1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White

Repost from the old site. Most people take it as a given that the USA as a nation and society is and always has been basically White, even mostly British or Northern European White. We have only to look at the authors of the Constitution and signers of the Declaration of Independence to see that all of them where White. And as the Christian fundamentalists love to remind us, they were all “Christians” too. Too bad most of them were actually Deists. It’s true since 1830 or so (see 1830 census figures Excel, pdf ), this has been a majority-White land, and that is the picture most people’s memory and cultural knowledge of this country gives them. But Whites have only been here a short while, and we were immigrants, or actually invaders at first, ourselves. Previously, this land was inhabited 10 In California and the Southwest, we have even had Hispanics (almost all Mexicans) living here before those states were even a part of the US. A Filipino was part of the party that founded Los Angeles before California was even a state. He got sick in Baja and ended up staying there, but he was still present on the voyage. See below where many more Filipinos were already in this country even before 1781. On the eve of the Gold Rush, there were a mere 1,000 Chinese in the US. Only seven of them were in California. But within a year of becoming a state, California was full of East Indians (Hindoos), Samoans/Hawaiians, Mexicans and other Pacific Islanders (Kanakas) and Chinese, all come for the Gold Rush. By 1852, there were 25,000 Chinese alone in California. All of these groups stayed on through the whole decades-long Gold Rush and afterwards remained here as residents in the US. So are West Africans, as this is where many of the American slaves came from. There was a Filipino settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana, in 1763, before the US was even formed. The first Chinese immigrants came to the US in 1820, but before the Gold Rush, only 1,000 or so had arrived. Japanese and Filipinos have been present in Hawaii in large numbers since 1890, and Koreans have been present in much smaller numbers there from 1896. Hawaii was only made into a state in 1959. Cubans have also been here a very long time. Hundreds of Cubans came to St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, over 200 years before there was a USA. Similarly, the first Jamaicans (a party of 20) in America were already in Jamestown, the first White British colony in the US, by 1619. Further, many Jamaicans were included in slave shipments to the US since Jamaica was a way station along the way between Africa and the US. Significant numbers – two large ships full of Chilean and Peruvian miners were in California for the Gold Rush as early as 1848. A couple of thousand Brazilian and Caribbean Blacks also came for the Gold Rush. Note that California did not become a state until 1850. Pakistanis (people from what later became Pakistan) were in the US since the 1700’s and continuing into the 1800’s in Oregon and Washington, working in agriculture, logging and mining in California. The first known East Indian Hindu came to the US in 1790, soon after the Declaration of Independence, as a maritime worker. Mexicans, Samoans, Blacks, Cubans, East Indians, Pakistanis, Chileans, Peruvians, Filipinos, American Indians, Canadians, Japanese, West Africans, Hawaiians, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese have been here in significant, not trivial, numbers, from the very start. They are not, as groups, wholly immigrants or foreigners to this land. They are not foreign to American culture – they are part of the very building blocks of it. Perhaps Germany, Russia, Sweden, France and most of Europe can lay claim to being predominantly White countries for centuries or millenia, but the US cannot. On the inside back cover of a recent issue of American Heritage Magazine was a painting of the Antediluvian American South with some text below. The text took me aback. I shook my head and read it again and again and it’s stuck in my head ever since. It said that in 1825, the US South1 was estimated to be 3 Both the US South, and the nation as a whole, were already White-minority as early as 35 years after signing of the Constitution. Take that, “White America” fools! The White America of movies, TV, magazines, books and memories was just a temporary mirage, a ship passing in the night. Now, as the USA moves back to becoming a White-minority land, we are not changing the basic nature, culture and essence of this nation. We just reverting to our roots. I am not arguing for unlimited immigration to this land (In fact, I want to seriously limit it) and I am a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Nevertheless, it angers me when White Nationalists act like this is some kind of a “White country”. Nothing could be further from the truth. 1I misremembered the text in the issue – it referred to the US South only, not the US as a whole. A look at the US Census Bureau information (Excel file here, pdf here) clears up the mystery. A 3 The 2 Figures for the whole of the US reveal a White majority, however, if we include the Amerindians living in the Louisiana Purchase at that time (recently part of the US in 1825), we can still make a case for a non-White majority in the US. See note 3 below for more on that. 2There were numerically small numbers of Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, pre-Pakistanis (people from the land that would later become Pakistan), East Indians and Cubans here in 1825, but they probably added up to less than 3The American Heritage figures quoted have now been called into question (see comments at the end of this post and the comments at the end of the frankly White racist American Renaissance article that linked this piece); the suggestion is that Blacks made up 1 The mystery is cleared up in note 1, where the magazine text referred to only the US South, not the US as a whole. Indians were not counted in either the 1820 or 1830 censuses, and may have numbered 8 million in the US at the time (recall that the Louisiana Purchase had just been added to the nation). Figure 12 million Indians in the US and Canada pre-contact, with 9 This leaves us with 7 million Indians in the US in 1825. Further, runaway slaves were clearly not counted, probably 1

An Interesting NE Asian Phenotype

Repost from the old site. White Nationalists like to go on and on and on about the glorious color of their skin: white. For some odd reason, this white skin is superior to darker-colored skins of folks who evolved in hotter zones. Truth is, darker skin color is a perfectly rational evolutionary response to high rates of UV radiation in areas where it is very hot. And in some areas of the globe, people can have fairly light skins if they stay out of the sun, but they get dark quite easily if they go out in the sun. Italians and Greeks come to mind. Here are photos of Italians, Greeks and Spaniards who have stayed out of sun, and then the same folks after they got tanned. The same page also shows identical phenotypes commonly seen as European-only, like Nordics, Mediterraneans and Alpines, in both their European and extra-European forms from Arabia, North Africa and Central Asia. Often the darker skin you see in a lot of Southern Europeans is nothing but a tan. On the other hand, Northern Europeans, and possibly other Northern types, don’t tan very well (they often burn) and even when they do, they don’t get all that dark. The very dark skin of Blacks, Papuans, Melanesians, some Aborigines and some South Indians is simply a result of evolving in those parts of the Earth where the sun shines brightest of all. But Whites ought to give up the fantasy of about their white skin being best of all – because other races have some very white skin too. See the Korean woman in the photo below for example.

A Korean woman. She has a shade of White on her skin that is lacking in almost all Caucasians – it is probably only seen in Ireland and Scotland and it’s probably even lacking in Sweden and Norway. But this very White phenotype seen in some Koreans and Northern Chinese differs from that of European Whites in that it is more glossy. European White skin looks more chalky or powdery. This phenotype also has skin that looks more like porcelain and is reflective of light. The very light European skin tends to be less light-reflective.

Here’s a pretty cool chart showing degrees of skin lightness versus darkness around the world.

UV radiation chart along with zones of skin color. Zone 1 has the darkest skin of all . Zone 2, which includes Italians and Spaniards, has skin that tans easily. Zone 3 contains light skin that enables residents to absorb as much Vitamin D as possible from the sun due to lack of sunlight at higher latitudes. Note that there is also pretty high UV radiation in parts of South America (Peru), in the heart of Mexico, in Southwest Arabia (especially Yemen), in Southern India and Sri Lanka and in Indonesia, Malaysia, Southern Philippines and New Guinea. Indonesians and Malaysians are known for being darker than many other SE Asian groups. According to this chart, the darkest people of all are Blacks from Mozambique and Cameroon in Africa and Aborigines from Darwin in North Australia. A look at the same chart, much expanded, in the original paper, shows that the next darkest are Blacks, the Okavango in Namibia and the Sara in Chad (Table 6, p. 19). The chart shows that the lightest people are in Netherlands, followed by Germany and then the northern parts of the UK. Note on the map that Tibet and parts of the Amazon should have some very dark-skinned people, but those who live there are lighter than you would expect based on UV. The paper suggests that the Tibetans are lighter because it is so cold there that most of their body is covered up all the time and only the face is uncovered. The face is lighter to collect what Vitamin D it can as so much of the body cannot collect Vitamin D due to clothing. The Amazonian Indians are known to be shade-seeking and the paper suggests that this may account for their lighter skin.

Most Whites don’t really have White skin anyway. I am looking at my own skin here as I type, and it looks more pink than White.

References

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. (2000) The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Available on this blog here.

High-nutrient Diet Causes 8 point IQ Gain

Repost from the old site. In a a truly amazing study, Pediatrics notes that premature infants fed a high nutrient diet for only one month after birth showed an increase of 8 IQ points, in males only and only on verbal IQ, at the late age of 16. Further, there were actual significant increases in the volume of a brain structure called the caudate, values which were associated with the verbal score increases. The regimen was not specified, but was only identified as moderately higher protein and calories and more micronutrients (presumably on the order of a Once a Day type multivitamin of the sort that science insists is absolutely useless). Blacks have a very high rate of premature infants, and it may be genetic. Although this regimen would not benefit Black females, they already have a higher IQ anyway. Black female IQ (=87) is higher than Black male IQ (=83) at adulthood. I cannot think of any possible genetic reasons for Black females to be smarter than Black males. But if you go into schools in the ghetto, the honor roll will be almost all Black females, with scarcely a Black male in sight. In 1990, I taught school at Compton High School in Compton, California. I had a Chemistry class filled with almost exclusively Black females. They were calm and well-behaved. This is in part because after Grade 10, even terrible Black ghetto schools improve incredibly. In most cases, there is still an utter and absolute refusal to learn anything, but at least they are good-natured about it. You sit there in your teacher’s chair all hour and give them an assignment that the whole class refuses to do, laughing all the time. This is known as a joke. You fight them for a bit, then you give up and just get in on the joke. You sit there and read a book all hour while everyone laughs and jokes and has a good time. This is best because this way the mostly-Black class is almost completely warm, pleasant, friendly, and well-behaved. By 11th grade, except in the most horrible heart of the ghetto, the bad ones are all long-since dropped out, dead or in jail or juvey. They’re just gone, and that’s all that matters. There are Samoans there too, but they don’t want to learn either. The school Administration is just trying to survive. The cute Black girls, 18 year old seniors, come up to the teacher, sit down next to his desk, and ask how old he is. Informed, they say they have been looking for a boyfriend right around that age, and they write their phone numbers down and give it to the teacher “accidentally”. Teacher contemplates whether or not to call the number when he is home alone after work. If he does, his credential is pulled, if not, nothing lost. Anyway, the all-girls Chemistry class at Compton High was a good bunch of girls. They informed that they were all in gangs, but that just means if you are in a Crip neighborhood, everyone there claims Crip so as not to be killed, and also to root for the hometown. As these days I actually claim Norteno for similar reasons, I can relate. The girls are bright, quiet, polite and hard-working. All of the crappy lies you had about Blacks are getting blown away every minute you teach these Compton High Chemistry class girls. These days, at age 16, the US Black IQ is 88.4. The US female Black IQ at age 16 must be 90.4, and the Black male IQ must be 86.4. With a rise of 8 points in verbal in those males who were preemies, their full-scale IQ’s would go up by 4 points, since there is no effect on performance IQ. Blacks are better in verbal than on performance IQ anyway. The Black male IQ of the ex-preemies would be 90.4 at age 16, the same as Black females of that age. With time, the Black female IQ will decline at age 24 to 87. It is unknown if these supplemented Black males will also decline to age 24, but normally Black males would lose 3 IQ points from age 16 to age 24. Even if this still occurred, Black male IQ in the supplemented males would decline to 87.4 at age 24. Not exactly the greatest thing in the world, but as an IQ fetishist, let us now praise not only great rises, but mild ones too. I suggest that a rise in Black male IQ from 83.5 to 87.4 at age 24, 3.9 IQ points, would hold some real and significant consequences for those males who benefited.

Is the "White" IQ So Superior?

Repost from the old site. I confess that I love to beat up White nationalists, or for that matter ethnic nationalists of any sort (this is why I verbally eviscerate Zionists – they are nothing but the Jewish equivalent of White Nationalists). There is nothing like nationalism, not to mention the super brain-killer of ethnic nationalism, to turn a smart person’s brain to useless mush. The problem is that beating up on WN’s is cruel. It’s like slapping a retarded person and ridiculing them in public. So I feel kind of guilty when I do it. For a look at what a nightmare the White Nationalist movement is, and what a racist horror it represents, check out the sanest, most moderate outlier of the movement, American Renaissance. I hang out there a lot, and post lots of comments, when they do not get deleted, which is 7 I post mostly on illegal aliens, which is all I care about race-wise, as I am utterly indifferent to the “Black problem”, anti-immigration xenophobia, Islamophobia, and all their other crazy obsessions. This is a good, frightening post to get you started. It is a common, and fairly disgusting, White Nationalist argument that Whites are superior to all other groups in IQ, with the exception of NE Asians. WN’s typically define Whites as Europeans, but no one quite knows where to draw the line there. For instance, many White Nationalists are so insane that they say Southern Europeans such as Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Greeks, and Balkans such as Macedonians, Serbians, Albanians, Croats and Bosnians, and West Eurasians such as Armenians, Ashkenazi Jews, Georgians, Caucasians and Turks, and Middle Easterners such as Iranians, Kurds and Assyrians, are not White. Most of these groups are clearly White. There is a bit of a question when it comes to Iranians, Kurds, Turks and Assyrians, but most of these groups are White by any sane definition. So WN’s like to crow about how they are smarter than just about everyone else on the Earth. It follows that letting in anyone from any of the stupid races or ethnic groups to a White country is going to pollute the gene pool, result in growing stupidity, an inability to think and compete and a declining standard of living. I do think that they have a point, and I am not opposed to IQ tests for prospective immigrants other than spouses of Americans. Where I object is to the typical WN insanity of labeling entire races and ethnic groups as idiots who should not be allowed to set one foot on our soil. First of all, Western culture is good for IQ, independent of genes. This alone should throw a serious monkey wrench into WN crap about intellectually inferior races being banned from immigrating to White countries. Look: Everyone knows that the East Indian IQ in Europe is 96 (Lynn 2005), and it’s 81.5-83 in India and Pakistan. Merely living in an improved Western environment raised it 14 pts. Jamaicans raise their IQ’s from 71 to 85 within one generation of living in the UK – 14 points. Most sane people think selective immigration could have only raised either of those scores only a few points. Even if we grant 3 IQ points for selective immigration, we still get an 11 rise for both E. Indians and Jamaicans just for a Western environment. Even Moroccans raise their IQs from 84-89 (5 points) within a generation of living in Holland, and there was probably no selective immigration there at all, as the Europeans were just looking for manual labor. 73 IQ US Negro Blacks (taking a base African Black IQ of 67, adding in 17. Much of the Black raise has occurred since 1920. Everyone except WN lunatics Richard Lynn, except as noted.

US Hispanics   89
Croatia        90
Bosnia         90
Albania        90
Maori          90
Serbia         91
Cyprus         91.5
Chile          91.5 1
Greece         92
Macedonia      92.5
Ireland        93
Bulgaria       93
Armenia        93.5
Georgia        93.5
Israel         94
Romania        94
Argentina      94.5 2
Portugal       95
Slovenia       95.5
Moldova        95.5
Uruguay        96 3
Slovakia       96
Malta          96
Russia         96.5
Belarus        96.5
Ukraine        96.5
Spain          97.5
Czech Republic 97.5
US             98
Australia      98
Finland        98
Canada         98
France         98
Denmark        98
Andorra        98
Estonia        98
Hungary        98.5
Norway         99
Poland         99
Belgium        99.5
Iceland        99.5
Vietnam        99.5 4
Sweden         100
UK             100
Germany        100
Luxembourg     100.5
Netherlands    101
Austria        101
Switzerland    101
Italy          102

Notes

1. “Inferior” Chilean Mestizos beat four White groups, tie one. 2. “Inferior” Argentine Mestizos beat 13 White groups. 3. “Inferior” Uruguayan Mestizos beat 16 White groups, tie two. 4. “Inferior” Vietnamese beat 34 White groups, lose to eight, tie two.

References

Lynn, Richard. (January 2005). Business Today. Smith, Douglas K., Wessels, Richard A., Riebel, Emily M. August 1997. Use of the WISC-III and K-BIT with Hmong Students. School Psychology Training Program University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

There Be Cannibals!

