian influence only ended in 1878. Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have 10-1 This difference is because Bulgarian is not spoken the same way it is written like Serbo-Croatian is. However, Bulgarians claim to be able to understand Serbo-Croatian better than the other way around. There is a group of Bulgarians living in Serbia in the areas of Bosilegrad and Dimitrovgrad who speak a Bulgarian-Serbian transitional dialect, and Serbs are able to understand these Bulgarians well. Serbo-Croatian has variable intelligibility of Macedonian, averaging ~5 Most Macedonians already are able to speak Serbo-Croatian well. This gives rise to claims of Macedonians being able to understand Serbo-Croatian very well, however, much of this may be due to bilingual learning. In fact, many Macedonians are switching away from the Macedonian language towards Serbo-Croatian. The Macedonian spoken near the Serbian border is heavily influenced by Serbo-Croatian and is quite a bit different from the Macedonian spoken towards the center of Macedonia. One way to look at Macedonian is that it is a Serbo-Croatian-Bulgarian transitional lect. The intelligibility of Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian is highly controversial, and intelligibility studies are in order. Croats say Macedonian is a complete mystery to them. Czech and Polish are incomprehensible to Serbo-Croatian speakers (Czech 1 Serbo-Croatian and Russian have 10-1 Serbo-Croatian has only 2 Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. It’s often said that Czechs and Poles can understand each other, but this is not so. Much of the claimed intelligibility is simply bilingual learning. Czechs claim only 10-1 The intelligibility of Polish and Russian is very low, on the order of 5-1 Silesian or Upper Silesian is also a separate language spoken in Poland, often thought to be halfway between Polish and Czech. It may have been split from Polish for up to 800 years, where it underwent heavy German influence. Polish lacks full intelligibility of Silesian, although this is controversial (see below). Some Poles say they find Silesian harder to understand than Belorussian or Slovak, which implies intelligibility of 20-2 The more German the Silesian dialect is, the harder it is for Poles to understand. In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. Poles who know German and Old Polish can understand Silesian quite well due to the Germanisms and the presence of many older Polish words, but Poles who speak only Polish have a hard time with Silesian. Many Poles insist that Silesian is a Polish dialect, but this is based more on politics than reality. In fact, people in the north of Poland regard Silesian as incomprehensible. 4 Silesian itself appears to be a macrolanguage as it is more than one language since as Opole Silesian speakers cannot understand Katowice Silesian, so Opole Silesian and Katowice Silesian are two different languages. Cieszyn Silesian or Ponaszymu is a language closely related to Silesian spoken in Czechoslovakia in the far northeast of the country near the Polish and Slovak borders. It differs from the rest of Silesian in that it has undergone heavy Czech influence. Some say it is a part of Czech, but more likely it is a part of Polish like Silesian. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. Cieszyn Silesian speakers strongly reject the notion that they speak the same language as Upper Silesians. Ponaszymu also has many Germanisms which have been falling out of use lately, replaced by their Czech equivalents. Ponaszymu appears to lack full intelligibility with Czech. In fact, some say the intelligibility between the two is near zero. Lach is a Czech-Polish transitional lect with a close relationship with Cieszyn Silesian. However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. Instead Eastern Lach and Western Lach have difficult intelligibility and are separate languages, so Lach itself is a macrolanguage. Lach is not fully intelligible with Czech; indeed, the differences between Lach and Czech are greater than the differences between Silesian and Polish, despite the fact that Lach has been heavily leveling into Moravian Czech for the last 100 years. Czechs say Lach is a part of Czech, and Poles say Lach is a part of Polish. The standard view among linguists seems to be that Lach is a part of Czech. However, another view is that Lach is indeed Lechitic, albeit with strong Czech influence. It is often said that Ukrainian and Russian are intelligible with each other or even that they are the same language (a view perpetuated by Russian nationalists). It is not true at all that Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible, as Russian only has 5 However, there are dialects in between Ukrainian and Russian such as the Eastern Polissian and Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian that are intelligible with both languages. Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. Nevertheless Ukrainian intelligibility of Russian is hard to calculate because presently there are few Ukrainians in Ukraine who do not speak Russian. Most of the Ukrainian speakers who do not speak Russian are in Canada at the moment. In addition, the Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian and Russian such as (Slobozhan Ukrainian and Slobozhan Russian) spoken in Kantemirov (Voronezhskaya Oblast, Russia), and Kuban Russian or Balachka spoken in the Kuban area right over the eastern border of Ukraine are very close to each other. Slobozhan Russian can also be called Kuban Russian or Balachka. It is best seen as a Ukrainian dialect spoken in Russia – specifically, it is markedly similar to the Poltavian dialect of Ukrainian spoken in Poltava in Central Ukraine. Although the standard view is that Balachka is a Ukrainian dialect, some linguists say that it is actually a separate language closely related to Ukrainian. An academic paper has been published making the case for a separate Balachka language. In addition, Balachka language associations believe it is a separate language. Intelligibility between Balachka and Ukrainian is not known. Russian only has 6 However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. Most people in the region speak Russian with a few Ukrainian words. Slobozhan Russian is very close to Ukrainian, closer to Ukrainian than it is to Russian, and Slobozhan Ukrainian is very close to Russian, closer to Russian than to Ukrainian. Slobozhan Ukrainian speakers in this region find it easier to understand their Russian neighbors than the Upper Dnistrian Ukrainian spoken in the far west in the countryside around Lviv. Upper Dnistrian is influenced by German and Polish. The Russian language in the Ukraine has been declining recently mostly because since independence, the authorities have striven to make the new Ukrainian as far away from Russian as possible by adopting the Kharkiv Standard adopted in 1927 and jettisoning the 1932 Standard which brought Ukrainian more in line with Russian. For instance, in 1932, Ukrainian g was eliminated from the alphabet in order to make Ukrainian h correspond perfectly with Russian g. After 1991, the g returned to Ukrainian. Hence, Russians understand the colloquial Ukrainian spoken in the countryside pretty well, but they understand the modern standard heard on TV much less. This is because colloquial Ukrainian is closer to the Ukrainian spoken in the Soviet era which had huge Russian influence. The intelligibility of Belarussian with both Ukrainian and Russian is a source of controversy. On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. For instance, West Palesian is a transitional Belarussian dialect to Ukrainian. Some say that West Palesian is actually a separate language, but the majority of Belarussian linguists say it is a dialect of Belarussian (Mezentseva 2014). Belarussian and Ukrainian have 8 Russian has high intelligibility of Belarussian, on the order of 7 From some reason, the Hutsul, Lemko, and Boiko dialects of the Rusyn language are much more comprehensible to Russians than Standard Ukrainian is. Intelligibility may be 8 The Lemko dialect of Rusyn has only marginal intelligibility with Ukrainian. Lemko is spoken heavily in Poland, and it differs from Standard Rusyn in that it has a lot of Polish vocabulary, whereas Standard Rusyn has more influences from Hungarian and Romanian. The Rusyn language is composed of 5 Pannonian Rusyn is spoken by a group of Rusyns who migrated to northwestern Serbia (the Bachka region in Vojvodina province) and Eastern Croatia from Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine 250 years ago. Pannonian Rusyn is actually a part of Slovak, and Rusyn proper is really a part of Ukrainian. Pannonian Rusyn lacks full intelligibility of Rusyn proper. Not only that, but it is not even fully intelligible with the Eastern Slovak that it resembles most. The intelligibility of Czech and Slovak is much exaggerated. It is true that Western Slovak dialects can understand Czech well, but Central Slovak, Eastern Slovak and Extraslovakian Slovak dialects cannot. It is also said that West Slovak (Bratislava) cannot understand East Slovak, so Slovak may actually two different languages, but this is controversial. Western Slovak speakers say Eastern Slovak sounds idiotic and ridiculous, and some words are different, but other than that, they can basically understand it. Other Western Slovak speakers (Bratislava) say that Eastern Slovak (Kosice) is hard to understand. Bratislava speakers say that Kosice speech sounds half Slovak and half Ukrainian and uses many odd and unfamiliar words. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. Much of the claimed intelligibility between Czech and Slovak was simply bilingual learning. Since the breakup, young Czechs and Slovaks understand each other worse since they have less contact with each other. In the former Czechoslovakia, everything was 50-50 bilingual – media, literature, etc. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people don’t understand Slovak so well. Intelligibility problems are mostly on the Czech end because they don’t bother to learn Slovak while many Slovaks learn Czech. There is as much Czech literature and media as Slovak literature and media in Slovakia, and many Slovaks study at Czech universities. When there, they have to pass a language test. Czechs hardly ever study at Slovak universities. Czechs see Slovaks as country bumpkins – backwards and folksy but optimistic, outgoing and friendly. Czechs are more urbane. The written languages differ much more than the spoken ones. The languages really split about 1,000 years ago, but written Slovak was based on written Czech, and there was a lot of interlingual communication. A Moravian Czech speaker (Eastern Czech) and a Bratislavan Slovak (Western Slovak) speaker understand each other very well. They are essentially speaking the same language. However, in recent years, there has also been quite a bit of bilingual learning. Young Czechs and Slovaks talk to each other a lot via the Internet. There are also some TV shows that show Czech and Slovak contestants untranslated (like in Sweden where Norwegian comics perform untranslated), and most people seem to understand these shows. All foreign movies in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are translated into Czech, not Slovak. Far Northeastern Slovak (Saris Slovak) near the Polish border is close to Polish and Ukrainian. Intelligibility data for Saris Slovak and Ukrainian is not known. Saris Slovak has high but not complete intelligibility of Polish, possibly 8 Southern Slovak on the Hungarian border has a harder time understanding Polish because they do not hear it much. This implies that some of the high intelligibility between Slovak and Polish may be due to bilingual learning on the part of Slovaks. Russian has low intelligibility with Czech and Slovak, maybe 3