Repost from the old site. My understanding of cannibalism is not good. It’s well-known that starving people in just about any society will eat their own dead. Clearly, the Anasazi Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians, engaged in cannibalism during the 1300’s. I don’t care what the Indians say. Indian tribes are notorious liars when it comes to denying anything that makes them look bad. The cannibals and head-hunters of New Guinea are well-known, and some were said to continue to engage in the practice until the mid-1960’s. Cannibalism was well-known in other parts of the world, especially Polynesia and Fiji. It was legendary in New Guinea and widely practiced in Australia too. The cannibals of the Congo below were not the only ones in Africa, just some of the more notorious. There were also cannibals in the Brazilian Amazon and a few in North America here and there. But Polynesia, especially New Zealand, had some of the worst cannibals of all. A Maori wife of a chief killed in combat would offer herself to be killed and eaten by her enemies, becoming dinner to show her love for her husband. A Fijian husband’s power over his wife was such that he could kill her and eat her at any time for any or no reason at all. In some societies, people were eaten if they were loved. In Australia, people ate the corpses of their relatives and friends in order to pay tribute to their lives. In New Guinea, old folks, having a hard time straggling through life, were hanged from trees or killed in other ways, often by their own kids, in a big party with the whole village gathered around. After they were dead, they were chopped up and eaten. Beats mortgaging your house for Mom’s nursing home, eh? Smoking a fish is a good way of making it more flavorful, and logically it follows that it adds a little zest to roast human. Humans waiting to be eaten were “tenderized” in water or other liquids to make the flesh less beef jerky-like. Tribes from Africa to Polynesia went out on hunting parties, like armies of Jeffrey Dahmers, looking for human prey to kill and cook up. Although women definitely are better looking then men, some cannibals insist that we guys are more delectable. Others prized female flesh most of all and went to great woman-chasing lengths to obtain it. Dying in battle is bad enough if you are to be a meal afterwards, but being wounded and then hauled away to be served on the dinner table must have been a particular horror. Slaves were captured, kept in chains and horribly mistreated for long periods, knowing all the while that one day that would serve as a main course. What is interesting is that so many cannibal societies insist that Roast Human tastes great, even better than many or most domesticated or wild animals. One wonders why we taste so great. Did we evolve to be good eatin’? In many places, White explorers were told, “Of course we eat people! Don’t you?” One New Guinea tribe had a legend about how they became cannibals. One day the men went out hunting. They came back with some wild pigs and whatnot. The women berated them, “Is that all you can give us – that lousy stuff? The humiliated men, their masculinity at risk, figured that the women wanted people to eat, not some dirty animals. So they took off to a neighboring village and came back. They came back with humans to eat, the women danced all around and their manliness was intact. Biting off the nose of a corpse is pretty horrible, and cannibals deny that they do this. They only bite off the noses of those others kill, not those they kill themselves! They do have some class. If boiling a dead man’s heart is too much for you, just get your daughter to do it, and then drink the delicious juice. A rack of rib sounds pretty good, but would you eat it if it came from a seven year old girl? Now, I like pork myself, but “long pig” is said to be more delicate, and it never makes you so full you feel ill. We all like to get together with the family for Thanksgiving, but how about the New Guineans, a woman and her two daughters, who dug up the corpse of one of the daughter’s baby and consumed it? Gives a new meaning to three generations at the table for dinner, eh? The Dobudura in New Guinea liked to keep a fresh supply of meat on hand. So they would capture a man and keep him alive for up to a week, cutting off bits of his flesh any time they felt hungry. They used a plant medicine to keep the food supply from bleeding to death. When he is nearly dead, they would poke a hole in his skull and scoop the brains out with a spoon, brains being a major delicacy and all. One way to ensure a delicious meal is to roast a man while still alive, for the meat tastes better when prepared this way. Deboning a chicken makes for better eating, and humans may be similarly deboned. What to do with the giblets? Well, with human giblets, just give them to the kids, who roast them in the fire and eat them up. With the coming of “evil Western colonialist missionaries” all of this quaint “indigenous” cultural behavior was laid to rest once and for all, or so we thought (but see below). Many cultures became ashamed of their former cannibalism and refused to discuss it. The Aborigines were puzzled at why it had been outlawed. Why were we not allowed to eat our friends anymore, to have a party and say what a great guy he was? None of it made sense. I suppose the Cultural Leftists, in love with all cultures, wicked, sublime and in between, as long as they are not White and Christian or Jewish, want to resurrect all this delectable human-chomping. As the Congo War devolves, we are receiving reports that Congolese militias are once again reverting to old habits of cannibalism. In particular, they are killing the Pygmies (the Bantus have waged a long genocidal campaign against both Bushmen and Pygmies) and cooking them up for chow. Almost all roads in the Congo built by those evil colonialists are now in disrepair – not due to weather or abuse, that is normal. It is that in the Congo now, when a road falls apart, no one ever fixes it. Never. Ever. Hence, roads just pretty much do not exist. The apartheid Whites of Southern Africa, of paternalistic mind, always said that when the White man left Africa, Africans would “go back to the bush”, in every conceivable way. That’s not necessarily the case in all Africa. See an optimistic post about a disaster zone called Nigeria, and note the good economic growth the continent has been experiencing, with the sole exception of Zimbabwe, which is disgustingly tossed out by White racists as an exemplar of all of Africa. Yet in Congo, it appears that this depressing forecast is being borne out. Delicious quotes follow, from Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. Check out the title – I suppose the anti-racists assume it must be “racist”, no? Dark continent, heart of darkness, the horror, the horror, and all that? Racists salivating over this post as an exemplar of “nigger innate savagery” be warned: cannibalism was not generalized over all of Africa. It was a cultural phenomenon primarily confined to the Congo, which then grew, strangely, in the 1800’s, to encompass more of the colony via cultural transmission.

For their part, the Malela were delighted by their diet of human flesh, describing it as “saltish in flavour, and requiring little condiment.” Unfortunately for their neighbors, their search for human flesh led to widespread slaughter. Edgerton, 85 But the Basongye, or Zappo Zaps as they were often known, sold slaves to their neighbors knowing that they would be eaten; they also ate their own dead. Soon after the end of the Arab War, they would work for the Free State and spread cannibalistic terror across the Congo. Other societies such as the Baluba, for example, ate the hearts of virtuous or brave people to gain their strength, but they also ate the bodies of criminals and slaves to prevent them from doing evil to their masters or haunting them. Ibid, 86 In some Congolese societies, people ate human flesh only occasionally to mark a particularly significant ritual occasion, but in other societies in the Congo, perhaps even a majority by the late nineteenth century, people ate human flesh whenever they could, saying it was far tastier than other meat and, perhaps surprisingly, that male human flesh tasted better than female. Persons to be eaten often had both of their arms and legs broken and were made to sit up to their necks in a stream for three days, a practice said to make their flesh more tender, before they were killed and cooked. Teeth filed to sharp points were widely thought by Europeans to be the mark of cannibals, but in some societies whose people actually were cannibals, teeth were not filed at all, and in others that did not practice cannibalism, people nevertheless filed their teeth to sharp points. As Sydney L. Hinde noted during the Arab War, the Batetela were such devoted cannibals that children actually killed and ate their parents “at the first sign of their decrepitude,” but they did not file their teeth. Ibid. In 1907, the Bankutu people were seen by a European traveler to hunt people for food as other Congolese hunted animals. They served human flesh in “little rolls like bacon.” As late as 1923, American traveler Hermann Norden reported that cannibalism was commonplace. One Congolese man reprovingly scolded him for not eating some human flesh when he was offered it: “You know the flesh of man tastes better than the flesh of a goat.” A Belgian companion of Norden’s admitted that he had probably been served human flesh and had eaten it unknowingly. In 1925, Hungarian anthropologist Emil Torday reported an encounter with a Muyanzi man who boasted about cooking human brains with a pinch of salt and red peppers, then dipping his bread in it. “Then he would smack his lips and run away like an imp.” Missionary and explorer A.L. Lloyd reported that when a European told a Bangwa tribesperson that eating human flesh was a “degrading habit,” the man answered, “Why degraded? You people eat sheep and cows and fowls, which are all animals of a far lower order, and we eat man, who is great and above all; it is you who are degraded.” Ibid, 86 While in the Congo, Livingstone saw human parts being cooked with bananas, and many other Europeans reported seeing cooked human remains lying around abandoned fires. British captain and medical officer Sydney L. Hinde, who would take part in the Free State’s war with the Arabs in 1892-93, reported an incident in which a Basongo chief asked a Belgian officer’s tent to cut the throat of a little slave girl he owned. He was cooking her when soldiers seized him. British adventurer Herbert E. Ward once asked a group of Congo tribespeople whether they ate human flesh. Their immediate answer was “Yes, don’t you?” Later, Ward witnessed cannibalism on numerous occasions and was often offered human flesh to eat. He recalled an occasion when a young Bangala slave was killed. Soon after, the chief’s son, a boy of sixteen or so, “nonchalantly” said, “That slave boy was very good eating – he was nice and fat.” Ibid, 88 Several European officers in the Force noted with a mixture of horror and approval that because Congolese on both sides of such battles cooked and ate all of the dead and wounded, burial parties were unnecessary and diseases were kept under control. Cannibalism had become so routine that one Force Publique officer admitted he had become quite “bland” about it.” Ibid, 100 At least a thousand Arabs were killed – then smoked and eaten. Ibid, 102 While some Free State officials were exploiting Congolese and others tried to care for them, a constant concern of these Europeans was cannibalism. It was not simply the eating of human flesh that repelled them, but that so many people were murdered expressly so that others might feast upon their bodies. Early in the 1660s, Englishmen Andrew Battell escaped the Portuguese who had enslaved him, to spend sixteen months among the Jaga people near the Congo’s Atlantic coast. He reported that they preferred human flesh to their own cattle. Later, as we have seen, healthy children were stabbed to death to provide a feast for their owners, and men were known to help sick coworkers “die,” then smoke their body parts for later consumption. Six Bangala men on the Stanley, a thirty-ton, stern-wheel steamer, were suspected by the ship’s captain of killing two crewmen who fell ill. They pleaded innocence, but smoked human body parts were found hidden in their lockers. Some men showed no restraint in their appetite for human flesh. When one of Gongo Lutete’s wives was killed in battle, his own men ate her. Enraged, Lutete ordered these men killed the next day and eaten. None of the Europeans were surprised that Africans on both sides of the war with the Arabs routinely cooked and ate not only the dead they found on the battlefield, but the wounded as well.” Ibid, 108

References

Edgerton, Robert B., The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.  Harris, Marvin, Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Cultures. Glasgow, 1978, p. 69. Hogg, Garry, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, quoting The Rev. James Chalmers, Life and Work in New Guinea. RTS, 1895. Lange, Algot, In the Amazon Jungle. Putnam, New York, 1912. MacGregor, Sir William, Foreword to Murray, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Maynard, Dr. Felix & Dumas, Alexandre, The Whalers. Hutchinson, 1937. Métraux, Alfred, Easter Island. André Deutsch, 1957. Murray, J. H. P., Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Judicial Officer, “Papua”, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Rice, A. P., in The American Antiquarian vol. XXXII, 1910. Seligmann, C. G., “South-eastern New Guinea”, in The Melanesians of British New Guinea. Cambridge University Press, 1910. Simpson, Colin, Adam in Ochre . Angus & Robertson, 1938. St Johnston, Alfred, Traveller, Fiji Islands, Camping Among Cannibals. Macmillan, 1883. Walker, H. W., FRGS, Wanderings among South Sea Savages. Witherby, 1909. Wallace, A. Russel, Travels on the Amazon. Ward Lock, 1853. Williams, F. E., Orikaiva Society. Clarendon Press, 1930.

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.

Southeast Asian IQ Scores

Repost from the old site. The IQ scores of Southeast Asian groups are not well-known. The best source, and it is not very good at all, is Richard Lynn’s chart from IQ and Global Inequality. Richard Lynn is a hardcore racist, typical of most hereditarian IQ researchers. Let us look at some of the scores he has come up with:

              IQ
World average 88
Laos          89
Cambodia      90 (est.)
Thailand      91
Vietnam       95
Hmong         --

The Vietnam score is quite suspect. I don’t know exactly how he did it, but he seems to have averaged scores from surrounding countries to come up with his score. Lynn needs to do this because he has some strange theories about how IQ developed. He thinks that IQ is shaped by going through the Ice Age. Philippe Rushton, another hardcore academic racist, goes along with this. Their followers claim that Europeans went through two ice ages, one 70,000 years ago and another 10,000-20,000 years ago. Truth is that the Toba Volcano explosion in Indonesia 73,000 years ago not only wiped out all the pre-Europeans, but also killed every other human being west of the explosion, through Asia, the Middle East and even Africa. It is thought that a group as small as 5,000, probably situated on the western slope of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, made it through the explosion and ensuing decade of frigid nuclear winter. In addition to killing the humans, most other forms of life were probably also killed by this explosion. A few years after the explosion, humanity seems to have gone through a serious bottleneck. No doubt major changes took place, including selection for intelligence. It is at this time that we see something called The Great Leap Forward in Eastern Africa. Art, language, and a huge cultural explosion take place in only a few years. Humanity then explodes out of Africa to populate the world. We have no way of knowing what any race’s IQ was 10,000’s of years ago, and it is silly to even guess. Furthermore, European-type Caucasians do not appear until about 10,000-13,000 years ago, probably in the Middle East and then spreading into Europe. Earlier than that, proto-Caucasoid skulls do not look much like modern-day Europeans. So it appears that the “European race” (that doesn’t really exit, see here) didn’t even go through any ice age in Europe anyway. That neato White skin comes later. Over in Northeast Asia, we have a different story. Supposedly, these high-IQ folks evolved in the frigid cold of Siberia. The problem with that is that modern NE Asians Aborigines or the Ainu. They are also said to look like Negritos and Polynesians. These specimens were from the Zhoukoudian Cave in Northern China. The Ainu, who are also said to have Aborigine features, are thought to be the proto-NE Asians. The proto-NE Asian group seems to have had its homeland around Lake Baikal about 35,000 years ago. So it looks like the people we call NE Asians today did not go through any Ice Age either. But, getting back to the Vietnam score. Richard Lynn’s theory will not support highly intelligent Asians, not to mention SE Asians, since they did not go through his famous Ice Age. However, all Asians came out of the proto-Asian homeland in Northern Vietnam and Southern China around 60-110,000 years ago. From there, they fanned out across SE Asia, Southern China and NE Asia. The crucial point is that SE Asians, including Southern Chinese, did not go through Lynn’s famous Ice Age brain gauntlet. Therefore, they cannot be real smart, according to Lynn. Except that some of them, which causes a problem for Mr. Lynn’s theory. Indeed, Lynn puts SE Asian IQ at 87 and considers them about the 4th most intelligent group on the planet, behind NE Asians, European Caucasians, and Eskimos. Lynn’s theory also presupposes a relationship between latitude and race. So we can’t have any smarties down there in the hot weather. They all have to come from frigid land, where their IQ’s got nice and refrigerated. Problem is that evidence shows that Central regions actually produce more geniuses than Northern or Southern regions. In order to fit the facts into his dubious theory, Lynn plays a lot of games. He refuses to note that Southern Chinese are some of the smartest people on Earth – their IQ is thought to be ~105, or possibly higher. The Chinese provinces around Hong Kong have often produced some of the brightest Chinese cohorts in the land. Further, we can’t have any real bright SE Asians either, for the same reasons as for the Southern Chinese, and also so as not to mess up his SE Asian IQ of 87. Which brings us to the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese IQ of 95 is incorrect, and Lynn is apparently deliberately distorting it to move his fake theory along. I think he got it by dividing the Thai IQ by the Chinese IQ, which he falsely puts at ~100 (The urban IQ is something like ~105, and Lynn dishonestly assumes that the rural areas have a 10 pt lower IQ, so he divides and gets 100). Nice trick, huh? Interestingly, Southern Chinese, though presumably high IQ and though they dominate the economy of Vietnam as businessmen, reportedly do found an IQ of IQ of 101. The 2006 study found an IQ of 98 . Averaging the two together gives us a Vietnamese IQ of 99.5. That is quite respectable, and smashes Lynn’s clever little theory to bits. Based on that high IQ, the future looks hopeful for both the nation of Vietnam and Vietnamese in the US. Vietnamese in the US often perform very well. In Orange County, California, they are reportedly the highest performing ethnic group. Another interesting group is the Hmong. The Hmong are a primitive tribe in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and China. They helped the US fight Communism in Laos and were persecuted after the war by the Pathet Lao regime. The Hmong really didn’t give a damn about Communism or capitalism or any of that, as they were just swidden agriculturalists up in the north of Laos near the Plain of Jars. They also did a bit of hunting and gathering. Their cultural level was not very high. They were considered the “hillbillies of Asia” and to some extent, they still are. Many NE Asians look down on them, as they look down on SE Asians in general. One NE Asian on a forum described the Hmong as “the worst of all. We would rather marry a White person than one of them.” Well, I beg to differ. I have worked with these people in the past teaching Hmong adults ESL and I really enjoyed them. Actually, I enjoyed all the SE Asian students. They have some problems here in the US, as they came here after years in refugee camps with little more than the shirts on their backs. I recall an anecdote I heard about the Hmong at an educational conference. They were living in these squalid refugee camps amidst some pretty bad conditions. But in one building in the camp, English was being taught. There was not enough room for the Hmong of all ages to be taught there, so many could not get in. So they went home? Forget it! Mobs crowded around the windows, trying to see the teacher and listen to the lesson. As you can see, an intelligent group or individual, even when exposed to an impoverished environment, will often seek out stimulation wherever they can find it. I recall another story from India about a boy in a small village who was very bright. There was nothing going on in the village, so he walked hours every day to a bookshop in a nearby town and spent all day there reading books. High IQ seeks out stimulating environments, which then enrich the mind further, which then drives further stimulation-seeking. In this way, genetics and IQ drive each other, for better or worse throughout life, and it is for this reason that it is almost impossible to untangle genetics from environment in intelligence, not to mention a host of other things. Well, I finally found a report on the Net of a test of Hmong IQ. This is apparently the first test ever made on the Hmong IQ, and I’m going to publish it here and get all the laurels. The test was done in the US in a school district, and the Hmong students scored quite low, an 82.15 IQ. There were however extreme differences between a Performance IQ of 95 and a verbal IQ of 74. Even the normal Asian gap between performance and verbal IQ is generally not that great. Furthermore, my friends who have worked with the Mien near Davis, California, say that the children do very well in school while living in profoundly deprived conditions in the home. The Mien are probably very closely related to the Hmong. The fact that the children may have had difficulty with the English language cannot be ruled out. The 82.15 IQ is the lowest among mainland Asians and is below that of US Blacks, Hispanics and Amerindians. It is also below Samoans and Melanesians. I have spent years teaching in the public schools and taught thousands of Black, Hispanic and Samoan students in the Los Angeles area. I have also spent some time with Hmong adults of all ages and a bit of time with Hmong children. My opinion was that they are highly intelligent and I find it very hard to believe that their IQ’s are lower than US Blacks (no attempt to put down the IQ scores of US Blacks, Hispanics or Samoans was made here). I feel that as the Hmong stay in the US longer, the IQ scores will rise quite a bit. Keep in mind these students typically come from extremely deprived environments. The Hmong may have more NE Asian genes than any other group in SE Asia, which makes the low IQ score even more suspect. Two recent studies have been done on Thai IQ. One came up with a score of 87.5 and the other came up with a score of 92. In the latter test , scores were much worse in the North. The mean of the two tests is ~90 IQ. This is not far off from Lynn’s score. On the Thai fora where I tracked the scores down Thai-Americans were disappointed in their performance and wished they could do better. I found similar things at Khmer and Lao forums, where some of the higher IQ groups were baiting the SE Asians for having IQ’s “lower than the average human”, as if this was a bad thing. Actually, according to Micheal Hart, average human IQ is 88. Thailand does have a lot of malnutrition and it is well known that this depresses IQ scores. Further, the government is actually getting serious about IQ and trying to raise national scores. I will toast to that one. Thai and Cambodian IQ is 90, the same as Albania, Bosnia and Croatia. The Lao score is 89, the same as Turkey. Let’s redo the IQ chart with the additions and emendations to Lynn’s dubious calculations. Note that the Lao and Khmer scores are from the ethically-challenged Professor Lynn. I searched all around for a good IQ study on the Khmer and Lao, but I could not find one. I did fight a report on mental health in Laos where a Laotian psychologist was working on preparing a version of the WISC of Lao youth. However, the Lynn figure for Lao IQ at least represents two actual tests in Laos, one that found an IQ of 90 in village children in Laos not living in abject poverty. The second was a similar study done on their mothers that found an IQ of 88. The average, then, is 89.