References

Jembrigh, Mario. Croatian linguist. December 2014. Personal communication. Mezentseva, Inna. English professor. Vitebsk State University. Vitebsk, Belarus. December 2014. Personal communication. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.

My Language Has More Words Than Yours!

In the comments section, James Schipper comments on the notion that English has more words than, say, Swedish:

Measuring the number of words in a language isn’t very scientific. What is a word? Is it anything that is separated by empty space? If so, then the more words are written as one, the more words there are in a language. Bookkeeper and steamship would be separate words but book publisher and passenger ship would not be. I’m currently reading a book by your Swedish colleague Mikael Parkvall about language myths. One myth that he discusses is Engelska har fler ord än svenska = English has more words than Swedish. He says that no evidence is ever provided for the claim, except to say that English has borrowed a lot. He mocks an English chauvinist who states that English has over 1 million words and French about 100,000 and who then says that English borrowed a lot from other languages, especially from French. In other words, English is rich and French poor because English borrowed a lot from French. As Parkvall sarcastically notes, the English must have borrowed a lot of words from the French without ever paying them back. He says that if all the works of Shakespeare are run through a computer program designed to count words, the result is 29,066. However, if all the works of August Strindberg are run through the same program, the result is 119,288 words! I can easily see why the Swedish count is so high. In Swedish, all nominal compounds are written as one word and the definite article is a suffix. On top of that, the genitive is used more than in English. We have for instance bil = car, bilen = the car, bilar = cars, bilarna, the cars, bils = of a car, bilens = of the car, bilars = of cars, bilarnas = of the cars, bilolycka = car accident, bilägare = car owner, bilmekaniker = car mechanic, bilparkering = car parking, bilbälte = seat belt, etc. How can a computer or anybody else decide how many of these are separate words or not? When the French language had a lot of prestige, people were saying that it was exceptionally clear. Now that English is very prestigious, we keep hearing that it is exceptionally rich. In any case, languages that have borrowed a lot are not uncommon. Moreover, the more a language borrows, the greater the probability that the borrowed words simply displace native words, in which case no enrichment takes place.

I read somewhere that someone said that Dutch has 4 million words! On my other site, we do a lot of translations of posts to other languages. So far, we have done Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Serbo-Croatian, German, French, Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish and Korean. So far, I have had few complaints from translators along the lines of “we don’t have a word or  phrase in our language for that English word or phrase.” Cases of having to use an English word or phrase because no translation was available are few. However, Korean did some to stick out. I am told by Korean speakers that Korean has few to no synonyms. I knew a young Korean-American woman who was stunned by the number of synonyms in English. The Koreans think the plethora of US synonyms is somewhere  between ridiculous and idiotic. Why do you need more than one word with the same meaning? Norwegian, a very small language in terms of speakers, struck me as being particularly word-rich for some reason. An interesting question is how many words a typical primitive language had or has. A study was recently done on one of the Araucanian languages of South America, Yaghan. A recent dictionary of Yaghan listed around 30,000 words! The author made the supposition that your typical primitive language pre-contact had around 30,000 words. No one knows for sure. I worked for 1½ years on a California Indian language called Chukchansi. It’s true that they lacked words for a lot of modern concepts, many more obscure body parts, and many fine gradations of meaning. The speakers were all elderly and spoke English well. The last near-monolingual speaker died around 1965. She spoke English, but it was broken English. These speakers are helpful for a language. I heard from people who knew this woman that she had coined many Chukchansi borrowings and calques for many words having to do with modern living. When the last of the monolingual or near monolingual speakers die, your small language may get in bad shape. Calques and proper borrowings wedded to the phonology of the receptive language will simply disappear. We have many speakers of a SE Asian language called Hmong around here. It has millions of native speakers, but I understand that it lacks many words for modern concepts, even though there large number of monolinguals to near monolinguals around here – older people, especially women. I don’t understand why they don’t borrow English words or engage is calques or word-formations. The Hmong have an interesting cultural concept – if you are over 40, they say that you are too old to learn a foreign language. Hence, a lot of the older Hmong, especially the women, simply do not even try to learn English here in the US.

Tiki-Tiki Has 250 Words?

Repost from the old site. Forget it. Via Marilyn Vos Savant in Parade Magazine, we are told that Tiki-Tiki, otherwise known as Sranan Togo, a creole with 100,000 native speakers and many more second languages speakers on Suriname, has the smallest vocabulary of any known language – with only 250 words. This claim is credulously repeated elsewhere on the Net. It is true that Internet dictionaries of Tiki-Tiki do show few words, possibly as few as several hundred. The SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) page says that Sranan Togo has maybe 3,000-4,000 words, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of words for major world languages (Vos Savant notes that English has the largest vocabulary at 250,000). Many of those English words are neologisms, that is, new words that are being created on the fly, especially on places like the Internet. I actually think that English has more than 250,000 words, but I can’t prove it. As slang and whatnot proliferates in a widely spoken language, it gets pretty darn hard to count up all the words, much less write them all down. There are other ways to create words, so it is not really so true to say that certain languages have low vocabularies. For instance, many languages spoken by small tribes have an almost endless productive variety of features for word production. In some (or perhaps many) such languages, roots can be manipulated almost endlessly to create new words to describe just about anything. Nouns can turn into adjectives, adverbs and verbs and verbs can turn into nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Adding morphological particles onto existing roots creates a process whereby one root could possibly create up to 1000 or so new words if one is creative enough. This potential is lost in much of the nonsense about “primitive” versus “advanced” languages, a distinction that hardly exists anyway. The truth is that the most insanely maddening languages on Earth, languages so crazy that brilliant linguists are still trying to figure them out, are spoken in general by the world’s most primitive and backwards peoples. As a language gets bigger and used more by a civilization, it gets stupidified more and more as it loses its complexity. The reason is that people need to be on time and earn a paycheck. They need to say things quickly, make the sale or hang up the cellphone, and get to work on time. In a more primitive situation, people are hunter-gatherers or they are laid-back agriculturalists who just take it easy and tend their fields all day. Despite blatherings of IQ theorists, even primitive humans are highly intelligent beings. We can prove this by looking at the insanely brilliant languages they have constructed all by their own selves. We think that people get bored in these primitive settings, as their high intellect is not stimulated enough. One of the things these tribes do to stimulate their high intelligence is to play games with languages. This is why you such wildly complicated languages in such places. Much of this complexity is superfluous (noun markers, case endings, etc.) and can easily be jettisoned if one wishes to become a multitasking metrosexual. Anyway, I did some quick research on Sranan Togo and found semantic distinction derived from philosophy. Briefly, a type is a generic and a token is a specific instance of that generic. For instance, tree would be a type and maple tree would be a token. Waterfall would be a type and Vernal Falls would be a token. Man would be a type and Jesus would be a token. So in 1783, an early version of this creole already had 20,122 words. It must only have increased its vocabulary since then. I’m calling bullshit on this 250 words line. A creole is different from a pidgin. A pidgin is often created by immigrants to a new country where none of them understand each other. Early immigrants to Hawaii created some pidgins. Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Koreans, etc. were all thrown together on sugar and pineapple plantations and no one could understand each other. English was the main language. The immigrants took English, I believe, and then layered onto it parts of their native languages and finally created a pidgin that they could all understand. A pidgin is a mess, since it is a language made by adults, and due to brain constraints, adults cannot create a functional language out of thin air on the fly. The pidgin is then spoken to the adults’ kids, who pick it up as a first language. But kids are little language-creating genius machines, and they somehow take this messed-up pidgin and transform into a full-fledged language, a creole, by expanding it in a variety of important ways. The creole is then transmitted to kids again, and soon the pidgin dies and everyone is speaking creole. It took some time for us to figure out what was really going on here, but we are pretty confident that kids are indeed expanding the pidgin and turning it into a creole. A guy named Derek Bickerton at the University of Hawaii has done some great work in this area. I actually bought and tried to read Bickerton’s Language and Species, but I only got 4 In Suriname, actually formerly Dutch Guyana, Sranan Togo is the mother tongue of some 100,000 descendants of former slaves brought to the country. It has also become a lingua franca for other ethnicities in the place, including speakers of Hindustani, Amerindian, Javanese, Dutch, and Chinese tongues. Like all of the Guyanas, there is quite a fine mess of ethnicities in Suriname, and I think they have been breeding together for a while such that race is becoming a bit of an afterthought. As another aside, although Vos Savant, in addition to being a hottie, is quite brilliant and is even smarter than I am, it is not true that she has the highest IQ on Earth, or that her IQ is 220 or whatever. She got that score at age 10 or so. There are others who have gotten sky high scores at that age. At a young age, IQ is computed by looking at how the young person’s mind compares to older peoples minds. In adults, we do not compute it that way, and adult scores are never as high as the same kids’ score. In Vos Savant and other extremely high-IQ kids, their IQ’s have seen considerable regression in adulthood, but they are still sky-high. Glad to see she’s getting a paycheck just by being smart. Wish I could.

References

Braun, Maria and Plag, Ingo. (2002). How Transparent is Creole Morphology? A Study of Early Sranan Word-Formation. University of Siegen, Germany. Yearbook of Morphology 2002. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Schumann, Christian Ludwig. (1783). Neger-Englisches Wörterbuch. Editio Tertia. Paramaribo.