              IQ
Hmong         82.15
World average 88?
Laos          89
Cambodia      90 (est.)
Thailand      90
Vietnam       99.5

As we can see from these comparisons and the fact that most SE Asian scores surpass the world average, most SE Asians surely have the brains to develop in a modern, Western-type society. Furthermore, there are large numbers of malnourished people in all those countries. It is important to be above the world average. Although White Nationalists and some Asians rebuke groups who score at around 89-90 IQ, this blog is going to take the humanistic position that the average human is not a complete idiot. You are welcome to disagree. Therefore, this blog will never call an IQ of 88 or above a “low IQ” – an implicitly misanthropic stance. Scoring at least at or above world average IQ ought to be sufficient to make a nation competitive economically with other nations, even if there are no other benefits. The future looks bright for SE Asians in both their lands and in the US. Things haven’t been totally on the up and up for Asians in recent years. They have suffered stereotyped in similar ways by Whites. SE Asians have much lower college grad rate and higher unemployment rate than NE Asians, but some (Vietnamese) are doing quite well in some places. In that same area (SF Bay Area), many Asians, especially SE Asians, are forming gangs.There are now Mien, Cambodian, Chinese, Korean and Khmu gangs in California. At one Alameda County school, Asians went from typical high-achievers to having many delinquents in just 15-20 yrs. In Alameda County, Vietnamese (IQ 99.5), Lao (IQ 90) and Samoans (IQ 86) have considerably higher crime rates than Hispanics (IQ 89). There is a very high crime rate among Vietnamese and Lao youths in Richmond, second only to Blacks. You can see, there is no relationship between IQ and crime here. A Second Generation theory has been proposed – the 2nd generation of immigrants has a high crime rate and rejects their parents’ values. In the US, 2/3 of Hmong and Lao, 5 That “low-crime Asians” could have the potential for disorganized violence and crime is not surprising in light of my previous post documenting very high crime rates amongst Euro-Whites at various times in the past. Even peaceful Taiwan has seen a sharp increase in crime in recent years. Who knows why that is occurring. Criminology is a notorious graveyard for dead theories that never pan out.

References

Smith, Douglas K., Wessels, Richard A., Riebel, Emily M. August 1997. Use of the WISC-III and K-BIT with Hmong Students. School Psychology Training Program University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Human Races and Subspecies

Repost from the old site. A question that comes up all the time in race realist circles is whether or not the various races of man, however defined, can be considered to be subspecies. No reputable scientist considers the major human races to be separate subspecies of Homo Sapiens. At any rate, Homo sapiens himself is already a subspecies called Homo sapiens sapiens. There was H.s. neanderthalis , H.s. idaltu, probably H.s. rhodesiensis and finally, Homo sapiens sapiens. So a human subspecies would be look more like a Neandertal, with dramatic differences between them and modern humans. Even Khoisans and Pygmies are much closer to the rest of us than Neandertal or Idaltu Man was. This area is still quite controversial, but the only scientists and theorists who are suggesting that the differences between the races are great enough to constitute subspecies are racialists, many of whom are explicit racists. Almost all are associated with White nationalism and usually with Nordicism. Nordicists are best seen as Nazis. You must understand the differences between races and subspecies. For instance there is the California kingsnake . There are no subspecies of the California kingsnake. However, there are numerous races, many of which look radically different from the California kingsnake norm. They are simply called races of the California kingsnake. So races of humans and other animals are really a level even below that of the subspecies. They are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, and I’m not sure anyone cares about them all that much. They’re better seen as regional variants. Subspecies are a variant of a species that only occurs in one limited geographical area in which no other subspecies of that animal reside. Hence, each subspecies is geographically isolated from the others such that interbreeding is rare to nonexistent. At some point, subspecies’ territories may start overlapping. They begin to interbreed a lot, since subspecies of a type are readily capable of interbreeding. Once their territories overlap and interbreeding begins, we often stop calling two types separate subspecies and wrap them into a single entity. Subspecies were differentiated in the past based on a significant degree of anatomical difference. Nowadays, genetics is much more popular. The combination of significant anatomical and behavioral differences combined with significant genetic difference at some point is deemed great enough to warrant a subspecies split. These discussions are carried on very civilly in academic journals and after a bit of back and forth, a consensus of some sort is arrived at regarding whether or not two variants of a species differ enough to be called subspecies. At that point, the discussion typically dies. In addition, new genetic discoveries now show that some subspecies are so far apart genetically that a good case can be made that they are actually full species and not subspecies. This argument is also written up carefully in a journal, and usually seems to be accepted if the argument is well thought-out. In addition to splitting, there is lumping. Some variants of a species have in the past been divided into various subspecies. Some new analyses have shown that all of these subspecies definitions were in error, and in fact, the species is fairly uniform, with few to no subspecies instead of the 10-15 they had in the past. This argument also gets written up in a journal and passed around. Usually the new designation is accepted if the argument is well-crafted. The species/subspecies question is not as wildly controversial among scientists as laypeople think. Designations change back and forth, all are based on good, solid science, and science simply coalesces around the paradigmatic view of a species as it may change over time. Science, after all, is always a work in progress. The reasons that the California kingsnake races were not split into subspecies is because apparently the genetic differences were too small to warrant a split into subspecies. It is also possible that these races are widely distributed over the kingsnake’s territory, with no particular race holding sway in any certain locale. So probably all of these kingsnake races can not only interbreed like subspecies but they probably are actively interbreeding as they are probably not geographically segregated. At some point, it is discovered that two animals, previously thought to be separate species, have interlapping territories and the two species are observed readily interbreeding. Since separate species cannot interbreed, once two species start interbreeding easily, science often decides that they are not separate species after all and instead that they are subspecies of a single species At some level X, two living things are split into species. At some lesser level of genetic differentiation Y, a species is further split into subspecies. At some lesser level of differentiation Z, we can start talking about races. I believe that all of the various breeds of dogs and cats are races. “Race” and “subspecies” are two terms often conflated in speech, even by biologists, but strictly speaking, they do have different meanings. I do not know any reputable biologist who thinks that any of the various extant human races or subraces, however defined, need to be preserved on solely anthropological grounds in order to preserve their phenotype. The various human races have been changing all through time continuously. North Africans were once pure African, now they are mostly Caucasian. Northeast Asians looked like Aborigines until 9,000 YBP (years before present). South Indians looked like Aborigines until 8,000 YBP. Southeast Asians looked like Negritos and Melanesians until about 5,000 YBP. Over 10,000 years ago, Amerindians looked like Aborigines. Between 7,000-9,000 years ago, they looked something like the Ainu or Polynesians. Europeans looked like Arabs 10,000 YBP, like Northwestern US Amerindians 23,000 YBP and 30-40,000 YBP, they looked very strange, possibly resembling a Khoisan more than anything else. White skin only shows up 9,000 YBP in Europe. Polynesians and Micronesians only show up in the past 2,000 years. So all of the modern human races and subraces, however defined, have been continuously changing down through time. The notion that they are some kind of unique subspecies in need of conservation like Northern Spotted Owls is completely mistaken and has little basis in modern science.

Racists Create Their Own

Repost from the old site. In the comments, one of our fine commenters and a great writer to boot, Dano of Hawaii Five-O, notes:

If you treat people with respect and dignity you get the same in return, and create a chain-reaction of civility. If you treat them like shit-enemies, you get a negative reaction, which allows you to point and scream “SEE! Just like I’ve been saying. They hate us!”

I think Dano hits it on the head. I go to American Renaissance and those White racists on there are constantly saying, “Blacks treat Whites like shit! They’ve been treating me and other Whites like shit my whole life!” And they say this about other races too. They are convinced that most or all races are completely racist towards most or all other races. Especially all non-Whites are horribly hostile towards all Whites. It’s pretty clear that there is a Hell of a lot of projection going on here. I’m a racist (except wait, I’m not, really) so everyone else is. No wait. I’m a racist, because all those other races hate me and my kind. They done forced me into it. I guess I must have missed this. I’ve been around Blacks quite a bit in my life. I taught Blacks in LA, including the inner city, including Compton and even Watts for a day. I never got a whole lot of hostility out of Black students. I mean, some were just antisocial period. They sure had a lot of opportunities to vent on me. There were a few occasions where I got some racist stuff at me, but I can’t think of many. The worst of all was at Centennial High in Compton near Willowbrook (close to Watts). It’s the heart of the heart of the ghetto. The students were racially hostile and tried to bust me for being a racist by attempting to provoke me into making racist comments (they lied, and the Black principal backed me up). Some of the pretty young Black teachers were just out and out hostile. In Compton, there were some classes of 8th and 10th graders that were so horrible I just walked off the job and left the kids there with no teacher. Amazingly, they took me back after that. Those kids were just animals, and I didn’t get the impression there was some racial thing going on, but who knows? In LA, I’ve been to reggae concerts full of Blacks and rap concerts full of street Black rappers. I’m not saying that’s a good environment. But none of those Blacks ever bothered me. I’ve bought fast food in the ghetto in the daytime, quite a few times too. I’ve driven through the heart of the ghetto in daytime many, many times. I think once some Black guy yelled something about “What are these RICH motherfuckers doing here?!” at me on a side street. I’ve dated Black women who lived in S Central LA (Black part of town). I got ripped off once, the day I was in Watts. The Black administrators always treated me like I was solid gold, and the Black teachers were pretty nice overall. I’ve taught in Hispanic neighborhoods for years too. Also in Filipino, Japanese and Samoan-heavy schools. No real problems, at least racially, in any of these places. I delivered phone books for weeks on end all through the worst parts of East LA and nothing happened. I drove an ice cream truck through barrios for months and nothing went down. I hung out in apartments smoking crack with Blacks in the Wilshire District of LA (I only tried it once) at the beginning of the crack era. I bought pounds of dope from teenage Mexican gang members who I never met before, who got it straight from the Mexican Mafia. Nothing much ever happened. If these people really hate Whites, they must do a pretty good job of covering it up, or else I am a complete idiot and can’t spot the virulent racists who hate me and my kind ferociously every time they deal with me. I don’t really know what to say for why Blacks have not fucked me over more than the few depredations I experienced (one stolen car battery). I’m a pretty paranoid guy, and I’m always looking around all the time and watching everything and everyone. I don’t open up very easily and I’m quite wary and dubious. Furthermore, I’m reportedly a pretty scary-looking guy, despite my pretty boy preppie looks. That’s not really a good thing, but I guess that’s one way that looking a little dangerous comes in handy. Everyone pretty much leaves you alone, even the criminals. Criminals like easy targets, just like predators in the wild. White racists give off fuck you vibes to whichever non-Whites they dislike, and those non-Whites fire it right back on them. Hence the White racist sees the world, partly through projection, as filled with White-hostile non-Whites. You’re 21 years old at the university and it’s Psychology 100 again. You look up at the overhead lamp and all the points of light come together in an epiphany, and it all makes sense. That’s being alive.

Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Panmixia

Repost from the old site. A commenter notes: “The Father of the EU” Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was a half Japanese philo-Semitic aristocrat who advocated a mixed race Europe. He was a living, breathing Abercrombie & Fitch ad in 1925, and nobody in the WN movement has ever heard of him. From Wikipedia: “Coudenhove-Kalergi complemented his liberal views of the political role of the Jews with distinctive advocacy of race mixing. In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism, Wien/Leipzig 1925, pages 20, 23, 50) he wrote:

The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals. Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility through spiritual grace. This happened at the moment when Europe’s feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation.

I respond: This guy was definitely an interesting fellow! What is odd is that he loves Jews so much, and Jews are some of the original ethnic nationalists and racial separatists. Since emancipation, they have promoted this only for themselves, while seeking to diversify the societies they reside in because a mono-ethno-religious nation is typically bad for the Jews. So being a proponent of Panmixia while at the same time being a philosemite is a bit of a disconnect. Nevertheless it is quite a common one. Alon Ziv is a modern Jewish incarnation along similar lines. I wonder if is going to marry a non-White or even a non-Jewish woman and practice what he preaches, or if he do will play the usual Jewish hypocritical role in such affairs? Not that I care who he marries or what type of babies he makes, but I can see why a lot of reasonable folks get upset at Jews promoting diversity in their own lands while promoting ethnic nationalism and racial separatism in Israel and even in their own lives, in the sense that they intend their fellow Jews to marry within the tribe. If it’s ok for Jews to only marry fellow Jews and to oppose intertribal breeding (Jewish miscegenation), why isn’t ok for Whites or others to promote intraracial breeding and oppose miscegenation. I don’t have any interest in racial purity myself, as I’ve been dating and sleeping with non-Whites my whole life and do to this day. I’m an ethnocentric White guy who dislikes being turned into a minority by a bunch of foreigners, but I’m perfectly willing to do my part to suicide my race with a non-White female, though I don’t really care either way, and I don’t have kids yet anyway. Incidentally, there are quite a few White Californians like me, including both of my brothers. That’s just the way people are out here. The world is already pretty much Panmixia anyway. As far as the future being a mixed race Europe or America, it’s quite possible. It’s essential to realize that many nations of the world are already mixed race for all intents and purposes. In particular, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Polynesia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, the Sahel, Mongolia, Siberia, the Stans, etc. And of course most of the Americas except for Argentina and Uruguay, and the US and Canada. The East Indian people are mixed between Caucasians and Asians in the North. So are the Pakistanis, Afghans, Siberians, Mongolians, Western Chinese, Nepalese, Turks and people from the Stans. There is significant Caucasian-Black admixture in North Africa, the Middle East, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, South Africa, and far southern Europe. In Sri Lanka, the Tamils are mixed between Australoids and Caucasians, and there be other such Veddoid stocks in the region. There is Black-Asian mixture in Madagascar. The entire continent of the Americas except for the US, Canada, Argentina and Uruguay is mixed race. The mix is Amerindian and White in most of the continent. In Brazil, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Brazil and the Guyanas it is mixed between Whites, Blacks and Amerindians. In the Caribbean, there is significant White-Black mixture. Indonesians, Micronesians and Polynesians are mixed between SE Asians and Melanesians. Fiji is mixed between Polynesians and Melanesians, and French Polynesians are mixed between Whites and Polynesians. Hawaii is so mixed no one even knows how to describe it. Far from being “mongrel races” as White nationalist racists describe them, the above are probably just more or less the norm for human societies. Races and ethnicities have been mixing all down through time, they will continue to do, and many so-called pure races are actually significant mixtures. The entire notion of pure races is somewhat problematic. There is no scientific reason why any given “more pure” race is de facto superior or inferior to any given “less pure” race or vice versa. Existing “pure” races of dogs and cats were creating by creating “mongrelized” mixtures of existing stocks. Panmixia is just the way it’s going to be. Probably the last places on Earth to become mixed-race will be in East Asia and in Sub Saharan Africa. Most of East Asia is relatively pure race-wise to the extent that almost everyone there is either a NE Asian or a SE Asian. Sub-Saharan Africans are relatively pure Blacks with little admixture. There’s little non-Asian immigration to Asia, and there’s little non-African immigration to Africa, so things will probably remain this way into the foreseeable future.

How Much Salt in a Salt Packet?

You know those little tiny salt packets they give you at restaurants? Hard to find out how much salt is in those. McDonalds salt packets have 189mg of salt, so your average salt packet has about that much. Maximum is 2000mg of the poison, but Americans eat way more than that. Bottom line: the stuff gives you high blood pressure, a disease I already have. I try to limit my salt to 280mg per item. One pickle that I’m eating now (170mg). Or one packet of salt on your birria de chivo (goat) Superburrito, which I just added. I must say, adding the two lemon slices and the salt packet did make it taste a lot better! A goat Superburrito! Crazy or what? Not at all, just one of the pleasures of living in the The Diversity. The real killer stuff is soups and other kinds of prepared foods, even canned vegetables. There’s no logical reason to load this stuff up with salt, but they do it anyway. I look for the low-salt soups, but even those are like 480mg. Throughout our lives, we are slowly salt-poisoned. Not only does it gives you high blood pressure, but it also supposedly makes you fat to boot. You barely need any of the stuff. Studies in the Solomon Islands had 2,800 random villagers eating a traditional diet with almost no salt. They found zero cases of obesity and zero cases of high blood pressure. Later they found one guy who had gone off to the city and was eating the wonderful Modern West Diet (TM). He came back to the village fat (only case of obesity) and with high blood pressure. We’re committing suicide by fork! How does salt give you hypertension (HTN)? It slowly poisons your kidneys, and after a while, they don’t work very well anymore. Your malfunctioning kidneys give you high blood pressure. Salt is a necessary but not always sufficient factor in HTN. Studies of the Yanonomo show that they get 270mg of salt a day. Not one of them had HTN. Contrary to the notion that stress causes HTN, the Yanonomo live very violent lives. All the men beat their wives and there is frequent physical conflict between everyone. Homicide is endemic. By age 40, 10 What happens in modern society is that high level salt poisoning over a lifetime kills your tongue. The years of salt poisoning kill the taste receptors in your tongue. Result? Your sense of taste is dulled over the years. Upshot? You keep pouring more and more salt on your increasingly tasteless food to make it taste good. Dumb or what? After years on a low salt diet, you won’t even like the stuff anymore. I eat a real salty dish now that I used to love or even crave and I feel like I just swallowed a mouth of seawater.

Equality is Not a Prerequisite for Liberalism

Repost from the old site.

On a White nationalist blog that linked to me, I noted that it was possible to be a race realist and a socialist. This provoked the following objection:

…That makes no sense. A fundamental principle of liberalism is that of equality, of human beings being equal and interchangeable. It’s false of course, but take it away and all sorts of other leftist and liberal ideas crumble by implication.

I don’t see how one can be a race realist without that leading naturally to some sort of white supremacist / white nationalist / white exclusiveness position.

First of all, I would like to say some things about White Nationalism. I’ve finally concluded that White Nationalism is nothing but White racism and often White Supremacism.

It’s just White racism and White Supremacism repackaged with a fancy new name called White Nationalism to make it seem like it’s not those nasty things that we know of as White racism and White Supremacism, the latter being largely discredited. Well, if a philosophy is discredited, just invent a fancy new word for it and say it’s not the bad thing it really is.

It also explains why White Nationalists are so sensitive about the word racism and always put it in quotes like this: “racism”. Of course, they only do this when referring to White racism. Black racism, Hispanic racism, and all the other kinds are quite real; it’s only White racism that is phantasmagorical.

It’s also interesting how White Nationalists project. While they are denying their own racism, they are often fulminating about Black racism and Hispanic racism and whatnot. That’s clearly denial and projection.

There does seem to be a trend now with a lot of White Nationalists to come right out and admit that they are racists. This is to be encouraged. If you’re racist, what the Hell, just admit it. It’s not like you’re alone in the world – the world is full of racists. And it’s not like it’s the worst thing in the world to be anyway – as White Nationalists note, there are sure plenty of Hispanic and Black racists out there.