How Learning One Language Well Helps You Learn Others

Repost from the old site. In the comments, the ever-perceptive dano notes:

dano: The thing is, I’ve found that once you learn to speak a European language, and particularly a Latin-based one, you see similarities in many words across the board and a rough kind of pattern emerges, making it easier to learn more languages.

Dano is correct – once you learn one Romance language, you can learn others. Also, the better you know English, the more easily you can learn a Romance language because so many English words have Latin roots. I also have knowledge of Proto Indo-European, so I can see roots that go back even farther back than Latin. It helps to learn Greek and Latin roots in English. That way you can pick up more English words that you don’t know just by figuring out roots. Also it helps a lot with Romance languages. Let’s try a little experiment. I know English very well, including many obscure terms, and I am familiar with many Latin roots. I know Spanish pretty well. I know a tiny bit of French and know a few words in Indo-European. With that knowledge, let us see how far that will get me in Venetian, a language I had never heard of before, and Italian, a language I have never been able to make heads or tails of. Comparison of Venetian and Italian with English, Spanish, French and Indo-European Venetian grasa, Spanish “grasa”, English “gross” fat, corpulent Venetian can, Indo-European “kuon”, French “chien”, English “canine”, “hound”, dog Venetian çena, Spanish “cena”, dinner Venetian scóła, Spanish “escuela”, English “school” Venetian bała, Spanish “bala”, English “ball” Venetian pena, English “pen” Venetian bìsi, English “peas” Venetian diałeto, Spanish “dialecto “, English “dialect” Venetian sgnape, English “schnapps” Venetian scóndar, Spanish “esconder”, English, “abscond”, to hide, to depart rapidly to avoid persecution Venetian baxar, Spanish “besar”, English “buss”, to kiss, kiss Venetian dormir, Spanish “dormir”, English “dormitory”, to sleep Venetian pàre, Spanish “padre”, English “patrilineal”, father, in the father’s family line Venetian parlar, French “parler”, English “parlance”, to speak, way of speaking Venetian scusàr, Spanish “excusar”, English “to excuse”, to forgive Venetian aver, Spanish “haber”, English “to have,” to possess Venetian essar, Spanish “estar”, to be, English “essence,” essential quality of a thing Venetian sentir, Spanish “sentir”, English, “sentiments”, to feel, feelings Venetian venir, Spanish “venir”, to come Venetian cantar, Spanish “cantar”, English “cantata”, to sing, song, “canto,” a type of lyric poetry, Venetian vaca, Spanish “vaca”, cow Venetian vardar, Spanish “guardar”, English “to guard”, to look, to guard Venetian sghiràt, English “squirrel” Venetian récia, Spanish “orecha,” English “ear” Venetian plàstega, Spanish “plastica”, English “plastic” Italian forchetta, English “fork” Italian ratto, Spanish “raton”, English “rat” Italian pipistrello, English “pipistrelle”, bat, a type of bat Italian asino, English “ass”, donkey Venetian mustaci, English “mustache” Italian io, Spanish “yo”, English “I” Venetian mare, Spanish “madre”, mother, English “matriarchal”, rule by women Italian uscita, English, “exit” Venetian fiól, English “filial”, son, relating to a son or daughter Italian quando, Spanish “cuando”, when Venetian cascàr, English “cascade”, to fall, waterfall Venetian trón, English “throne,” chair, king’s chair Venetian bèver, Spanish “beber”, English “to imbibe”, to drink Venetian trincàr, English “to drink” Venetian òcio, Spanish “ojo”, English “ocular”, eye, of the eye Venetian morsegàr, English “morsel”, to bite, a bite Venetian nome, Spanish “nombre”, English “name” Venetian solo, Spanish “solo”, English “solo”, only, alone Venetian grande, Spanish “grande”, English “grand” big, great Italian piccante, Spanish “picante”, English “piquant”, spicy hot Venetian cale, Spanish “calle,” street Venetian łéngua, Spanish “lengua”, English “language” Venetian senpre, Spanish “siempre”, always Venetian mar, Spanish “mar”, English “maritime”, sea, of the sea Venetian nostre, Spanish “nuestro”, our Venetian vite, Spanish “vida”, English, “vital”, life, living Venetian virtuosi, Spanish “virtuoso”, English “virtuous” Venetian serae, Spanish “seria”, would be Venetian spirito, Spanish “espiritu”, English “spirit”, ghost, spirit Venetian segura, Spanish “seguro”, English “secure”, safety, safe Venetian robar, Spanish “robar”, English “to rob”, to loot, to steal Venetian mal, Spanish “mal”, English “malevolent”, bad, evil-minded As we can see, there is a huge amount of similarity between Venetian, an obscure language I had never heard of, and Spanish and English. Even the frightening Italian has quite a few Spanish and English cognates. Learning one foreign language, or even learning your own language very well, really does help you to learn even more languages so much more easily. Go ahead and give it a shot!

A Look At the Venetian and Friulian Languages

Repost from the old site. Here we will compare Friulian and Venetian with Italian. The Friulian language is spoken in northeastern Italy. Among Friulian speakers, the language is affectionately known as Marilenghe and is best known from the Udine, the main town of the Friulian zone. It has 794,000 speakers and is in pretty good shape. There is a close relationship with Ladin and Romansch. Most speakers also speak Standard Italian. In regions of Slovenia bordering Friuli, almost everyone speaks Friulian as a second or third language. Friulian is closer to French than to Italian. legal status of Friulian and feels that it is lacking, although a landmark law was passed in Italy in 1999. This law was very controversial, and public opinion in Italy continues to be that regional languages should all give way to Italian. Venetian is said to be a dialect of the Italian language, but it is actually a completely separate language related more to French than Italian. It is spoken mostly in northeastern Italy in Venice, Trieste and other areas by 2,280,387 people, but the number may actually be up to 3 million. ethnic nationalist myths have arisen – that Northern Italians are Celtic (more White) and that Venetian is some kind of Celtic language. There was a Celtic language spoken in the area some 1,800 years ago, but it has not left much trace on the languages of today. North Italians are not Celtic and Venetian has no relation to Celtic. Venetian is close to the northern Italian languages Piedmontese, refer to such a mindset as “that of the Roman Empire” and those who promote it as fascists. My English translation is a free literary translation and is not literal or word for word at all. It translates the text into the best possible literary English. Central (Udine) Friulian Copiis Il puar biāt al ą copiāt il Siōr par dīj: “O soi come tč”: ma il Siōr nol ą copiāt. Magari chel biāt j ą vuadagnāt, ma i fīs, daspņ, cetant ąno pajāt no savint jéssi sé? Il lōr destin al č, savéso quāl? Copie de brute copie origjnāl! Eastern/Coastal (Triestino) Venetian Copie Il sempio il gą copią il Sior par dir “Mi son come ti” ma il Sior no’l gą copią. Forsi quel sempio xč divegnudo sior, ma i fioi, dopo, quanto i gą pagą par non saver come xe stado? Savč vł qual xč il loro destin? copie dela bruta copia original! Notes: Both Friulian and Venetian are structurally separate languages. It’s very difficult to write in Friulian, and very few people know how to do it properly. Venetian is easier to write, and more speakers are able to write it. Friulian ā is a long a. Venetian x is the same as English z Venetian ł resembles the “lh” sound. This sound does not occur in English. Standard Italian Il poveretto voleva copiare il Signore per dire: “Io sono come te’, ma il Signore non ha copiato. Forse quel poveretto ha guadagnato ma i figli, dopo, quanto hanno pagato non sapendo cosa ? Sapete qual’č il loro destino? Essere copia dell’originale brutta copia! Notes:  Poveretto: povero di mente: simpleminded fellow. Signore: educated, gentleman. Guadagnato: learned something, got wiser. Pagato: to pay in a moral, education way, to “learn your lesson.” English The simple man tried to copy the gentleman so he could say, “I’m just like you”, but the gentleman could not be copied. Now, maybe that simple man learned a thing or two, but how much would his sons, later on, have to pay for not knowing a thing? The sons’ destiny? To be a copy of the original rude copy.

Cool Neo-Latin Websites

Repost from the old site. Forgive me a bit while I trip off into obscure Romance linguistics here for a bit, but I’m really getting off on this little journey. Here is the website for La Quotidiana, an online and printed daily newspaper in the Romansch language. This is the closest Romance language of all to Latin itself. Below are a couple of websites entirely in the Ladin language. Ladin is spoken in northeastern Italy, in the Eastern Alps. The specific range is called the Dolomites. Ladin is a weird-looking language. At first you think it’s French, then…no, it can’t be. Wait, it’s Italian, no, not quite. You keep thinking Romanian, but that’s wrong too. The one thing that keeps hitting you is that it looks so much like Classic Latin. Noeles.net is said to be the only online Ladin newspaper. Ladins da Friul is even better. It’s also entirely in Ladin, but it has lots of really cool photos. The people in this region are isolated in small mountain valleys, wear strange but fascinating traditional garb including wide-rimmed hats, have sloped roofs on the buildings with Swiss clocks on the outside, and seem to be very, very deeply Catholic. The people have interesting features and look more Germanic or Slavic than anything else. Lots of blond and red hair and blue and green eyes. There seems to be a deep tradition of scholarly endeavors and a general serious, even ponderous nature. These are not the happy go lucky Italians of the South. Traditional racial science classed the Europeans in this area as “Dinarics.” A gallery of Dinarics is here. It’s from a horrible proto-Nazi book by Hans F.K. Gunther, but the photos are pretty interesting. Employment seems to be mostly tourism now, but it looks as if some small farming, especially wine grapes, logging and handicrafts such as woodcarving still employ some folks. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of place one gets rich, but you get the feeling that people in the Dolomites really don’t care about getting rich. That’s a good set of values! Modern, sophisticated White people who don’t give a damn about getting rich. Persistence of small languages in Europe is associated with isolation, rural areas, poor economics, “backwardness,” deep religious values and regular churchgoing, and employment in traditional industries. In these isolated regions, speakers of small languages continue to marry their own kind – they don’t breed with outsiders too much. You also get the impression that many folks here spend their whole lives in one small village. I recall an anecdote where a writer was in a small Scottish village and an old-timer informed that he was moving for the first time in his life. “Oh?” asked the writer. “Where?” He was moving across the street. Ladin has 30,000 speakers and Romansch has 35,000. These are cultured, intelligent, educated Europeans, yet they are still speaking small languages that don’t have a lot of use in our multicultural world. I wonder what it must feel like to speak one of these small languages? There is probably not a lot to read in your small language. But in the case of Romansch and Ladin, probably almost all speakers also speak Italian and/or German at least, so if they want to do a lot of reading, there’s tons of German and Italian stuff out there. These small languages are often called “the language of the hearth and home.” They are spoken with family and friends, in small towns and villages, on the street and in shops. In some rural or more isolated areas, they are spoken at work. But in the wider world, a larger language is used. In modern times, the fate of the language lies with the younger generation. If they see the small language as having little value in our modern world, they will fail to use it or even learn it and will eventually lose the tongue. There are also problems with immigrants moving into the area who are not interested in learning some small language. Due to poor economics, a lot of speakers of small languages emigrate out of their home region to big cities. Eventually, many of them lose their native language. Media for small tongues is a constant problem, and it’s one reason I’m a socialist. These languages usually need some sort of funding by the state as the wonderful market just can’t see any profit in a radio or TV station broadcasting in some small tongue. So the state typically funds newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc. Advertising is another problem. You can put up signs in your small language and try to sell to speakers, but outsiders won’t be able to read them. So bilingual signage is often used. Education is always a sticky issue. With the larger minority tongues, there are often lessons in the language available through various grades of school. With the bigger ones, you can also opt to use the minority tongue as a language of instruction, as long as you take courses in the national language every year. Shortages of quality schoolbooks and other learning materials are typical problems, along with teachers fluent in the language. Recent decades have seen revivals throughout Europe in most of the small tongues. Here are a couple of websites in the much larger Friulian language, with 800,000 speakers. It’s close to Ladin and Romansch. Lenghe.net looks quite thorough. The Radio Onde site is also pretty nice. Friulian looks like it is getting quite a web presence, probably due to the high number of speakers. Radio and TV stations and printed press costs money, but websites are a lot cheaper. Maybe the web is going to be savior of a lot of small tongues.

Really Cool Friulian Site

Repost from the old site. This very well-done site is all in the Friulian language. Has lots of good graphics and tons of great links. I can’t read it, but it’s cool to look at it. If you can read Friulian (or Furlan in Friulian) give it a go. It’s also interesting how many bloggers are blogging in Friulian. Italy now accepts Friulian as a minority language and schools are now offering it as a course. It’s still spoken by 794,000 speakers in the region. It’s spoken in far northeastern Italy. Friulian is closest to Ladin and Romansch. That is, it’s straight up from Vulgar Latin along with those two. Those three languages are probably the closest to pure Latin of any of the Romance languages. There are quite a few Friulian speakers in Canada. Until recently, the region was quite poor, hence many speakers left the area. There are also some speakers in Argentina and Brazil. Good overview here.