White Nationalists think they have excellent reasons to be racists – they’ve had bad experiences with Blacks and Hispanics and want nothing more to do with them. If that’s the case, then just admit it and make your case to an inquiring world.

There are a few White Nationalists who don’t seem to be racists, but I would say that 9

No, onto this fellow’s rejoinder. This is a typical White Nationalist position. To them, one is either a silly race-denying liberal or one is a White Nationalist racist.

It doesn’t work that way. I know a number of White liberals and even Leftists who feel that there are intrinsic differences between the races; they just don’t think the question is very important. They date, befriend and even marry non-Whites. You might be surprised how common this type of thinking is.

One thing that always bothered me about the race realist crowd is that they insist that there are intrinsic differences between the races, and then proceed to blame races and ethnic groups for various average shortcomings and higher rates of pathologies.

But if those shortcomings and pathology rates are indeed genetic (This is what almost all race realists insist) then it follows that those groups should not be blamed for their shortcomings or pathologies. After all, it’s genetic and nothing can be done, right?

So, first of all, they accuse a group of being the equivalent of handicapped, then they throw the crutches away, kick the wheelchair to the side, throw the person into the gutter, all the while cursing them for being a cripple. How cruel can you get? Why does a realization that humans are not intrinsically equal automatically seem to lead to the cruelest sort of Social Darwinism, at best?

And by the same token, if the superior races are only superior through the luck of the dices, what on Earth do they have to feel proud of anyway? Nothing, really. Have they done anything to earn their superior status? Hardly. They just lucked out in the genes crapshoot. Big deal.

If humans are not equal, then it would be up to the state to equalize things. If Blacks, on average are always going to fall behind due to lower IQ (I am beginning to fear that this may be the case), then that is no fault of their own anyway, and it’s cruel to force them to suffer the ravages of the market, which is what most White nationalists seem to perversely want to do.

If Blacks were on average the same as we are, and the failures of their group were just due to their being a bunch of willful, perverse and deliberately wicked and stupid pricks, I would just say the Hell with them. But I honestly think that they can’t help it.

Nor can Amerindians, Polynesians, Hispanics, Aborigines, or any other group that is going to tend to fall behind. It’s really not their fault. Therefore, they should not be punished with failure for things that they can’t help.

If Black income is always going to be a lot lower on average than, say, Whites, due to an IQ deficit that they have no control over, then it is the duty of the state through redistributive taxation to equalize things a bit and make it more fair for Blacks who fail through no fault of their own.

Humans are not necessarily equal at all. Even within a race, we are born with wildly differing IQ’s and whatnot. I think most liberals would agree with that.

Even from a White Supremacist point of view, libertarianism makes no sense. Libertarianism is not only perverse for conscious White nationalists, it’s downright cruel.

If you really love your own people so much, why throw them into a Roman-type pit where they consume each other alive while you cheer on the deadliest and most homicidal of the White cannibals? Only via some form of socialism can Whites really work together to help each other and have real solidarity.

I’m not interested in supremacism or chauvinism or nationalism or any of that. What are you looking for in your acquaintances? There are smart or good or kind, or any combination of many other great qualities, Blacks, Hispanics, Amerindians, Arabs, East Indians and all sorts of other non-Europeans. Just as smart, good and kind as your European White friends.

I love my people finally (after decades of self-hate) but Whites are not the end-all and be-all. I think Whites are a bit cold, for one. Hispanics and Blacks are much warmer and friendlier, and it’s much easier to befriend them. Of course, their lower-income neighborhoods also have some big downsides too. There’s good and bad with all groups, including Whites.

If people are not equal, that’s no argument against liberalism. It actually implies we need it even more.

It means we need affirmative action, progressive taxation, humane prisons and all sorts of things you would never think of.

The Black Genius – Some Thoughts and Examples

There are a few things progressive people can do with regard to differential IQ results. The current results* show US White IQ = 103 and US Black IQ = 89.8. That’s being somewhat generous with Black IQ, as I am wont to do. Others might peg it a couple of points lower, but whatever. There’s about 1 Standard Deviation separating the two scores. I have a feeling that a lot of what people call Black pathology flows right from this I STD.

For instance, when Black and White IQ’s are held constant, Blacks have 2 times the crime rate of Whites. That’s a 10

That right there implies that there is more than IQ causing Black crime. One of the projects of this blog is to quit fucking around with fake liberal/Left BS explanations for Black pathology and to figure out what is really driving this stuff, come Hell or high water.

One problem with the current White nationalist line about Black IQ is that there are way too many smart Blacks. The White nationalist line goes that Blacks are semi-retarded with a IQ of 89.8 (when 88 was the former retarded line and then PC people changed it to 88 and changed retardation to 73, throwing 1/3 of all Blacks out of retardation.

So the line is Blacks Are a Bunch of Retards. We’ve heard this line forever coming out of the Black IQ scores in Africa, which, at average IQ of 70, are in fact retarded. 5

The problem is that when you take these attitudes out into the real world, they don’t really pass the smell test. There are way too many smart Blacks. This is the first problem. So the scores in a way don’t make sense. It’s quite clear to me that Blacks are currently less intelligent than Whites in the US at 1 STD. Whether that’s permanent or not is up is another matter. But to listen to White nationalists, smart Blacks are few and far between.

In Africa, extrapolating from the tests, there might be

The problem is that when you look around at Black Africans, there are quite a few who are very, very smart. I know a fellow from Togo who has a Masters in Computer Science. He used to work for me, and he had that kind of sloppy Black genius, but he’s very smart.

Last I talked to him, he was in France involved with some super-brains at MIT doing cutting edge graduate IT theory work in stuff that I could barely even understand. He was thinking of going for a PhD in Computer Science. I’ve spoken to him, and he’s smart as Hell in all sorts of other ways too. I don’t know what his IQ was, but I was worried it was higher than mine, and I’m smarter than 999/1000 Americans.

I have also heard White nationalists make fancy arguments that because Blacks are so stupid, they have never created any “geniuses on the level of US Whites” and apparently never will. This bothers me.

Suffice to say that while clearly US Blacks are much less intelligent than US Whites, and clearly African Blacks are way too stupid for their own good and we must try to raise their IQ’s as a public emergency issue, in some way, the tests still seem to be underestimating Black intelligence.

Africa is an obvious case. Most Whites with IQ’s below 73 can’t drive a car, work, marry or live independently. They live in group homes and have very limited lives.

Black Africans, with an average IQ 3 points below the retardation level in the US, can drive, marry, have normal friendships, live independently, have children, etc. In short, they are able to function in a normal African society and do not need to be institutionalized, nor should they be institutionalized.

I talked to a lot of these characters when I did anti-scamming work. In some ways they were dumb as rocks, but in other ways they were smart as whips. In one case, we had an American with an IQ of about 76. She was sent in wild circles for months by these 70 IQ Africans with their wild schemes, games, stories and lies such that she was nearly driven nuts. They took for stupid and were running rings around her dumbass brain. Yet the tests say she was smarter than they were. Bullshit.

Long story short, yes, Africans have frighteningly low IQ’s, and many African problems surely flow directly from that. On the other hand, in some weird way, the tests are yet underestimating Black African IQ.

In the US, yes, Blacks are 1 STD lower in IQ than So many things, obviously, first of all, the achievement gap, flow directly from this fact. On the other hand, extrapolating out from these scores, we realize that there are should not be that many smart Blacks.

Yet, curiously, there seem to be way too many smart Blacks around than the stats would suggest. Alpha Unit, Car Guy and tulio types (commenters and writers on the site) should be quite rare, in fact, once you start looking around, it seems like they are everywhere, even in the Abagondsphere. Turn on Pacifica, and it’s full of smart Blacks. Way too many.

Something doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s the Flynn Effect. According to the Flynn Effect of rising IQ’s in the US, your average Black today has the same IQ as the average White in 1960. That’s stunning, and doesn’t seem to make sense on so many levels, but the facts are true. In fact, James Flynn himself has verified that truth to me.

If Blacks are as smart as 1960 Whites, why are they so fucked up, and why can’t they create the 1960 White America? Once again, things don’t make sense. My conclusion is that it’s possible that US Blacks are perfectly capable of creating 1960 White America, it’s just that they are fucking up. Why, I have no idea, but you’ve seen the figures. Whatever reasons for them, lack of brains is not one of them. The conclusion is that Blacks are screwing up and need to get off the dime and get their shit together.

That Blacks have the same as 1960 Whites makes sense to me looking at my blog, at the blogosphere, and tuning in to Pacifica. There are way too many smart Blacks for the scores to make sense. But the intuitive reality makes sense if the entire scale has been flying upward with time. The old low is the new average. The old average is the new bright. We’re getting smarter, though Idiot Culture would seem to argue against that.

So we finally work our way back to the Black genius. if Black brains really are different on average (I say they are) then the Black genius will look different from the White genius. We may see this in a WN way of the Black genius is not even a genius, just a mediocrity, but that doesn’t seem to add up.

Black ideologues have long had the rather racist notion that Blacks have some particular thinking style that is not picked up on IQ tests and hence the tests are biased. I think this is nonsense in a way that it denies the realities of intelligence differences, but in a weird way, they may be onto something. As a race realist, I would go further and say that in fact Black brains are different on average from White brains. So Black intelligence and Black genius looks somewhat different from White genius.

To Whites, even some very smart Blacks seem sort of stupid due to sloppiness.

Their brain is going like a wild pinball machines, analogies, puns and references bouncing off each other like wild, but then there are spelling and punctuation errors and other fuckups. You call them on it, and the Black genius doesn’t seem to care. His brain’s going a mile a minute, all this genius stuff is pouring out like water over a broken dam, and Hell with the small stuff, errors and bullshit.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a good example of the Black genius. Here is his webpage. I wrote him a while back, offering to copy-edit his stuff, but in that Black either too proud of don’t give a fuck way, he never wrote back.

Here are two videos of two other Black geniuses.

One is Cornel West, the stunningly brilliant Black academic. The other is Micheal Eric Dyson, another incredible Black academic. This is where WN’s infuriate me. Both of these guys, especially West, are flat out top notch thinkers. I think West is up there with Tolstoy, Dante and Plato as a thinker.

Modern White philosophers leave me cold because I can’t understand them. West breaks all that BS down into street lingo that almost the average Black on the street could sort of figure it out. Watching his mind is facscinating. It’s like watchign a Coltrane jazz solo. It’s got to be the Black genius. Furthermore, think about.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Q6v1xsvcI&feature=related]

The other is Michael Eric Dyson. Once again, the archetypal Black genius, brain as a pinball machine thing. He’s more like a great rapper than great Black jazz musician, but it’s more or less the same thing.

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

How many Whites think like these guys? Not many.

Many very smart Blacks do not display the typical Black genius. Acculturated in White society, they don’t sound a lot different from Whites.

*Setting US IQ at 100.

Racial Transitions in Human Prehistory

A commenter asks:

“Then Taiwan aborigines transition to Mongoloid over the next 3000 years. Probably a similar transition occurred in the Philippines, as the Ami in the Philippines slowly turned into Mongoloids along with the rest of SE Asia.”

Interesting, hey Robert has this kind of “Transition” ever happened anywhere else in the world around the same period of time?

Khoisan transitioned from earlier types 90,000 YBP.

Khoisans transitioned to Pygmy types 50,000 YBP.

Europeans transitioned from proto-Masai types 40,000 YBP to proto-NW American Amerindian types 30,000 YBP to proto-Arabids at 12,000 YBP to modern Europeans.

Aborigines transitioned from earlier types to proto-Ainu types 18,000 YBP to the modern Aborigine 13,000 YBP.

Pygmies and Khoisan transitioned to Negroids in the Sahel from 12,000-6,000 YBP.

Amerindians transitioned from Australoids like Fuegians at 12,000 YBP to proto-Polynesian types resembling Maori like Kennewick Man at 9,000 YBP to modern Amerindians later on.

NE Asians transitioned from proto-Ainu Australoid types to modern NE Asians 9,000 YBP.

East Indians transitioned from Aborigine-type Australoids to Caucasians 8,000 YBP.

More Comments on the Genetics of Filipinos

The question involves whether or not Filipinos have some Negrito genes. The Negritos are the original Australoid peoples of the Philippines. The Filipinos are the modern, SE Asian Mongoloid types that we all familiar with.

SE Asian Australoids are people like Papuans, Melanesians and Negritos.

It is possible to be part this or that in your background, but it won’t show up in genes or in skulls. I think we are all aware that SE Asians in general are a mix of a Mongoloid type with more primitive Australoid types = Negrito or Melanesian types, that were already living there. But when we look at skulls, we see nothing. SE Asian skulls do not look Australoid, other than Negritos and the Senoi.

Classic SE Asian appearance in a young Filipina with relatively dark skin, an adaptation to the tropical climate. She also somewhat resembles a Taiwanese aborigine.

When we go looking for Australoid genes, we can’t seem to find much of those either. Just a few here and there along the coast of Vietnam, in Malaysia and in Indonesia. Though there are a lot more in Eastern Indonesia.

So, yeah, Filipinos may well be part Melanesian/Negrito going way back when (Heck, all SE Asians are) but there’s little to nothing obvious left of the Australoid presence, other than maybe some vague look in the faces won’t plot on a chart (Filipino skulls won’t plot with Australoid skulls on charts).

Emilio Aguinaldo, a famous Filipino independence fighter. This look, often said to be Australoid, actually shows resemblances to the Taiwanese Ami.

The analogy with Amerindians is a good one. Amerindians in the US have quite a bit of White genes. Most are only part Amerindian anymore. But Whites do not have a lot of Amerindian genes. Sure, we have some (I am 1/3000 Amerindian as I am related to Pocohontas), and perhaps a majority of Americans have Amerindian genes, but they only have small amounts of them.

Vast amounts of White genes went into the Amerindian population. Few Amerindian genes went into the White population. Both via genocide and genetic swamping effects.

A similar situation may have existed in the Philippines. Aeta genes now look Filipino, but Filipinos seem to have few Negrito genes that I am aware of.

Wilma, a Filipina girl from Siteo Pader, Angeles City. This Filipina girl has a classic Filipina look to her. She is much closer to a Taiwanese Ami than to a Negrito, as you can see.

The Negritos were simply genetically swamped out. Vast amounts of Filipino genes went into the Negritos, but few Negrito genes went into the Filipinos.

A Negrito woman from the Philippines. Do Filipinos look like this? No. Hence, don't have many Negrito genes.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the original Austronesians may well have been Australoid types. At 5000 YBP, the Taiwanese aborigine Ami, the source of the Filipino population, are Australoid.

An Ami girl from Taiwan. The Ami, Taiwanese aborigines, are the source population of most of the Philippines and the closest relatives of Filipinos.

They transition to Mongoloid over the next 3000 years. Probably a similar transition occurred in the Philippines, as the Ami in the Philippines slowly turned into Mongoloids along with the rest of SE Asia.

A chart showing the near-perfect relationship between the Taiwanese Ami and the Filipinos. The relationship is clear and unmistakable. Note that other Taiwanese populations could not have been the source.

It is true that there are Bornean genes from Borneo in the South of the Philippines, that is, the South Filipinos of Mindanao are part Bornean.

The heavily-Austronesian (Ami) people of Sabah. People from Sabah went up into the Southern Philippines (Mindanao) at some point in the past. P.S. The lady in the middle is a cutie. Same with 3rd one on the top and 3rd one on the left.

The proto-Daic genes from 15,000 YBP that make up 8

An Indonesian with a strong Australoid appearance. Quite a few Indonesians retain some Australoid features.

The Anuids or Ainu types probably passed through the Philippines two times.

An Ainu woman with quite a bit of Japanese in her. Most Ainus are now heavily Japanese. By the way, she's a hottie.

The first time, going from Thailand as the Ainuid Jomonese to Japan on boats to form the Japanese Jomonese 16,000 YBP.

An Ainu chief showing the typical Ainu appearance before Japanese gene flow.

Possibly the same migration brought the Jomonese to Australia as the Ainuid Murrayans, a formative element in the Aborigines.

Typical Aboriginal women.

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A Recent Comment on Human Genetics and Races

Here is a recent comment on the Peopling of India post by an Indian commenter. I will answer his questions later on in the post:

Please try to answer all of this long winded set of questions, thanks. Firstly, you seem interested in this topic and well educated on it say as much as me (love your theories they make sense based on my previous online research and discussion with other people of Indian and indo-Iranian+Near Eastern origin), in fact even more, but how are you valid, are you an anthropologist, scientist of some sort, or do you at least have sources (no offence)?

Can you pleases check out these genetic findings on this website: does this data not contradict yours? Is it valid?

Also Pakistanis are not genetically distinct, correct, and I heard Iranians, Indians, and All Aryan(Indo-Iranian) are closely related genetically as are all Aryans, including Europeans, is this true?

Dravidians are essentially just darker Mediterranean (a phenotype not really from the Mediterranean) Caucasians with a distinct language and culture?

Tribals seem like non-Caucasians that have adapted some local languages but kept their own.

So essentially you are saying Europe, the Middle East and Caucasus were likely inhabited by Australoids from East Africa who became Caucasians in India and outside of India?

So the Australoids would have been the first race to diverge off of Negroids, and if I am right, according to recent research, they would have mixed with Neanderthals who mixed with everyone who was not Negroid?

One more are, Veddoids, Tamils/Elamites, and Kalash intermediates or something else, and aren’t Nagas Mongoloid?

What are Andamans and Negritos racially?

Firstly, you seem interested in this topic and well educated on it say as much as me (love your theories they make sense based on my previous online research and discussion with other people of Indian and indo-Iranian+Near Eastern origin), in fact even more, but how are you valid, are you an anthropologist, scientist of some sort, or do you at least have sources (no offence)?

I am just a journalist who has researched the subject for a few years now. I have no formal credentials whatsoever.

Can you pleases check out these genetic findings on this website: does this data not contradict yours? Is it valid?

That data is very interesting. I think it claims that the Indians are very old and consist of two stocks, North Indian and South Indian. North going back 40,000 YBP and South going back 70,000 YBP. Problem is that if you go back that far, all Indians looked something like Aborigines. Indeed the Aborigines were partly created by an infusion of proto-South Indian stock (Carpenterians) 12,000 YBP went by boats to Australia.

Also Pakistanis are not genetically distinct, correct, and I heard Iranians, Indians, and All Aryan(Indo-Iranian) are closely related genetically as are all Aryans, including Europeans, is this true?

Pakistanis are pretty hard to tell apart from the rest of Indians, yes. But it does appear to be a separate small race amid the Indids.

All of the Indo-Aryans are indeed pretty closely related nowadays, even archaic types like Tamil types. The archaic types are so close to the rest probably through mass interbreeding. All people on the subcontinent are close genetically. The Iranians are fairly close to the Indians, but they are somewhat more distant. The Iranians are the link between the Europeans and the Indians via the Italians. It works like this:

Italians -> Iranians -> Indians

Groups separated by only one arrow are fairly closely related. By two arrows, not so close.

So you see the Iranians are the link between the Caucasians of the East and West.

All Europeans are not that closely related. The groups in the Caucasus are very distant from the rest, as are Turks, Russians, Jews, Orkney Islanders, Sardinians, Basques and Sami at the very least. At lesser distance, but still far from the rest are Yugoslavians and Greeks.

Dravidians are essentially just darker Mediterranean (a phenotype not really from the Mediterranean) Caucasians with a distinct language and culture?

No one knows what the Dravidians are. At the least they seem to be the basic cross between the ancient Australoids of India with the more modern Aryan types from the steppes in the north. There is also evidence of an infusion of ancient Caucasoid stock moving into India 12-17,000 YBP from the area between Lebanon and the coast of Iran. These people may have been related to the ancient Elamites, and Dravidian languages may be related to Elamite. Genetically, this stock looked like Arabs. So the Dravidians may be in part ancient proto-Arabs or proto-Iranians.

Tribals seem like non-Caucasians that have adapted some local languages but kept their own.

Tribals at this time are genetic Caucasians but have skulls that are Australoid.

So essentially you are saying Europe, the Middle East and Caucasus were likely inhabited by Australoids from East Africa who became Caucasians in India and outside of India?

No, it is not correct that Europe, Caucasus, and the Middle East were initially inhabited by Australoids. The Caucasus and the Middle East were originally inhabited by Africans. Europe was originally inhabited by proto-Caucasians, but they did not look much like White people. They may have still looked like East Africans or Masai. Later on, they looked a lot like Amerindians from the US Northwest.

The original Australoids did come out of East Africa as Africans, but they turned into Australoids. And the Australoids were the first race out of Africa, correct. The survivors of this first group are people like the Andaman Islanders and the Mani.

However, the Caucasian race has a different provenance. They came out of East Africa as Africans too, but more recently, only 42,000 YBP. So Caucasians are a more recent split from Blacks. The proto-Caucasian stock may have resembled the Masai, but no one really knows. They moved into the Middle East and then to the Caucasus and South Russia. There, they met with migrating proto-Chinese types (maybe resembling Ainu). From a mixture 2/3 Ainuid and 1/3 Masai type, the Caucasians were born. The Asiatic eyefold was somehow lost.

In Asia, the Australoids progress into modern Asiatics by evolution. The progression occurs first in NE Asia and later in SE Asia. Ancient SE Asians look like Melanesians.

So the Australoids would have been the first race to diverge off of Negroids, and if I am right, according to recent research, they would have mixed with Neanderthals who mixed with everyone who was not Negroid?

Yes, everyone outside of Africa mixed with Neandertals, maybe in the Middle East first, then later in Europe.

One more are, Veddoids, Tamils/Elamites, and Kalash intermediates or something else, and aren’t Nagas Mongoloid?

Kalash are a completely separate race of Caucasians. Caucasians are split into two races – Kalash and Non-Kalash.

Veddoids, Tamils, tribals, etc, are Caucasians by genes and Australoids by skulls.

Nagas, etc. in the Northeast are Mongoloids.

What are Andamans and Negritos racially?

Based on genes, I think that they are some sort of Asiatics. I do not know about the Andamans. The Andaman genes are very distinct, but how distinct I am not sure.

The Mani in Thailand have genes that look Thai.

The Aeta in the Philippines have genes that look Filipino.

Etc, etc.

However, if you do race by skull type, all Negritos are members of the Australoid race, as are Tamil types and others that look like Tamils in India.

Genetically, the Australoid Race only has Aborigines and Papuans in it.

By skulls, it consists of Ainus, Melanesians, Aborigines, Papuans, Negritos, Tamils, Veddoids, tribals and similar South Indian types and Fuegian Amerindians.

Do Asians Have a Short Bell Curve?

In race realist circles, much is made of a so-called short curve in Asian IQ. That is, Asians are said to have few geniuses and few idiots – there are few Asians below 70 IQ (gifted) and few above 130 IQ (gifted). So, while Asians are highly intelligent, it is said that they lack a large number of the sort of extreme geniuses that really move a society forward. On the contrary, European Whites are said to have a long curve.

Quite a few geniuses and idiots, and therefore more likely to produce truly innovative and forward-looking societies. White Supremacists have jumped all over this, as they are stung by IQ studies that show NE Asians scoring about 5 points above European Whites. By emphasizing the short Asian bell curve, White Supremacists fight back by arguing that European Whites are in fact the most superior race of them all, and NE Asians are inferior to them.

There are a lot of problems with this data. For one thing, it is not holding up well in the US. Our very top universities are overflowing not just with Ashkenazi Jews (IQ = 112) but also with NE Asians (IQ = 108). One would think that the competition at top schools such as the Ivy League would be among the most high IQ of them all.

Let us also look at the data below regarding gifted programs in the US. As you can see, Asians, especially but not exclusively NE Asians, have a higher

The graph below is confusing. It shows what

I have no explanation for some of the results below. Why do Amerindians have more gifted than Hispanics? Why do Hawaiians and Guamanians have so many gifted, but Samoans and other Pacific Islanders have fewer, when both groups have the same IQ?

The IQ scores may seem confusing. They are set at the new ranking of US IQ = 100. Scores were formerly set at US White IQ = 100. The new ranking pushes US White scores up to 103, and pushes everyone else’s score up 3 points. But the scores are still the same; only the scale has changed.

Asians are overrepresented in the gifted programs in the US, contrary to WN propaganda about narrow Asian SD and relative lack of gifted students.

For 1997, according to the Office of Civil rights (1999), 5.6

Examination of data for those assessed and those who qualified for GATE during the 1998-99 school year indicated that of 14,778 students tested during the year, 3,108 (21.0

Examination of data for Asian subgroups showed a wide range in percentages of children who qualified, with Chinese (50.4

Laotians (15.7

APA Subgroup               

Chinese                     50.4
Koreans                     47.44        108
Asian Indians               45.45        109
Japanese                    41.30        108
Vietnamese                  29.76        102.5
Hawaiians                   28.00         90
Filipinos                   28.00         97
Other Indochinese           25.00         93
Guamanians                  21.95         89
Total Including non-APAs    21.03         100
Laotians                    15.79         92
Hmong                       14.12         85.5
Cambodians                  12.58         92
Samoans                      7.32         89
Other Pacific Islander       5.56         89

In conclusion, it is not yet proven that Asians have a short bell curve relative to European Whites, and there is considerable evidence against the hypothesis.

References

Cheng L. L., Ima K. & Labovitz G. 1994. Assessment of Asian and Pacific Islander Students for Gifted Programs. In S. B. Garcia (Ed.), Addressing Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Special Education (pp. 30-45). Reston, VA: The Council for Exceptional Children.

U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights. 1999. 1997 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Compliance Report. National and State Projections. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Who Are the Smartest White Europeans?

A commenter suggests that Russians are the smartest Whites.

It’s not the case. Russians are not at all the smartest Whites. Here are some recent scores. There is a North-South cline, but it’s not perfect at all. Italian is a very much a Med state, and it’s IQ is very high. France is mostly a Northern state, and it’s IQ is not so hot. Spain is a Med state with a high IQ. Ireland is a Northern state with a lower IQ than the rest.

Notice I title this piece White Europeans, because as a Pan-Aryanist, I not only believe that most all Caucasoids of Europe are White, but I also believe that there are Whites outside of Europe who are just as White as those of Europe.

Germany        107
Netherlands    107
Poland         106
Sweden         104
Italy          102
Austria        101
Switzerland    101
UK             100
Norway         100
Belgium        99
Denmark        99 (median)
Finland        99
Americans      98 (for comparison purposes)
Czech Republic 98
Hungary        98
Spain          98
Ireland        97
Russia         96
Greece         95
France         94
Bulgaria       94
Romania        94
Turkey         90
Serbia         89

I don’t have much to say about these scores. If France can produce such a great nation with an IQ of 94, then others with similar scores can do well too. Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic should be able to create some fine modern societies. They are surely smart enough to. These others listed below are certainly intelligent enough to do well for themselves. IQ is certainly not holding them back at any rate.

Mongolia                              100
Vietnam                               99.5
Estonia                               99
Latvia                                97.5
Ukraine                               96
Belarus                               96
UK East Indian                        96
Uruguay                               96
Moldova                               95.5
US Mexican-American (2nd generation)  95
Argentina                             94.5
Lithuania                             94
US Filipino                           94

Even Serbia has created an excellent modern society with an IQ of only 89. If you go to Belgrade, you would think you are in any modern US or European city. Even the countryside is not really backwards. Its health, education and development figures are excellent. There’s nothing inferior about the place other than their morals. If we take Serbia as the IQ at which one ought to be able to create a fine, modern, European-type society, things get a lot more interesting, and a lot more countries have the brains to do well.

Armenia                 93.5
Georgia                 93.5
Kazakhstan              93.5
Malaysia                92
Macedonia               92
Brunei                  91.5
Cyprus                  91.5
Chile                   91.5
Thailand                91
Albania                 90
Bermuda                 90
Croatia                 90
Costa Rica              90
Bosnia and Herzegovina  90
Cambodia                90
Cook Islands            89
Laos                    89
Suriname                89

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The Head Size/Race/IQ Trainwreck

Repost from the old site.

Average cranial capacities of indigenous populations, sex-combined means. Black: 1450 cc. and over; checkerboard: 1400-1449; crosshatching: 1350-1399; horizontal striping: 1300-1349; diagonal striping: 1250-1299; dots: 1200-1249. From Beals et al., 1984.

Click to enlarge.

White racists like to make a big deal about the supposed correlation between head size and intelligence and race. A nice little chart showing the basically dishonest portrayal they attempt based on cherry-picking data is below. I’ve already dealt with this before, but it’s time to add some new evidence to the theory.

As you can see, in the Americas, there is no good evidence whatsoever for head size and IQ. I am not aware that Amerindian IQ varies in the Americas. The average is apparently 87 across the continent. If anyone can show me that it varies by latitude, please do.

The biggest heads of all are in Northern Chinese (Manchurians), Eskimos, Alaskan natives, Siberians and Mongolians. The Northern Chinese IQ is 105, the Mongolian IQ is 100, the Eskimo IQ is 91, the Alaska native IQ is 87 and the Siberian native IQ is not known.

Note that Amerindians in Canada, Alaska, Mexico (!) and Tierra Del Fuego have larger heads (1400-1449 cc.) than any Europeans, yet Europeans have higher IQ’s than any of these Amerindians, who have IQ’s of 87. In addition, Uralics and Northeast Asians also have very large heads. Northeast Asians have median IQ’s of 105, Uralics have IQ’s of 96 and Amerindians have IQ’s of 87.

Amerindians in most of the US and in most of Latin America, Egyptians, Ugandans and Oceanians (Polynesians, Melanesians and Micronesians) have the same sized heads (1350-1399 cc.) as Northern and Central Europeans.

Northern and Central Europeans have median IQ’s of 98, Amerindians are at 87, Oceanians have median IQ’s of 84.5, and Ugandans have IQ’s of 73.

Some Amerindians, North Africans and Sahelians, Central Indians and Arabs, SE Asian Islanders (Indonesians, Bruneians, Malays and Filipinos), South Africans, New Guineans, and Middle Easterners have the same head sizes (1300-1349 cc.) as Southern Europeans.

Southern Europeans have a median IQ of 93. Amerindians again have IQ’s of 87. SE Asian Islanders have median IQ’s of 89.5, Arabs, North Africans and Middle Easterners have median IQ’s of 83.5. Central Indians and Central Asians have median IQ’s of 82. South Africans have median IQ’s of 70.5. Sahelians and West Africans have median IQ’s of 67.5.

It is true that most Africans have small heads, at 1250-1299 cc. However, southern Indians and some Amerindians have the same sized heads. These Africans have median IQ’s of 68.5, the Indians have IQ’s of 81.5 and the Amerindians have IQ’s of 87.

The smallest heads in the world (1200-1249 cc.) are actually not found in Africa. They are found in SE Asia and South India and Sri Lanka (we will also include the Seychelles and the Comoros). South Indians have a median IQ of 81 and SE Asians have median IQ’s of 90.

Does any of this make much sense? Not really.

Race realists, for the most part Northern European racists, often use a subset of these figures to demonstrate a link between IQ and head size. The subset looks something like this.

Misleading Racist Head Size/IQ Chart

Head Size
Asians       Europeans     Africans
Largest      Intermediate  Smallest
1400-1449cc. 1350-1399 cc. 1250-1299 cc.

IQ
Asians   Europeans    Africans
106      100          67

This is misleading. Let’s do it the right way.

Proper Head Size/IQ Chart

Largest heads 1450 cc.+
Variable        IQ

North Chinese*  105
Mongolians      99.5
Eskimos         91
Amerindians**   87
Siberians***    unknown

Median          95.5

*Manchuria
**Alaskans
***Aboriginals
Large heads 1400-1449 cc.
Variable       IQ

NE Asians*     105
Russians**     96
Amerindians**  87

Median         96

*incl. S. Chinese
**Uralics
**Canada, Alaska, Mexico, Fuegians
Medium-large heads 1350-1399 cc.
Variable             IQ

Nor./Cent. Europeans 98
Amerindians*         87
Oceanians**          84.5
Ugandans             73

Median               86

*Most Amerindians
**Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia
Medium-small heads 1300-1349 cc. 
Variable               IQ

S. Europeans           93
SE Asian Islanders*    89.5
Amerindians**          87
Middle Easterners***   83.5
Central Asians****     82
South Africans         70.5
Sahelians/W. Africans  67.5
Papuans                65

Median                 82.5 

*Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines
**Equatorial
***Arabs, North Africans and SW Asians
****Incl. Central Indians
Small heads 1250-1299 cc.
Variable      IQ

Amerindians*  87
South Indians 81.5
Africans**    68.5

Median        81.5

*Caribbean
**Most
Smallest heads 1200-1249 cc.
Variable           IQ

SE Asians          90
Far South Indians* 81

Median             85.5

*Incl. Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Comoros

This looks like a complete wreck to me. There’s just not much there, once you sit down and really do the map.

People with large heads have very high (Several European countries = 101) and very low IQ’s (Ugandans = 73). Some people with the smallest heads have very high IQ’s (Vietnamese = 99.5). There’s sort of a general trend, but the data is all over the place, like a drunk throwing darts at a dartboard.

I wish people would quit talking about this race = head size = IQ thing already.

References

Beals, K.L., Smith, C.L. & Dodd, S.M. 1984. Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, and Time Machines. Current Anthropology, 25:301-330.

Lynn, R. and Vanhanen, T. 2006. IQ and Global Inequality. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers.

Meisenberg, Gerhard. Winter 2003. IQ Population Genetics: It’s Not as Simple as You Think. Washington, DC: Mankind Quarterly, Volume XLIV, Number 2, pp.185-210.

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Head Size = Brains = Nonsense

Repost from the old site.

It is much postulated by hereditarians in the IQ debate that head size has a correlation with IQ. This seems to be true to some extent, but there are also problems with it. For one thing, nutrition increases head size, so head size is not as genetic as the hereditarians say it is. Another problem is that it is only a correlation, and not a very high one either.

What this means is that there will be cases where it does not make sense at all. For instance, Eskimos have the biggest heads, but they have IQ’s of 91, which, though Richard Lynn falsely states that they are the third major race in IQ, behind Northeast Asians and European Whites.

This is because Lynn leaves out very high scoring groups like East Indians in the West (IQ = 96) and Vietnamese (IQ = 99.5), but they don’t fit his silly Ice Age Theory of Brains Evolution, so they get left out.

Even more problematic, or much more really, enough to make the case for brain size = brains even more deadly, is the fact that human brains were much larger 10,000 years ago, when most Asians were all still Australoids (the same race as Papuans and Aborigines), when European Whites as we now know them were just beginning to evolve, and white skin was still 1,000 years away in Europe, when American Indians were changing from Australoid to Polynesian type, and the NE Asian type had not even really showed up yet, and would not for a few thousand years more.

People in India still looked like Aborigines too, and would not look like the modern-day Caucasians that they surely are for another 2,000 years. In most of the world, man was simply transforming from Australoid to either Amerindian, Indian Caucasian or Northeast Asian.

To think that these Aborigine types were smarter then than we are today and have today ended up sadly and world’s lowest IQ race except for Bushmen simply defies belief. No one was doing much better anywhere on Earth really at that time, as something called Civilization had not even developed.

If you want to think that 10,000 year old Cro-Magnon hulking hunter-gatherers and a bunch of proto-Aborigines, who were probably even lower IQ than they are today, were smarter than the guys who put a man on the moon and created the wonder known as sliced bread, you are entitled to that belief. But I will call you an idiot.

Even Lynn’s head size correlations that the hereditarians love so much only account for 1

That brains were bigger 10,000 years ago than they are today simply means that humans have been getting less robust and more gracile. Robust means big and hulking. Aborigines, Melanesians and Papuans are some of the most robust folks around these days. Blacks are not necessarily as robust as one might think, many are surprisingly gracile.

We have been transforming from robust, hulking cave men more or less to our present status as Blackberry-doing New York metrosexuals, and in this transformation our brains have shrunk dramatically as we got sleeker and sleeker and more Upper East Side New York sleek and gym-trained.

Also, we should note that since 1600 to the present day our heads have been getting smaller and smaller. This is occurring in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and may have been occurring elsewhere too.

If you really think that folks in the time of Shakespeare, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Cromwell, Fermat, Rembrandt, Cervantes, Pascal, Leibniz, Peter the Great, Bach, Newton, Racine, Locke, Spinoza were smarter than we are, you may.

If you wish to believe that the humans who pulled off the Salem Witch Trials, Galileo’s Inquisition, and the idiotic Thirty Years War, the people who caused the Plague by sheer stupidity, the people who invented a famous thing called Pilgrims, who fought endless war in Europe against the Ottomans only halting at Vienna, were smarter than we are in our Teraflop Age, you are welcome to believe that, but I am going to call bull on that.

Still, they did halt the Turk at the gates, Newton did write is mathematical encyclopedic masterpiece, and the treaty of Westphalia was all pulled off, so this time did have its potential. Note, though, that all this good stuff occurred late Century when our brains were already shrinking. See where this argument is going? Time to get off a train that’s going off the tracks.