Virgilio Giotti, Triestine Venetian Poet

Repost from the old site. Let’s take a look again at Triestine Venetian. Virgilio Giotti was a famous poet who wrote in Triestine Venetian. He was born in 1885 in Trieste, a child of Riccardo Schonbeck and Emilia Ghiotto. He died in Trieste in 1957. He is considered to be the most important Triestine Venetian author. For this, he was honored in 1957 by the Accademia dei Lincei. Highly-regarded critics such Mario Fubini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gianfranco Contini, Cesare Segre and Franco Brevini enthusiastically described Virgilio Giotti as one of the most important Italian writers in Italian “dialects” of the 1900’s. From 1907 to 1919 he lived in Firenze. In 1912, he met Nina Schekotoff, a Russian from Moscow, the only woman he ever loved. In Tuscany, she bore him three children – Natalia, (Tanda), Paolo and Franco. Sons Paolo and Franco both died in Russia during World War 2. Giotti first book was Piccolo Canzoniere in Dialetto Triestino, published in Florence in 1914. He became famous in 1937, when the great critic Pietro Pancrazi, in a review in Corriere Della Sera pointed out the anti-dialectal character of Giotti: his poetry was described as écriture d’artiste (literary writing) or patois de l’ame (the language of love). Pancrazi described Giotti as a poet who wrote mainly in dialect, but he differed from the usual poetry of Italian “dialects” that was often folkloric, standardized, generic, etc. Giotti spoke Tuscan Italian as his principal language, and he considered Triestine Venetian as “the language of the poetry” only – that it only had a literary and cultural value, but was not useful beyond that. Giotti’s Triestine Venetian lexicon was impoverished and full of simple words, with only a very sparse use of idioms. Giotti’s Trieste was far from the Trieste of Svevo, Saba and other writers: there’s no Port wine, no psychoanalysis and no Mitteleuropa. Giotti’s world is one of sensations, little places, family and friends, the arcana of quotidian existence. He was a romantic poet of everyday life. Let’s look at one of Giotti’s poems, With Bolàffio, in classic Triestine Venetian, then in modern Triestine Venetian, then in an Italian translation by Antonio Guerra (Italian language link) or Tonino Guerra (a famous Italian screenwriter), (Italian language link) and finally I will try to translate it into literary English. If you think you can do a better job of translating this into nice poetic English, even a line or two, give it a shot. This translation stuff is kind of fun! Con Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti Classic Triestine Venetian Mi e Bolàffio, de fazza un de l’altro, col bianco tavoja de la tovàia in mezo, su i goti e el fiasco in fianco, parlemo insieme. Bolàffio de ‘na piazza de Gorìzia el me conta, ch’el voria piturarla: ‘na granda piazza sconta, che nissun passa. Do tre casete atorno rosa, un fiatin de muro, un pissador de fero vècio stravècio, e el scuro de do alboroni. Xe squasi mezogiorno E un omo, vignù fora de là, se giusta pian pian, e el se incanta sora pensier. Bolàffio in ‘sta su piazza bela, noi, poeti e pitori, stemo ben. La xe fata pròpio pai nostri cuori, caro Bolàffio. In quel bel sol, in quela pase, se ga incontrado i nostri veci cuori; là i se ga saludado stassera alegri. Con Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti Modern Triestine Venetian Mi e Bolàffio, de muso un co’ l’altro, col bianco tavoja dela tovaia in mezo, su i calici e il fiasco de fianco parlemo insieme. Bolaffio, de ‘na piazza de Gorizia il me conta ch’el voleria piturarla ‘na grande piazza sconta che nessun passa Do tre casete atorno rosa, un fiatin de muro un pisador de fero vecio stravecio, e il scuro de do alberoni Xe quasi mezogiorno E un omo, vignù fora de là, se giusta pian pian, e il se incanta sora pensier. Bolàffio in ‘sta sua piaza bela noi, poeti e pìtori stemo ben. La xe fata proprio pei nostri cuori caro Bolaffio In quel bel sol, in quela pase, se ga incontrado i nostri veci cuori; là i se ga saludado stasera alegri Con Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti Italian translation by Antonia Guerra Io e Bolaffio, l’uno di fronte all’altro, col bianco della tovaglia in mezzo, i bicchieri alzati e accanto il fiasco, parliamo insieme. Bolaffio mi racconta di una piazza di Gorizia, che vorrebbe dipingerla: una grande piazza nascosta, dove nessuno passa. Due tre casette intorno, rosa, un poco di muro, un pisciatoio di ferro, vecchio stravecchio, e lo scuro di due alberoni. È quasi mezzogiorno. E un uomo, venuto fuori di lì, si mette a posto pian piano, s’incanta sopra pensiero. Bolaffio, in questa sua piazza bella, noi, poeti e pittori, stiamo bene. È fatta proprio per i nostri cuori, caro Bolaffio. In quel bel sole, in quella pace, si sono incontrati i nostri vecchi cuori; là si sono salutati stasera, allegri. With Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti English translation by Robert Lindsay Bolaffio and I, face To face, sitting down At a table dressed in white In the middle Picking up the wineglasses and a bottle nearby Together we’re talking Bolaffio is telling me He would like to draw A picture of a square in Gorizia It’s a big hidden square Nobody is walking through 2 or 3 small houses around Rose-colored, a small wall An iron pissoir* Very old, and the dark shadows From a couple of trees It’s around noon And a man came out Of that pissoir Slowly, he buttons up his pants And he stops himself No thoughts in his head Bolaffio In his nice square We, painters and poets We feel good here It was created just for our hearts Dear Bolaffio In this nice sunshine, In this Peace, our old hearts Have met each other And tonight They’re enjoying each other *pissing place= Vespasiano, where to piss My friend Paolo describes Giotti’s language as the old “Modern” Triestine Venetian.

Thoughts on Etnocentrism and “Race-Mixing”

Repost from the old site.

White nationalists tend to say that any White person who dates or marries outside the White race is a “race traitor” who is engaging in “race mixing” and is fostering “racial suicide”. They also say that any such person must be a “White self-hater” with no love or pride on their own people.

This post will examine whether or not that is so. It will also examine ethnocentrism cross-culturally, with a view towards whether or not it is normal. It will also examine the tendency among human groups to simultaneously guard their women from outsiders while the males also attempt to mate with outsiders.