As you can see, the Fathead Brain Theory has serious issues, to say the least. There seems to be something there, but there is a lot less there than one might think. When people start talking in general terms of Fathead Brainiacness, it is time to wave the arms and shut the conversation down.

Hereditarians, come on, you can do better than this.

IQ By Region Maps

Here are a couple of maps showing average IQ’s by region in the world.

This map shows average IQ's by region of the native peoples of the region. It's good for evolutionary study, but not too useful for the current situation.

The first map is for the native peoples of the region.

This map shows IQ's by current resident majority of each region, so is more useful regarding the current majorities of the region and not so useful evolutionarily.

The second map is for the majority who currently reside there.

The maps have some inaccuracies.

For instance, Vietnam should be colored the same color as Europe, as Vietnamese IQ is 99, not whatever Richard Lynn says it is.

Botswana has a lower IQ than the rest of Africa as the native peoples are regarded as Khoisan and not Negroids. The Khoisan IQ is estimated at 54, but that seems too low. For instance, an anthropologist who spent years working with them described the Khoisan as “intelligent.” The map for Papua New Guinea masks a few things. The Papuans of the highlands are said to have low IQ’s of around 64 or so, around the same as Aborigines. Nevertheless, Jared Diamond, who worked extensively with Papuans, felt that they were “intelligent, not stupid.”

So we see once again primitive groups that are regarded as retarded on IQ tests, yet anthropologists who have spent years in the field with them say that they seem intelligent, and not retarded. IQ tests do not appear to be accurately measuring the intelligence of primitive peoples.

While the Papuans of the highlands of New Guinea have an IQ of 64, that of the Melanesians on the coast is much higher, around 84. This is curious as the Melanesians go back almost as far as Papuans, a good 30,000 years. However, they did receive an infusion of Taiwanese genes a few thousand years ago. To what extent this accounts for their higher IQ’s is not known.

The IQ of Native Americans is surprisingly uniform at around 87 or so. It would be nice if we could break it down further by native group per nation and see what we can get out of it. Some say that the Canadian Natives of the far north have higher IQ’s than the Indians of the SW US. And Mexican Indians are said to have IQ’s around 82, which may rise to 92 with the next generation if they come to the US.

African IQ appears low, but that says little to nothing about African-Americans, whose IQ’s may exceed those of Africans by up to 20 points. The higher US Black IQ certainly cannot be explained by White admixture as the racists and hard hereditarians tend to do.

The reasons why US Blacks have become so much more intelligent in the US is as yet unknown. Improved environment, selective (eugenic) breeding and other factors may be involved. Massive increases in US Black skull size along with changes from a more archaic to a more progressive phenotype in the past 100 years were said to be only partly due to nutrition.

Part of the changes were also thought to be genetic. This indicates that US Blacks have been genetically evolving towards a more progressive phenotype and larger heads in the past 100 years. Perhaps US Blacks with higher intelligence and more progressive phenotype have been preferentially selected since 1900. Theories about dysgenic trends in the US Black community are unwarranted and unsupported by the science.

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More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Non-Indo-European Languages

Caution: This post is very long. It runs to 200 pages on the Net. Updated January 17, 2016.

This is a continuation of the earlier post. I split it up into two parts because it had gotten too long.

The post refers to which languages are the hardest for English speakers to learn, though to some extent, the ratings are applicable across languages. Most Chinese speakers would recognize Spanish as being an easy language, despite its alien nature. And even most Chinese, Navajo, Poles or Czechs acknowledge that their languages are hard to learn. To a certain extent, difficulty is independent of linguistic starting point. Some languages are just harder than others, and that’s all there is to it.

Method, Results and Conclusion. See here.

In this case, 73 non-IE languages were examined.

Ratings: Languages are rated 1-6, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very  difficult, 5 = extremely difficult, 6 = most difficult of all.

Time needed: Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months-1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months-1 year. Level 3 languages = 1-2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

Here is a list of the ratings for the languages below as a handy reference.

 

Malagasy 1.0 Bahasa Indonesian 1.5 Aymara 2.0 Malay 2.0 Hawaiian 2.0 Swahili 2.0 Maori 3.0 Turkish 3.5 Quechua 4.0 Maltese 4.0 Tamil 4.0 Tagalog 4.0 Anyi 4.0 Egyptian Arabic 4.5 Moroccan Arabic 4.5 Amharic 4.5 Estonian 4.5 Khmer 4.5 Lao 4.5 Georgian 5.0 Gros Ventre 5.0 Karok 5.0 MSA Arabic 5.0 Hebrew 5.0 Somali 5.0 Malayalam 5.0 Korean 5.0 Japanese 5.0 Finnish 5.0 Skolt Sami 5.0 Hungarian 5.0 Quiang 5.0 Tibetan 5.0 Dzongka 5.0 Vietnamese 5.0 Sedang 5.0 Hmong 5.0 Tsou 5.0 Sakai 5.0 Kwaio 5.0 Thai 5.0 Kam 5.0 Buyang 5.0 Ga 5.0 Ndali 5.0 Xhosa 5.0 Ndebele 5.0 Zulu 5.0 Taa 5.0 Ju|’hoan 5.0 Cherokee 5.5 Lakota 5.5 Classical Japanese 5.5 Mandarin 5.5 Cantonese 5.5 Min Nan 5.5 Dondan Wu 5.5 Basque 5.5 Chechen 6.0 Circassian 6.0 Tsez 6.0 Archi 6.0 Tabasaran 6.0 Ingush 6.0 Ubykh 6.0 Abkhaz 6.0 Burushaski 6.0 Kootenai 6.0 Yuchi 6.0 Tlingit 6.0 Navajo 6.0 Slavey 6.0 Haida 6.0 Salish 6.0 Nuxalk 6.0 Montana Salish 6.0 Straits Salish 6.0 Halkomelem 6.0 Lushootseed 6.0 Cree 6.0 Ojibwa 6.0 Cheyenne 6.0 Arapaho 6.0 Wichita 6.0 Huamelutec 6.0 Hopi 6.0 Nahuatl 6.0 Comanche 6.0 Chinantec 6.0 Jalapa Mazatec 6.0 Tarina 6.0 Bora 6.0 Tuyuca 6.0 Cubeo 6.0 Hixkaryána 6.0 Nambikwara 6.0 Pirahã 6.0 Australian Languages – 6.0 Berik 6.0 Amele 6.0 Valpan 6.0 Tamazight 6.0 Tachelhit 6.0 Dahalo 6.0 Classical Chinese 6.0 Inuktitut 6.0 Kalaallisut 6.0 Chukchi 6.0

Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian and Kartvelian

Of course the Caucasian languages like Tsez, Tabasaran, Georgian, Chechen, Ingush, Abkhaz and Circassian are some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn.

Chechen and Circassian are rated 6, hardest of all.

Northeast Caucasian

NE Caucasian languages have the uvulars and ejectives of Georgian in addition to pharyngeals, lateral fricatives, and other strangeness. They have noun classes like the Bantu languages (but usually fewer). Nevertheless, they have noun class agreement markers on verbs on adjectives. One thing NE Caucasian has is lots of case. Some languages have 40+ cases. They are built from the ground up via two forms – one a spatial form such as in, on or around and the other a directional motion form such as to, from, through or at.

Tsezic

Tsez has 64-126 different cases, making it by far the most complex case system on Earth! It is one of the few languages on Earth that has two genitive cases – Genitive 1 (-s) and Genitive 2 (-z). Genitive 1 is used when the genitive’s head noun is in absolutive case and Genitive 2 is used when the genitive’s head noun is in any other case. It also has four noun classes. It is said that even native speakers have a hard time picking up the correct inflection to use sometimes.

In Tsez, you need to know a lot Tsez grammar to communicate at a basic level. The sentence:

English: I like your mother.

Tsez: Дāьр деби энийу йетих. (Dǟr debi eniyu yetix.)

In order to speak that sentence in Tsez, you need to know:

• the words themselves (word order is not as important) • that the verb -eti- requires the subject to be in the dative/lative case and the object to be in the absolutive • the noun class for eniyu (class II) • the dative/lative form of di (I), which is dǟr • the genitive 1 form of mi (you), which is debi • the congruence prefix y- that corresponds to the noun class of the absolutive argument of the phrase, in this case mother • the present tense ending for vowel-final verbs -x

Tsez is rated 6, hardest of all.

Lezgic Archi

Archi has an extremely complex phonology and one of the most complicated grammars on Earth. The extreme fusional aspects and the verbal morphology are what make the grammar so difficult. Every verb root has 1,502,839 possible forms! It is also an ergative language, but there is irregularity in its ergative system.

Some verbs take the typical ergative/absolutive case (absolutive for the subject of an intransitive very and ergative for the subject of a transitive verb – where the direct object would be in absolutive). In others the subject is in dative rather than the expected ergative/absolutive case. These are usually verbs of perception like love/want, hear, see, feel, and be bored. For instance, the verb:

-эти- = to love/want must have its subject in dative case instead of the expected absolutive or ergative case.

Among non-click languages, Archi has one of the largest consonant inventories, with only the extinct Ubykh having more. There are 26 vowels and between 76 and 82 consonants, depending on the analysis. Five of the six vowels can occur in five varieties: short, pharyngealized, high tone, long (with high tone), and pharyngealized with high tone.

It has many unusual phonemes, including contrasts between several voiceless velar lateral fricatives, voiceless and ejective velar lateral affricates and a voiced velar lateral fricative. The voiceless velar lateral fricative ʟ̝̊, the voiced velar lateral fricative ʟ̝, and the corresponding voiceless and ejective affricates k͡ʟ̝̊ and k͡ʟ̝̊ʼ are extremely unusual sounds, as velar fricatives are not typically laterals.

There are 15 cases, 10 regular cases, five spatial cases and five directional cases. The Spatial cases are Inessive (in), Intrative (between), superessive (above), Subessive (below) and Pertingent (against). The directional cases are Essive (as), Elative (out of), Lative (to/into), Allative (onto), Terminative (specifies a limit) and Translative (indicates change).

There are four noun classes:

I Male human II Female human III All insects, some animates, and some inanimates IV Abstracts, some animates, and some inanimates that can only be seen via verbal agreement

Archi is rated 6, hardest of all.

Samur Eastern Samur Lezgi–Aghul–Tabasaran

Tabasaran is rated the 3rd most complex grammar in the world, with 48 different noun cases.

Tabasaran is rated 6, hardest of all.

Nakh Vainakh

Ingush has a very difficult phonology, an extremely complex grammar, and furthermore, is extremely irregular. Ingush also has a proximate/obviate distinction and is the only language in the region that has this feature. Ingush along with Chechen both have a closed class of verbs, an unusual feature in the world’s languages. New verbs are formed by adding a noun to the verb do:

shootdo gun

Ingush is rated 6, hardest of all.

Kartvelian Karto-Zan

One problem with Georgian is the strange alphabet: ქართულია ერთ ერთი რთული ენა. It also has lots of glottal stops that are hard for many foreigners to speak; consonant clusters can be huge – up to eight consonants stuck together (CCCCCCCCVC)- and many consonant sounds are strange. In addition, there are uvulars and ejectives. Georgian is one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce. It regularly makes it onto craziest phonologies lists.

Its grammar is exceedingly complex. Georgian is both highly agglutinative and highly irregular, which is the worst of two worlds. Other agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Finnish at least have the benefit of being highly regular. The verbs in particular seem nearly random with no pattern to them at all. The system of argument and tense marking on the verb is exceedingly complex, with tense, aspect, mood on the verb, person and number marking for the subject, and direct and indirect objects.

Although it is an ergative language, the ergative (or active-stative case marking as it is called) oddly enough is only used in the aorist and perfect tenses where the agent in the sentence receives a different case, while the aorist also masquerades as imperative. In the present, there is standard nominative-accusative marking. A single verb can have up to 12 different parts, similar to Polish, and there are six cases and six tenses.

Georgian also features something called polypersonal agreement, a highly complex type of morphological feature that is often associated with polysynthetic languages and to a lesser extent with ergativity.

In a polypersonal language, the verb has agreement morphemes attached to it dealing with one or more of the verbs arguments (usually up to four arguments). In a non polypersonal language like English, the verb either shows no agreement or agrees with only one of its arguments, usually the subject. Whereas in a polypersonal language, the verb agrees with one or more of the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, the beneficiary of the verb, etc. The polypersonal marking may be obligatory or optional.

In Georgian, the polypersonal morphemes appear as either suffixes or prefixes, depending on the verb class and the person, number, aspect and tense of the verb. The affixes also modify each other phonologically when they are next to each other. In the Georgian system, the polypersonal affixes convey subject, direct object, indirect object, genitive, locative and causative meanings.

g-mal-av-en = they hide you g-i-mal-av-en = they hide it from you

mal (to hide) is the verb, and the other four forms are polypersonal affixes.

In the case below,

xelebi ga-m-i-tsiv-d-a = My hands got cold.

xelebi means hands. The m marker indicates genitive or my. With intransitive verbs, Georgian often omits my before the subject and instead puts the genitive onto the verb to indicate possession.

Georgian verbs of motion focus on deixis, whether the goal of the motion is towards the speaker or the hearer. You use a particle to signify who the motion is heading towards. If it heading towards neither of you, you use no deixis marker. You specify the path taken to reach the goal through the use or prefixes called preverbs, similar to “verbal case.” These come after the deixis marker:

up             a-
out            ga-
in             sha-
down into      cha-
across/through garda-
thither        mi-
away           c’a-
or down        da-

Hence:

up towards me = amo-. The deixis marker is mo- and up is a-

On the plus side, Georgian has borrowed a great deal of Latinate foreign vocabulary, so that will help anyone coming from a Latinate or Latinate-heavy language background.

Georgian is rated 5, extremely difficult.

Northwest Caucasian

All NW Caucasian languages are characterized by a very small number of vowels (usually only two or three) combined with a vast consonant inventory, the largest consonant inventories on Earth. Almost any consonant can be plain, labialized or palatalized. This is apparently the result of an historical process whereby many vowels were lost and their various features became assigned to consonants. For instance, palatalized consonants may have come from Ci sequences and labialized consonants may have come from Cu sequences.

The grammars of these languages are complex. Unlike the NE Caucasian languages, they have simple noun systems, usually with only a handful of cases.

However, they have some of the complex verbal systems on Earth. These are some of the most synthetic languages in the Old World. Often the entire syntax of the sentence is contained within the verb. All verbs are marked with ergative, absolutive and direct object morphemes in addition to various applicative affixes.

These are akin to what some might call “verbal case.” For instance, in applicative voice systems, applicatives may take forms such as comitative, locative, instrumental, benefactive and malefactive. These roles are similar to the case system in nouns – even the names are the same. So you can see why some call this “verbal case.”

NW Caucasian verbs can be marked for aspect (whether something is momentous, continuous or habitual), mood (if something is certain, likely, desired, potential, or unreal). Other affixes can shape the verb in an adverbial sense, to express pity, excess or emphasis.

Like NE Caucasian, they are also ergative.

NW Caucasian makes it onto a lot of craziest language lists.

These are some of the strangest sounding languages on Earth. Of all of these languages, Abaza has the most consonants. Here is a video in the Abaza language.

Ubykh

Ubykh, a Caucasian language of Turkey, is now extinct, but there is one second language speaker, a linguist who is said to have taught himself the language. It has more consonants than any non-click language on Earth – 84 consonant sounds in all. Furthermore, the phonemic inventory allows some very strange consonant clusters.

Ubykh has many rare consonant sounds. is only also found in two of Ubykh’s relatives, Abkhaz and Abaza and in two other languages, both in the Brazilian Amazon. The pharyngealized labiodental voiced fricative  does not exist in any other language. It often makes it onto weirdest phonologies lists. Ubykh also got a very high score on a study of the weirdest languages on Earth.

Combine that with only two vowel sounds and a highly complex grammar, and you have one tough language.

In addition, Ubykh is both agglutinative and polysynthetic, ergative, and has polypersonal agreement:

Aχʲazbatʂʾaʁawdətʷaajlafaqʾajtʾmadaχ! If only you had not been able to make him take it all out from under me again for them…

There are an incredible 16 morphemes in that nine syllable word.

Ubykh has only four case systems on its nouns, but much case function has shifted over to the verb via preverbs and determinants. It is these preverbs and determinants that make Ubykh monstrously complex. The following are some of the directional preverbs:

  • above and touching
  • above and not touching
  • below and touching
  • below and not touching
  • at the side of
  • through a space
  • through solid matter
  • on a flat horizontal surface
  • on a non-horizontal or vertical surface
  • in a homogeneous mass
  • towards
  • in an upward direction
  • in a downward direction
  • into a tubular space
  • into an enclosed space

There are also some preverbal forms that indicate deixis:

j-  = towards the speaker

Others can indicate ideas that would take up whole phrases in English:

jtɕʷʼaa- = on the Earth, in the Earth

ʁadja ajtɕʷʼaanaaɬqʼa They buried his body. (Lit. They put his body in the earth.)

faa– = out of, into or with regard to a fire.

Amdʒan zatʃətʃaqʲa faastχʷən. I take a brand out of the fire.

Morphemes may be as small as a single phoneme:

wantʷaan They give you to him.

w – 2nd singular absolutive a – 3rd singular dative n – 3rd ergative – to give aa – ergative plural n – present tense

Adverbial suffixes are attached to words to form meanings that are often formed by aspects or tenses in other languages:

asfəpχaI need to drink it. asfəfanI can drink it. asfəɡʲanI drink it all the time. asfəlanI am drinking it all up. asfətɕʷan I drink it too much. asfaajənI drink it again.

Nouns and verbs can transform into each other. Any noun can turn into a stative verb:

məzəchild

səməzəjtʼ I was a child. (Lit. I child-waschild-was is a verb – to be a child.)

By the same token, many verbs can become nouns via the use of a nominal affix:

qʼato say

səqʼa what I say – (Lit. That which I saymy speech, my words, my language, my orders, etc.

Number is marked on the verb via a verbal suffix and is only marked on the noun in the ergative case.

However, it does lack the convoluted case systems of the Caucasian languages next door and there is no grammatical gender.

Ubykh is rated 6, hardest of all.

Abkhaz-Abazin

Abkhaz is an extremely difficult language to learn. Each basic consonant has eight different positions of articulation in the mouth. Imagine how difficult that would be for an Abkhaz child with a speech impediment. Abkhaz seems to put agreement markers on just about everything in the language. Abkhaz makes it onto many craziest language lists, and it recently got a very high score on a weirdest language study.