I argue that all of these things are cultural norms in human beings and may have biological or genetic origins.

I’ve been talking to some of my smart friends about this stuff, and here’s what we came up with.

I noted that I have met persons from all over the world. One tendency that I noted among most, but not all, persons, was ethnocentrism, often of an extreme type. They all had a lot of pride in their race, nation, ethnic group, religion, or whatever. In particular, they did not like to hear criticism of it from outsiders.

At the same time, many were not particularly racist. They certainly were friendly enough towards me. These same people, if they were young and unmarried, often combined a profound ethnocentrism with a desire to marry outside their group. In this case, many of them wanted to marry an American, especially a White American.

This would seem to strongly contradict White nationalist theory that everyone who desires to marry outside their race, nation or ethnicity is race-traitor who is full of hatred for their own kind. That just doesn’t seem to be true. White nationalists are flat out wrong. It’s perfectly possible to love your people and marry outside of them.

Oddly enough, people seem to be able to combine an often profound ethnocentrism with a desire to marry out and commit “race-treason” or “racial suicide”.

I talked to one of my friends, and while he is not a White nationalist (he despises them), he admitted that he thinks Whites, specifically Northern Europeans, are superior to all other groups. He also said that he had been in love with a number of non-White women, and he would have gladly married them.

He said that even after he married them, he would probably still have felt that Northern Europeans were superior, even though he loved his wife. He suggested that many people of other races who marry non-group members probably feel the same way.

How can we make sense of these findings?

First of all ethnocentrism does seem to be a norm in human societies. As an example, let us look at a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon called the Pirahã.

This tribe has been the subject of a lot of research lately because they appear to lack recursion in their language. As recursion is said to be a human linguistic universal (or part of universal grammar in the Chomsky-Pinker paradigm) that is genetically coded into our brain, its absence in the Pirahã implies either that they are genetically distinct (dubious) or that the Chomsky-Pinker theory of universal grammar needs a lot of work.

Leaving aside the Pirahã’s lack of recursion for a moment, let us look at their extreme ethnocentrism. The Pirahã have been in contact with Europeans for a good 200 years. During that time, many a missionary has tried to convert them to Christianity. However, for a primitive people, the Pirahã are very scientific-minded, so they have never accepted Christianity.

Anthropologist/linguist Daniel Everett has worked with the Pirahã for 30 years. He originally started out as an evangelical minister to them, but their rejection of his preaching caused him to question his own religion, and he is now an atheist.

He used to talk to them about religion and the Pirahã would say, “Well, who is this Jesus guy? Have you ever seen him? Have you ever met him? Do you know anyone who has seen him or met him?” He would have to answer no to all of these questions. The Pirahã would then say, “So why should we believe this stuff?”

According to their culture, one can only believe things that one has experienced with their own senses, or that someone you know has experienced sensually.

Anyway, this is why the Pirahã have been rejecting missionaries for 200 years now. Not only have they rejected missionaries, but they have also rejected the Portuguese language and modern living, which they have also been exposed to for 200 years. They know what the Portuguese language is, and they know what modern living is, but they want no part of either.

Portuguese language classes have often been offered to the Pirahã, and they attend the classes and pretend to be engaged, but actually refuse to learn any of the language. Some of the children start to learn Portuguese, but as soon as they show signs of learning the language, the parents pull them out of class and refuse to let them return. They don’t want to learn Portuguese! Period!

Further, they want no part of modern culture. They have been told over and over the advantages of modern culture, but they’re not buying.

These refusals are rooted in the Pirahã’s profound sense of ethnocentrism. The Pirahã see themselves as superior to all other races, and they are even superior to all of the Indian tribes around them, whom they want nothing to do with. I’ve seen pictures of the Pirahã, and they just look like Amazonian Indians to me. In my ethnocentric mind, I can’t see how they have anything to feel superior about. But they do feel this way.

From this interesting post in Majority Rights, a White Supremacist site that is nevertheless intelligent, interesting and relatively easy to tolerate, we can see that this feeling is not limited to the Pirahã. It’s a discussion of racism in China. One commenter, who is Chinese, notes that most NE Asian groups see their race, nation or ethnic group as superior to all others, including surrounding Asians.

A White commenter who met Vietnamese students in Europe noted that these Vietnamese felt the same way. Furthermore, he noted that the Vietnamese place strong restrictions of their women marrying out.

The commenter said that a female member of the group that married out to a White man would be considered a whore who was lower than dirt who had just married into a subhuman race, the Whites. But if she married into an Asian group not her own, that would be even worse. She was now worse than a whore for marrying into a group that was even lower than Whites. The commenter noted that the Chinese felt much the same way.

I would imagine many other East Asians, especially the ethnocentric Koreans and Japanese, feel the same.

We really could go on and on here, but ethnocentrism, even profound ethnocentrism, seems to be a human norm. We can certainly get away from it as individuals, but it’s probably always going to be with us. It also implies that the thorough deracination of Western Whites, to the point of deliberate self-abnegation, is simply not normal. Much as I dislike them, the White nationalists are correct on this point.

Another commenter linked to this article, reported in the press as racist anti-African riots by Chinese students in China against African students. To the extent this stuff was written up at all in the Western press, it was as irrational racist riots against innocent Africans by racist Chinese.

The truth seems to be more complicated. A White American who was a student in China at the time noted that the African students were throwing wild parties in their dorms. Non-African males were allowed in, but not Chinese males. Chinese females were very much invited. He attended one of these parties and “rescued” two Chinese women by getting them out of there.

It was common knowledge at the time that the Africans were getting Chinese women drunk and then “raping” them. Whether that meant date rape or actual physical rape is uncertain, but after a while, Chinese students (probably mostly young males ) had had enough and there were days of anti-African riots.

Among the regulations that followed was that African male students were forbidden from consorting with Chinese females in their dorms.

In the examples above we see another essential part of ethnocentrism – “Don’t any of you outsiders dare to fuck with our women. We will defend the honor of our women with our lives and we will kill any outsider males who take liberties with our females.”

You don’t have to study a lot of anthropology or history to see how this line seems to be written all through human history. The horrible stoning of Dua Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old Yezidi girl who eloped with a non-Yezidi man, is an example. She was stoned to death by a crowd of 10,000 Yezidi men for “marrying an outsider”.

One of the best ways to rile up a population against an invader or an enemy is to suggest that “they are taking liberties with our women.” Countless male armies have been roused to defend the honor of the nation’s or group’s females.

We also see this in the Jim Crow laws of the South where Black males were lynched for looking at, whistling at, talking to, having sex with, or raping White women. The image of pure Southern womanhood was to be upheld with blood.

What’s up with this? Kevin MacDonald argues that there are probably dual imperatives operating here. The first is protection of the females of the tribe from mating with outsiders. This is probably done in the furtherance of “ethnic genetic interests.” That is, most tribes probably want to survive for as long as possible as an entity. The best way to do this is to keep outsiders away from your women.

At the same time, MacDonald argues that there is an opposite genetic imperative at work, that the males seek to mate with outsiders, while protecting their females from doing so. MacDonald sees this as attempting to add genetic diversity to the group to make it more fit, but I see it as more base than that.

Probably many of these mating occurred during raids in which the outsider females were raped. In many cases, they were captured as some sort of slaves, brought back to the group, and forced into marriages with males of the group.

In this way, the tribe poaches the women (probably the best, or most attractive women were favored), removes them from the competing group, and brings them into one’s own group. Though White nationalists would argue that this is genetic contamination, it surely was not seen that way. The tribe simply wishes to perpetuate itself, and the genes it utilizes in that goal are not relevant.

In older times, a woman who mated out probably was carted off by invading outsiders or went off with the outsider willingly, and hence was simply lost to the group. If all the women did this, the tribe would go extinct.

Yet males could mate out and still live with the group, since they would bring any captured women back to reside with the tribe of the man who captured her.

Further, by capturing the best females of competing outsiders, you deplete them of their best resource. If you rape them and run off, you force the outsiders to bear the children of your tribe (assuming they raise the child and don’t kill it), interjecting the genes of your own tribe into theirs against their will. It’s a form of domination and aggression of a very base sort.

Racists typically use these facts to try to justify racism by saying that everyone is a racist and that anti-racism is abnormal. This is to be condemned. At least here in the modern West, there seem to be an awful lot of folks that are significantly free of racist feelings, so it would seem we are not genetically doomed to racism.

Modern political correctness argues that the tendencies above, ethnocentrism and protection of one’s women from outsiders, are examples of the most horrible and evil racism.

The Left would simply argue that these are reactionary archaisms that must be swept away via revolution. They would probably throw in something stupid and say that these backwards tendencies are all related to economics.

But it seems so much deeper than that.

Though civilized man is capable of transcending most of his base instincts much of the time, the fact remains that at the end of the day, we are just long-legged bipedal apes.

Any sensible analysis of human behavior needs to recognize that.

That Can’t Possibly Be a Word in English

Entitativity.

It’s not often that a commenter throws up a new English word at me.

Not that I know every word in the dictionary, though I wish I did. In my Linguistics Program at university, we had a visiting professor from the Netherlands who not only was gay but also supposedly knew every word in the dictionary and could define it for you. In the English dictionary, yet. A Dutchman. I wonder if he could give you roots and history too.

Some minds are simply amazing; I have to hand it anyone who can do such a thing. Who cares if it never gets you laid? Women are petty and nonsensical anyway in their desires.

Nietzsche says you’re supposed to rise above all that petty quotidian sex, love and relationships Female Mind/Emotional Mind stuff anyway. That’s what the Ubermensch is all about. The guy that rises above all of the scattered and blowing litter of the quiet and desperate ordinary lives of people and things to live in the world of pure ideation. Or, I would add, to find the God within himself, and thereby discover genius, or the Male Genius anyway.

Anyway, back to the word. At first I thought it had to be a misspelling. So I Googled and what the Hell, it’s actually a fuckin word, though surely not among the 10,000 English words that is all your average peabrained American can cram into his meager skull.

You know, I’ve just read three daffynitions of this word and I still don’t know WTF it even means. Someone explain it for me in good plain English.

No wait, forget it.

Colorism in Mexico

Color is a taboo subject in Mexican society, but the elite is mostly White or at least light skinned. There is more colorism as in lighter vs. darker. A lot Mexican Whites refuse to identify as White because that means gringo. They will just identify as Mexican. But others will identify as White, or more usually, as Spaniard, Frenchman, etc.

I know a guy whose family comes from Mexico who tells me he’s “French.” But he refuses to identify as White. That’s gringo, racist, etc. He also identifies as “Hispanic.” It’s like they would rather be Hispanic or Latino than White.

But a lot of them, I tell them, “You’re a Mexican? You’re as White as I am!” And they break into these huge grins and say that their families came from Spain. They clearly think they are better than the others.

One guy was insulted when I asked him if he was a Mexican. The guy was born in Mexico! He was a Spaniard, 10

But others get a little upset when I tell them they are White, even though they are as White as I am. To say that they are White is calling them a gringo, and Mexican nationalists don’t dig imperialist gringos. They will deny being White and say that they prefer to identify as Mexican.

Also, the word “White” is sort of racist in Mexican society. Mexican society is seriously racist, but it’s also European Spaniard with regard to manners. There is a color line, sure, but officially, all Mexicans are “mestizos,” that is, there are no Indians or Whites. Everyone is mixed.

Also Mexicans are in denial about their Black heritage. Your average Mexican is as Black as a Sicilian –

My Mom took a trip to Mexico once and got into a funny conversation with the Mexican guide about that subject.

Also the guide kept referring to the miltars. My Mom calmly told her that the English word was soldiers, not militars, which is not a word in English. The female guide got really mad, insisted that militars was the right word, and kept saying militars for the rest of the tour.

Proud people.

English Attacking Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia

English is the global destroyer, taking out native languages here and there, right and left, over there and over here. I’ve never heard of it damaging actual national languages yet.

Looks like it’s going to town on Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) somewhat. Pretty weird when people in either speaking the national language poorly or not at all. Actually, it ridiculous. It’s like Ireland all over again, this time shamrocks in Bali.

AAVE, Ebonics, Etc.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=228fq9rietk&feature=player_embedded]

Do any of you have the foggiest idea of what this guy’s saying? I swear to God, he’s speaking a foreign language. There’s no way he’s speaking the same language I am.

AAVE = African American Vernacular English

The guy seems like a real asshole. Practically a caricature of your typical Black ghetto scumbag.

Two years after the video was shot, Corey Lamar Beecher (the man in the video) was arrested and charged with Trespassing and Resisting Arrest. One month previous, he was arrested and charged with Grand Theft Auto. You gotta figure that anyone who talks like that is essentially unemployable at any legal occupation. He seems to have a promising future in store for him.

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