Abkhaz is rated 6, hardest of all.

Burushaski

Burushaski is often thought to be a language isolate, related to no other languages, however, I think it is Dene-Caucasian. It is spoken in the Himalaya Mountains of far northern Pakistan in an area called the Hunza. It’s verb conjugation is complex, it has a lot of inflections, there are complicated ways of making sentences depending on many factors, and it is an ergative language, which is hard to learn for speakers of non-ergative languages. In addition, there are very few to no cognates for the vocabulary.

Burushaski is rated 6, hardest of all.

American Indian Languages

American Indian languages are also notoriously difficult, though few try to learn them in the US anyway. In the rest of the continent, they are still learned by millions in many different nations. You almost really need to learn these as a kid. It’s going to be quite hard for an adult to get full competence in them.

One problem with these languages is the multiplicity of verb forms. For instance, the standard paradigm for the overwhelming number of regular English verbs is a maximum of five forms:

steal steals stealing stole stolen

Many Amerindian languages have over 1,000 forms of each verb in the language.

Kootenai

Yet the Salishans (see below) always considered the neighboring language Kootenai to be too hard to learn. Kootenai also has a distinction between proximate/obviate along with direct/inverse alignment, probably from contact with Algonquian.

However, the Kootenai direct/inverse system is less complex than Algonquian’s, as it is present only in the 3rd person. Kootenai also has a very strange feature in that they have particles that look like subject pronouns, but these go outside of the full noun phrase. This is a very rare feature in the world’s languages. Kootenai scored very high on a weirdest language survey.

Kootenai is an isolate spoken in Idaho by 100 people.

Kootenai is rated 6, hardest of all.

Yuchi

Yuchi is a language isolate spoken in the Southern US. They were originally located in Eastern Tennessee and were part of the Creek Confederacy at one time. Yuchi is nearly extinct, with only five remaining speakers.

Yuchi has noun genders or classes based on three distinctions of position: standing, sitting or lying. All nouns are either standing, sitting or lying. Trees are standing, and rivers are lying, for instance. It it is taller than it is wide, it is standing. It if is  wider than it is tall, it is lying.

If it is about as about as wide as it is tall, it is sitting. All nouns are one of these three genders, but you can change the gender for humorous or poetic effect. A linguist once asked a group of female speakers whether a penis was standing, sitting or lying. After lots of giggles, they said the default was sitting, but you could say it was standing or lying for poetic effect.

Also all Yuchi pronouns must make a distinction between age (older or younger than the speaker) and ethnicity (Yuchi or non-Yuchi).

Yuchi gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Dene-Yeniseian Na-Dene Athabascan-Eyak Tlingit

Tlingit is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest, language in the world. Tlingit is analyzed as partly synthetic, partly agglutinative, and sometimes polysynthetic. It has not only suffixes and prefixes, but it also has infixes, or affixes in the middle of words.

‘eechto pick

All prefixes must be in proper order for the word to work.

tuyakaoonagadagaxayaeecheen. I am usually picking, on purpose, a long object through the hole while standing on a table.

tuyakaoonagootxayaeecheen. I am usually being forced to pick a long object through the hole while standing on a table.

tuyaoonagootxawa’eecheen. I am usually being picking the edible long object through the hole while standing on a table.

Tlingit has a pretty unusual phonology. For one thing, it is the only language on Earth with no l. This despite the fact that it has five other laterals: dl (), tl (tɬʰ), tl’ (tɬʼ), l (ɬ) and l’ (ɬʼ). The tɬʼ and ɬʼ sounds are rare in the world’s languages. ɬʼ  is only found in the wild NW Caucasian languages. It also has two labialized glottal consonants, ʔʷ and hw ().

Tlingit gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Athabascan Southern

Navajo has long, short and nasal vowels, a tone system and a grammar totally unlike anything in Indo-European. A stem of only four letters or so can take enough affixes to fill a whole line of text.

Navajo is a polysynthetic language. In polysynthetic languages, very long words can denote an entire sentence, and it’s quite hard to take the word apart into its parts and figure out exactly what they mean and how they go together. The long words are created because polysynthetic languages have an amazing amount of morphological richness. They put many morpheme together to create a word out of what might be a sentence in a non-polysynthetic language.

Some Navajo dictionaries have thousands of entries of verbs only, with no nouns. Many adjectives have no direct translation into Navajo. Instead, verbs are used as adjectives. A verb has no particular form like in English – to walk. Instead, it assumes various forms depending on whether or not the action is completed, incomplete, in progress, repeated, habitual, one time only, instantaneous, or simply desired. These are called aspects. Navajo must have one of the most complex aspect systems of any language:

The Primary aspects:

Momentaneous – punctually (takes place at one point in time) Continuative – an indefinite span of time & movement with a specified direction Durative – over an indefinite span of time, non-locomotive uninterrupted continuum Repetitive – a continuum of repeated acts or connected series of acts Conclusive – like durative but in perfective terminates with static sequel Semelfactive – a single act in a repetitive series of acts Distributive – a distributive manipulation of objects or performance of actions Diversative – a movement distributed among things (similar to distributive) Reversative – results in directional change Conative – an attempted action Transitional – a shift from one state to another Cursive – progression in a line through time/space (only progressive mode)

The subaspects:

Completive – an event/action simply takes place (similar to the aorist tense) Terminative – a stopping of an action Stative – sequentially durative and static Inceptive – beginning of an action Terminal – an inherently terminal action Prolongative – an arrested beginning or ending of an action Seriative – an interconnected series of successive separate & distinct acts Inchoative – a focus on the beginning of a non-locomotion action Reversionary – a return to a previous state/location Semeliterative – a single repetition of an event/action

The tense system is almost as wild as the aspectual system.

For instance, the verb ndideesh means to pick up or to lift up. But it varies depending on what you are picking up:

ndideeshtiilto pick up a slender stiff object (key, pole) ndideeshleel to pick up a slender flexible object (branch, rope) ndideesh’aalto pick up a roundish or bulky object (bottle, rock) ndideeshgheelto pick up a compact and heavy object (bundle, pack) ndideeshjolto pick up a non-compact or diffuse object (wool, hay) ndideeshteelto pick up something animate (child, dog) ndideeshnil to pick up a few small objects (a couple of berries, nuts) ndideeshjihto pick up a large number of small objects (a pile of berries, nuts) ndideeshtsosto pick up something flexible and flat (blanket, piece of paper) ndideeshjilto pick up something I carry on my back ndideeshkaalto pick up anything in a vessel ndideeshtlohto pick up mushy matter (mud).

But picking up is only one way of handling the 12 different consistencies. One can also bring, take, hang up, keep, carry around, turn over, etc. objects. There are about 28 different verbs one can use for handling objects. If we multiply these verbs by the consistencies, there are over 300 different verbs used just for handling objects.

In Navajo textbooks, there are conjugation tables for inflecting words, but it’s pretty hard to find a pattern there. One of the most frustrating things about Navajo is that every little morpheme you add to a word seems to change everything else around it, even in both directions.

Navajo is said to have a very difficult system for counting numerals.

There is also a noun classifier system with more than a dozen classifiers that affect inflection. This is quite a few classifiers even for a noun classifier language and is similar to African languages like Zulu. In addition, it has the strange direct/inverse system.

To add insult to injury, Navajo is an ergative language.

Navajo also has an honorifics or politeness system similar to Japanese or Korean.

Navajo also has the odd feature where the word niinaabecause can be analyzed as a verb.

X áhóót’įįd biniinaa… Because X happened…

Shiniinaa sits’il. It broke into pieces because of me.

In the latter sentence, the only way we know that 1st singular was involved in because of the person marking on niinaa.

There are 25 different kinds of pronominal prefixes that can be piled onto one another before a verb base.

Navajo has a very strange feature called animacy, where nouns take certain verbs according to their rank in the hierarchy of animation which is a sort of a ranking based on how alive something is. Humans and lightning are at the top, children and large animals are next and abstractions are at the bottom.

All in all, Navajo, even compared to other polysynthetic languages, has some of the most incredibly complicated polysynthetic morphology of any language. On craziest grammar and craziest language lists, Navajo is typically listed.

It is even said that Navajo children have a hard time learning Navajo as compared to children learning other languages, but Navajo kids definitely learn the language. Similarly with Hopi below, even linguists find even the best Navajo grammars difficult or even impossible to understand.

However, Navajo is quite regular, a common feature in Amerindian languages.

Navajo is rated 6, hardest of all.

Northern

Slavey, a Na-Dene language of Canada, is hard to learn. It is similar to Navajo and Apache. Verbs take up to 15 different prefixes. All Athabascan languages have wild verbal systems. It also uses a completely different alphabet, a syllabic one designed for Canadian Indians.

Slavey is rated 6, hardest of all.

Haida

Haida is often thought to be a Na-Dene language, but proof of its status is lacking. If it is Na-Dene, it is the most distant member of the family. Haida is in the competition for the most complicated language on Earth, with 70 different suffixes.

Haida is rated 6, hardest of all.

Salishan

The Salishan languages spoken in the Northwest have a long reputation for being hard to learn, in part because of long strings of consonants, in one case 11 consonants long. Salish languages are the only languages on Earth that allow words without sonorants.

Many of the vowels and consonants are not present in most of the world’s widely spoken languages. The Salish languages are, like Chukchi, polysynthetic. Some translations treat all Salish words are either verbs or phrases. Some say that Salish languages do not contain nouns, though this is controversial. The verbal system of Salish languages is absurdly complex.

All Salishan languages are rated rated 6, hardest of all.

Nuxálk (Bella Coola)

Nuxálk is a notoriously difficult Salishan Amerindian language spoken in British Colombia. It is famous for having some really wild words and even sentences that don’t seem to have any vowels in them at all. For instance:

xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓  (xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ in IPA) He had a bunchberry plant.

sxs seal fat

Here are some more odd words and sentences:

smnmnmuuc mute

Nuyamłamkis timantx tisyuttx ʔułtimnastx. The father sang the song to his son.

Musis tiʔimmllkītx taq̓lsxʷt̓aχ. The boy felt that rope.

However, this word is not typically used by speakers and by no means do most words consist of all consonants. The language sounds odd when spoken. It has been described as “whispering while chewing on a granola bar” (see the video sample under Montana Salish below).

These wild consonant clusters are even crazier than the ones in Ubykh and NW Caucasian. In fact, the nutty consonant clusters in Salish and causing a debate in linguistics about whether or not the syllable is even a universal phenomenon in language as some Salish words and phrases appear to lack syllables. Some Berber dialects have raised similar questions about the syllable.

Nuxálk makes it onto lists of the craziest phonologies on Earth.

Nuxálk is rated 6, hardest of all.

Interior Salish Southern

Montana Salish is said to be just as hard to learn as Nuxálk . Spokane (Montana Salish) has combining and independent forms with the same meaning:

spim’cnmouth -cinmouth

Montana Salish makes it onto a lot of craziest grammars lists.

This link shows an elder on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Steven Smallsalmon, speaking Montana Salish. He also leads classes in the language. This is probably one of the strangest sounding languages on Earth.

Montana Salish is rated 6, hardest of all.

Central

Straits Salish has an aspectual distinction between persistent and nonpersistent. Persistent means the activity continues after its inception as a state. The persistent morpheme is . The result is similar to English:

figure out – nonpersistent know – persistent

look at – nonpersistent watch – persistent

take – nonpersistent hold – persistent

is referred to as a “parasitic morpheme” and only occurs in stem that has an underlying ə which serves as a “host” for the morpheme.

How strange.

The Saanich dialect of Straits Salish is often listed in the rogue’s gallery of craziest grammars on Earth. The writing system is often listed as one of the worst out there. In addition, Saanich makes it onto craziest grammars lists for the parasitic morphemes and for having no distinction between nouns and verbs!

Straits Salish gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Halkomelem, spoken by 570 people around Vancouver, British Colombia, is widely considered to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. In Halkomelem, many verbs have an orientation towards water. You can’t just say, She went home. You have say how she was going home in relation to nearby bodies of water. So depending on where she was walking home in relation to the nearest river, you would say:

She was farther away from the water and going home. She was coming home in the direction away from the water. She was walking parallel to the flow of the water downstream. She was walking parallel to the flow of the water upstream.

Halkomelem gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Lushootseed

Lushootseed is said to be just as hard to learn as Nuxálk. Lushootseed is one of the few languages on Earth that has no nasals at all, except in special registers like baby talk and the archaic speech of mythological figures. It also has laryngealized glides and nasals: w ̰ , m̥ ̰ , and n̥ ̰ .

Lushootseed is rated 6, hardest of all.

Iroquoian

All Iroquoian languages are extremely difficult, but Athabaskan is probably even harder. Siouan languages may be equal to Iroquoian in difficulty.

Compare the same phrases in Tlingit (Athabaskan) and and  Cherokee (Iroquoian).

Tlingit:

kutíkusa‘áatIt’s cold outside. kutíkuta‘áatIt’s cold right now.

In Tlingit, you can add or modify affixes at the beginning as prefixes, in the middle as infixes and at the end as suffixes. In the above example, you changed a part of the word within the clause itself.

Cherokee:

doyáditlv uyvtlvIt is cold outside. (Lit. Outside it is cold) ka uyvtlv It is cold now. (Lit. Now it is cold.)

As you can see, Cherokee is easier.

Cherokee

Cherokee is very hard to learn. In addition to everything else, it has a completely different alphabet. It’s polysynthetic, to make matters worse. It is possible to write a Cherokee sentence that somehow lacks a verb. There are five categories of verb classifiers. Verbs needing classifiers must use one. Each regular verb can have an incredible 21,262 inflected forms! All verbs contain a verb root, a pronominal prefix, a modal suffix and an aspect suffix. In addition, verbs inflect for singular, plural and also dual. For instance:

ᎠᎸᎢᎭ   a'lv'íha 

You have 126 different forms:
ᎬᏯᎸᎢᎭ  gvyalv'iha     I tie you up
ᏕᎬᏯᎸᎢᎭ degvyalviha  I'm tying you up
ᏥᏯᎸᎢᎭ  jiyalv'ha        I tie him up
ᎦᎸᎢᎭ                          I tie it
ᏍᏓᏯᎸᎢᎭ sdayalv'iha  I tie you (dual)
ᎢᏨᏯᎢᎭ  ijvyalv'iha    I tie you (pl)
ᎦᏥᏯᎸᎢᎭ gajiyalv'iha  I tie them (animate)
ᏕᎦᎸᎢᎭ                        I tie them up (inanimate)
ᏍᏆᎸᎢᎭ  squahlv'iha    You tie me
ᎯᏯᎸᎢᎭ  hiyalv'iha     You're tying him
ᎭᏢᎢᎭ   hatlv'iha         You tie it
ᏍᎩᎾᎸᎢᎭ skinalv'iha    You're tying me and him
ᎪᎩᎾᏢᎢᎭ goginatlv'iha  They tie me and him etc.

Let us look at another form:

to see

I see myself           gadagotia
I see you                gvgohtia
I see him/               tsigotia
I see it                    tsigotia
I see you two          advgotia
I see you (plural)    istvgotia
I see them (live)    gatsigotia
I see them (things) detsigotia

You see me                     sgigotia
You see yourself              hadagotia
You see him/her              higo(h)tia
You see it                        higotia
You see another and me  sginigotia
You see others and me    isgigotia
You see them (living)      dehigotia
You see them (living)      gahigotia
You see them (things)     detsigotia

He/she sees me                    agigotia
He/she sees you                   tsagotia
He/she sees you                   atsigotia
He/she sees him/her            agotia
He/she sees himself/herself  adagotia
He/she sees you + me          ginigotia
He/she sees you two             sdigotia
He/she sees another + me    oginigotia
He she sees us (them + me) otsigotia
He/she sees you (plural)       itsigotia
He/she sees them                 dagotia

You and I see him/her/it                igigotia
You and I see ourselves                 edadotia
You and I see one another             denadagotia/dosdadagotia
You and I see them (living)           genigotia
You and I see them (living or not) denigotia

You two see me                           sgninigotia
You two see him/her/it                 esdigotia
You two see yourselves                sdadagotia
You two see us (another and me) sginigotia
You two see them                        desdigotia

Another and I see you             sdvgotia
Another and I see him/her       osdigotia
Another and I see it                 osdigotia
Another and I see you-two      sdvgotia
Another and I see ourselves    dosdadagotia
Another and I see you (plural) itsvgotia
Another and I see them           dosdigotia

You (plural) see me        isgigoti
You (plural) see him/her etsigoti

They see me                    gvgigotia
They see you                   getsagotia
They see him/her             anigoti
They see you and me       geginigoti
They see you two             gesdigoti
They see another and me gegigotia/gogenigoti
They see you (plural)       getsigoti
They see them                 danagotia
They see themselves       anadagoti

I will see datsigoi
I saw      agigohvi

He/she will see dvgohi
He/she             sawugohvi

Number is marked for inclusive vs. exclusive and there is a dual. 3rd person plural is marked for animate/inanimate. Verbs take different object forms depending on if the object is solid/alive/indefinite shape/flexible. This is similar to the Navajo system.

Cherokee also has lexical tone, with complex rules about how tones may combine with each other. Tone is not marked in the orthography. The phonology is noted for somehow not having any labial consonants.

However, Cherokee is very regular. It has only three irregular verbs. It is just that there are many complex rules.

Cherokee is rated 5.5, close to most difficult of all.

Iroquoian Northern Iroquoian Five Nations-Huronian-Susquehannock Huronian Huron-Petun

Wyandot, a dormant language that has been extinct for about 50 years, has some unbelievably complex structures. Let us look at one of them. Wyandot is the only language on Earth that allows negative sentences that somehow do not contain a negative morpheme. Wyandot makes it onto craziest grammars lists. (To be continued).

Siouan-Catawban Siouan Mississippi Valley-Ohio Valley Siouan Mississippi Valley Siouan Dakota

Lakota and other Siouan languages may well be as convoluted as Iroquoian. In Lakota, all adjectives are expressed as verbs. Something similar is seen in Nahuatl.

Ógle sápe kiŋ mak’ú. The shirt it is black he gave it to me. He gave me the black shirt.

In the above, it is black is a stative verb and serves as an adjective.

Ógle kiŋ sabyá mak’ú. Shirt the blackly he gave it to me. He gave me the black shirt. (Lit. He gave me the shirt blackly.)

Bkackly is an adverb serving as an adjective above.

Lakota gets a 5.5 rating, hardest of all.

Algic Algonquian

All Algonquian languages have distinctions between animate/inanimate nouns, in addition to having proximate/obviate and direct/inverse distinctions. However, most languages that have proximate/obviate and direct/inverse distinctions are not as difficult as Algonquian.

Proximate/obviative is a way of marking the 3rd person in discourse. It distinguishes between an important 3rd person (proximate) and a more peripheral 3rd person (obviative). Animate nouns and possessor nouns tend to be marked proximate while inanimate nouns and possessed nouns tend to be marked obviative.

Direct/inverse is a way of marking discourse in terms of saliency, topicality or animacy. Whether one noun ranks higher than another in terms of saliency, topicality or animacy means that that nouns ranks higher in terms of person hierarchy. It is used only in transitive clauses. When the subject has a higher ranking than the object, the direct form is used. When the object has a higher ranking than the object, the inverse form is used.

Central Algonquian Cree-Montagnais

Cree is very hard to learn. It are written in a variety of different ways with different alphabets and syllabic systems, complicating matters even further. The syllabic alphabet has many problems and is often listed as one of the worst scripts out there. They are both polysynthetic and have long, short and nasal vowels and aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants. Words are divided into metrical feet, the rules for determining stress placement in words are quite complex and there is lots of irregularity. Vowels fall out a lot, or syncopate, within words.

Cree adds noun classifiers to the mix, and both nouns and verbs are marked as animate or inanimate. In addition, verbs are marked for transitive and intransitive. In addition, verbs get different affixes depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses.

Cree is rated 6, hardest of all.

Ojibwa-Patowatomi

Ojibwa is said to be about as hard to learn, as Cree as it is very similar.

Ojibwa is rated 6, hardest of all.

Plains Algonquian Cheyenne

Cheyenne is well-known for being a hard Amerindian language to learn. Like many polysynthetic languages, it can have very long words.

Náohkêsáa’oné’seómepêhévetsêhésto’anéhe. I truly don’t know Cheyenne very well.

However, Cheyenne is quite regular, but has so many complex rules that it is hard to figure them all out.

Cheyenne is rated 6, hardest of all.

Arapahoan

Arapaho has a strange phonology. It lacks phonemic low vowels. The vowel system consists of i, ɨ~,u, ɛ, and ɔ, with no low phonemic vowels. Each vowel also has a corresponding long version. In addition, there are four diphthongs, ei, ou, oe and ie, several triphthongs, eii, oee, and ouu, as well as extended sequences of vowels such as eee with stress on either the first or the last vowel in the combination. Long vowels of various types are common:

Héétbih’ínkúútiinoo. I will turn out the lights.

Honoosóó’. It is raining.

There is a pitch accent system with normal, high and allophonic falling tones. Arapaho words also undergo some very wild sound changes.

Arapaho is rated 6, hardest of all.

Gros Ventre has a similar phonological system and similar elaborate sound changes as Arapaho.

Gros Ventre is rated 5, hardest of all.

Caddoan Northern Wichita

Wichita has many strange phonological traits. It has only one nasal. Labials are rare and appear in only two roots. It also may have only three vowels, i, e, and a, with only height as a distinction. Such a restricted vertical vowel distribution is only found in NW Caucasian and the Papuan Ndu languages. There is apparently a three-way contrast in vowel length – regular, long and extra-long.

This is only found in Mixe and Estonian. There are some interesting tenses. Perfect tense means that an act has been carried out. The strange intentive tense means that one hopes or hoped to to carry out an act. The habitual tense means one regularly engages in the activity, not that one is doing so at the moment.

Long consonant clusters are permitted.

kskhaːɾʔa

nahiʔinckskih while sleeping

There are many cases where a CVɁ sequence has been reduced to due to loss of the vowel, resulting in odd words such as:

ki·sɁ bone

Word order is ordered in accordance with novelty or importance.

hira:wisɁiha:s kiyari:ce:hire: Our ancestors God put us on this Earth.

weɁe hira:rɁ tiɁi na:kirih God put our ancestors on this Earth.

In the sentence above, “our ancestors” is actually the subject, so it makes sense that it comes first.

Wichita has inclusive and exclusive 3rd person plural and has singular, dual and plural. There is an evidential system where if you say you know something, you must say how you know it – whether it is personal knowledge or hearsay.

Wichita gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Hokan Tequislatecan Coastal Chantal

Huamelutec or Lowland Oaxaca Chantal has the odd glottalized fricatives , , ɬʼ and as its only glottalized consonants. They alternate with plain f, s, l and x. , ɬʼ and are extremely rare in the world’s languages, usually only found in 2-3 other languages, often in NW Caucasian. occurs only in one other language – Tlingit. is slightly more common, occurring five other languages including Tlingit. In other languages, these odd sounds derived from sequences of consonant + q: Cq -> Cʔ -> glottalized fricative.

Sentence structure is odd:

Hit the ball the man. Hit the man the ball. The man hit the ball.

All mean the same thing.

Huamelutec gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Karok

Karok is a language isolate spoken by a few dozen people in northern California. The last native speaker recently died, however, there are ~80 who have varying levels of L2 fluency.

In Karok, you can use a suffix for different types of containment – fire, water or a solid.

pa:θ-kirih throw into a fire

pa:θ-kurih throw into water

pa:θ-ruprih throw through a solid

The suffixes are unrelated to the words for fire, water and solid.

Karok gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Uto-Aztecan Northern

Hopi is so difficult that even grammars describing the language are almost impossible to understand. For instance, Hopi has two different words for and depending on whether the noun phrase containing the word and is nominative or accusative.

Hopi is rated 6, hardest of all.

Southern Uto-Aztecan Corachol-Aztecan Core Nahua Nahuatl

In Nahuatl, most adjectives are simply stative verbs. Hence:

Umntu omde waya eTenochtitlan. The man he is tall went to Tenochtitlan. The tall man went to Tenochtitlan.

He is tall is a stative verb in the above.

Nahuatl gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Numic Central Numic

Comanche is legendary for being one of the hardest Indian languages of all to learn. Reasons are unknown, but all Amerindian languages are quite difficult. I doubt if Comanche is harder than other Numic languages.

Bizarrely enough, Comanche has very strange sounds called voiceless vowels, which seems to be an oxymoron, as vowels would seem to be inherently voiced. English has something akin to voiceless vowels in the words particular and peculiar, where the bolded vowels act something akin to a voiceless vowel.

Comanche was used for a while by the codespeakers in World War 2 – not all codespeakers were Navajos. Comanche was specifically chosen because it was hard to figure out. The Japanese were never able to break the Comanche code.

Comanche is rated 6, hardest of all.

Oto-Manguean Western Oto-Mangue Oto-Pame-Chinantecan Chinantecan

Chinantec, an Indian language of southwest Mexico, is very hard for non-Chinantecs to learn. The tone system is maddeningly complex, and the syntax and morphology are very intricate.

Chinantec is rated 6, hardest of all.

Popolocan Mazatecan Lowland Valley Southern

Jalapa Mazatec has distinctions between modal, creaky, breathy-voiced vowels along with nasal versions of those three. It also has creaky consonants and voiceless nasals. It has three tones, low, mid and high. Combining the tones results in various contour tones. In addition, it has a 3-way distinction in vowel length. Whistled speech is also possible. It has a phonemic distinction between “ballistic” and “controlled” syllables which is only present on Oto-Manguean.

Ballistic (short) warm nīˑntūslippery tsǣguava hų̄you plural

Controlled (half-long) sūˑblue nīˑntūˑneedle tsǣˑfull hų̄ˑ – six

Jalapa Mazatec is rated 6, hardest of all.

Maipurean Northern Upper Amazon Eastern Nawiki

Tariana is a very difficult language mostly because of the unbelievable amount of information it crams into its morphology and syntax. This is mostly because it is an Arawakan language that has been heavily influenced by neighboring Tucanoan languages, with the result that it has many of the grammatical categories and particles present in both families.

This stems from the widespread bilingualism in the Vaupes Basin of Colombia, where many people grow up bilingual from childhood and often become multilingual by adulthood. Learning up to five different languages is common. Code-switching was frowned upon and anyone using a word from Language Y while speaking Language X would get laughed at. Hence the various languages tended to borrow features from each other quite easily.

For instance, Tariana has both a noun classifier system and a gender system. Noun classifiers and gender are sometimes subsumed under the single category of “noun classifiers.” Yet Tariana has both, presumably from its relationship to two completely different language families. So in Tariana is not unusual to get both demonstratives and verbs marked for both gender and noun classifier. Tariana borrowed such things as serialized perception verbs and the dubitative marker from Tucano.

In addition, Tariana has some very odd sounds, including aspirated nasals mh (), nh (n̺ʰ) and ñh (ɲʰ) and an aspirated w () of all things. They seem to be actually aspirated, not just partially devoiced as many voiceless nasals and liquids are.

Tariana gets 6, hardest of all.

Huitotoan Proto-Bora-Muinane

Bora, a Wintotoan language spoken in Peru and Colombia near the border between the two countries, has a mind-boggling 350 different noun classes. The noun classifier system is actually highly productive and is often used to create new nouns. New nouns can be created very easily, and their meanings are often semantically transparent. In some noun classifier systems, classifiers can be stacked one upon the other. In these cases, typically the last one is used for agreement purposes.

Bora also is a tonal language, but it has only two tones. In addition, nearly all consonantal phonemes have phonemic aspirated and palatalized counterparts. The agreement structure in the language is also quite convoluted. The classifier system effectively replaces much derivational morphology on the noun and noun compounding processes that other languages use to expand the meanings of nominals.

Bora gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Tucanoan Eastern Tucanoan Bará-Tuyuka

Tuyuca is a Tucanoan language spoken in by 450 people in the department of Vaupés in Colombia. An article in The Economist magazine concluded that it was the hardest language on Earth to learn.

It has a simple sound system, but it’s agglutinative, and agglutinative languages are pretty hard. For instance, hóabãsiriga means I don’t know how to write. It has two forms of 1st person plural, I and you (inclusive) and I and the others (exclusive). It has between 50-140 noun classes, including strange ones like bark that does not cling closely to a tree, which can be extended to mean baggy trousers or wet plywood that has begun to fall apart.

Like Yamana, a nearly extinct Amerindian language of Chile, Tuyuca marks for evidentiality, that is, how it is that you know something. For instance:

Diga ape-wi. = The boy played soccer. (I saw him playing). Diga ape-hiyi. = The boy played soccer. (I assume he was playing soccer, though I did not see it firsthand).

Evidential marking is obligatory on all Tuyuca verbs and it forces you to think about how you know whatever it is you know.

Tuyuca definitely gets a 6 rating!

Central Tucanoan

Cubeo, a language spoken in the Vaupes of Colombia, has a either SOV or OVS. That would mean that the following:

The man the ball hit. The ball hit the man.

Mean the same things. OVS languages are quite rare.

Morphemes belong to one of four classes:

  1. Nasal (many roots, as well as suffixes like -xã  = associative)
  2. Oral (many roots, as well as suffixes like -pe  = similarity, -du = frustrative)
  3. Unmarked (only suffixes, e.g. -re  = in/direct object)
  4. Oral/Nasal (some roots and some suffixes) /bãˈkaxa-/(mãˈkaxa-) – to defecate and -kebã = suppose

Just by looking at any given consonant-initial suffix, it is impossible to determine which of the first three categories it belongs to. They must be learned one by one.

Cubeo has nasal assimilation, common to many Amazonian languages. In some of these, nasalization is best analyzed at the syllable level – some syllables are nasal and others are not.

dĩ-bI-ko /dĩ-bĩ-ko/ nĩmĩko She recently went.

The underlying form dĩ-bI-ko is realized on the surface as nĩmĩko. The ĩ in dĩ-bI-ko nasalizes the d, the b, and the I on either side of it, so nasal spreading works in both directions. However, it is blocked from the third syllable because k is part of a class of non-nasalizable consonants.

Pretty difficult language.

Cuneo gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Carib Waiwai

Hixkaryána is famous for being the only language on Earth to have basic OVS (Object-Verb-Subject) word order.

The sentence Toto yonoye kamara, or The man ate the jaguar, actually means The jaguar ate the man.

Toto yonoye kamara Lit. The man ate the jaguar. Gloss: The jaguar ate the man.

Grammatical suffixes attached to the end of the verb mark not only number but also aspect, mood and tense.

Hixkaryána gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Nambikwaran Mamaindê

This is actually a series of closely related languages as opposed to one language, but the Southern Nambikwara language is the most well-known of the family, with 1,200 speakers in the Brazilian Amazon.

Phonology is complex. Consonants distinguish between aspirated, plain and glottalized, common in the Americas. There are strange sounds like prestopped nasals glottalized fricatives. There are nasal vowels and three different tones. All vowels except one have both nasal, creaky-voiced and nasal-creaky counterparts, for a total of 19 vowels.

The grammar is polysynthetic with a complex evidential system.

Reportedly, Nambikwara children do not pick up the language fully until age 10 or so, one of the latest recorded ages for full competence. Nambikwara is sometimes said to be the hardest language on Earth to learn, but it has some competition.

Nambikwara definitely gets a 6 rating, hardest of all!

Muran

Pirahã is a language isolate spoken in the Brazilian Amazon. Recent writings by Daniel Everett indicate that not only is this one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn, but it is also one of the weirdest languages on Earth. It is monumentally complex in nearly every way imaginable. It is commonly listed on the rogue’s gallery of craziest languages and phonologies on Earth.

It has the smallest phonemic inventory on Earth with only seven consonants, three vowels and either two or three tones. Everett recently wrote a paper about it after spending many years with them. Previous missionaries who had spent time with the Pirahã generally failed to learn the language because it was too hard to learn. It took Everett a very long time, but he finally learned it well.

Many of Everett’s claims about Pirahã are astounding: whistled speech, no system for counting, very few Portuguese loans (they deliberately refuse to use Portuguese loans) evidence for the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis, and evidence that it violates some of Noam Chomsky’s purported language universals such as embedding. It also has the t͡ʙ̥ sound – a bilabially trilled postdental affricate which is only found in two other languages, both in the Brazilian Amazon – Oro Win and Wari’.

Initially, Everett never heard the sound, but they got to know him better, they started to make it more often. Everett believes that they were ridiculed by other groups when they made the odd sound.

Pirahã has the simplest kinship system in any language – there is only word for both mother and father, and the Pirahã do not have any words for anyone other than direct biological relatives.

Pirahã may have only two numerals, or it may lack a numeral system altogether.

Pirahã does not distinguish between singular and plural person. This is highly unusual. The language may have borrowed its entire pronoun set from the Tupian languages Nheengatu and Tenarim, groups the Pirahã had formerly been in contact with. This may be one of the only attested case of the borrowing of a complete pronoun set.

There are mandatory evidentiality markers that must be used in Pirahã discourse. Speakers must say how they know something, whether they saw it themselves, whether it was hearsay or whether they inferred it circumstantially.

There are various strange moods – the desiderative (desire to perform an action) and two types of frustrative – frustration in starting an action (inchoative/incompletive) and frustration in completing an action (causative/incompletive). There are others: immediate/intentive (you are going to do something now/you intend to do it in the future)

There are many verbal aspects: perfect/imperfect (completed/incomplete) telic/atelic (reaching a goal/not reaching a goal), continuative (continuing), repetitive (iterative), and beginning an action (inchoative).

Each Pirahã verb has 262,144 possible forms, or possibly in the many millions, depending on which analysis you use.

The future tense is divided into future/somewhere and future/elsewhere. The past tense is divided into plain past and immediate past.

Pirahã has a closed class of only 90 verb roots, an incredibly small number. But these roots can be combined together to form compound verbs, a much larger category. Here is one example of three verbs strung together to form a compound verb:

xig ab op take turn gobring back, You take something away, you turn around, and you go back to where you got it to return it.

There are no abstract color terms in Pirahã. There are only two words for colors, one for light and one for dark. The only other languages with this restricted of a color sense are in Papua New Guinea. The other color terms are not really color terms, but are more descriptive – red is translated as like blood.

Pirahã can be whistled, hummed or encoded into music. Consonants and vowels can be omitted altogether and meaning conveyed instead via variations in stress, pitch and rhythm. Mothers teach the language to children by repeating musical patterns.

Pirahã may well be one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn.

Pirahã gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Quechuan

Quechua (actually a large group of languages and not a single language at all) is one of the easiest Amerindian languages to learn. Quechua is a classic example of a highly regular grammar with few exceptions. Its agglutinative system is more straightforward than even that of Turkish. The phonology is dead simple.

On the down side, there is a lot of dialectal divergence (these are actually separate languages and not dialects) and a lack of learning materials. Some say that Quechua speakers spend their whole lives learning the language.

Quechua has inconsistent orthographies. There is a fight between those who prefer a Spanish-based orthography and those who prefer a more phonemic one. Also there is an argument over whether to use the Ayacucho language or the Cuzco language as a base.

Quechua has a difficult feature known as evidential marking. This marker indicates the source of the speaker’s knowledge and how sure they are about the statement.

-mi expresses personal knowledge:

Tayta Wayllaqawaqa chufirmi. Mr. Huayllacahua is a driver. (I know it for a fact.)

-si expresses hearsay knowledge:

Tayta Wayllaqawaqa chufirsi. Mr. Huayllacahua is a driver (or so I’ve heard).

chá expresses strong possibility:

Tayta Wayllaqawaqa chufirchá. Mr. Huayllacahua is a driver (most likely).

Quechua is rated 4, very difficult.

Aymaran Aymara

Aymara has some of the wildest morphophonology out there. Morpheme-final vowel deletion is present in the language as a morphophonological process, and it is dependent on a set of highly complex phonological, morphological and syntactic rules (Kim 2013).

For instance, there are three types of suffixes: dominant, recessive and a 3rd class is neither dominant nor recessive. If a stem ends in a vowel, dominant suffixes delete the vowel but recessive suffixes allow the vowel to remain. The third class either deletes or retains the vowel on the stem depending on how many vowels are in the stem. If the root has two vowels, the vowel is retained. If it has three vowels, the vowel is deleted.

Although all of this seems quite odd, Finnish has something similar going on, if not a lot worse.

Nevertheless, Aymara is still said to be a very easy language to learn. The Guinness Book of World Records claims it is almost as easy to learn as Esperanto.

Aymara gets a 2 rating, very easy to learn.

Australian

Australian Aborigine languages are some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn, like Amerindian or Caucasian languages. Some Australian languages have phonemic contrasts that few other languages have, such as apico-dental, lamino-dental, apico-post-alveolar, and lamino-postalveolar cononals.

Australian languages tend to be mixed ergative. Ordinary nouns are ergative-absolutive, but 1st and 2nd person pronouns are nominative-accusative. One language has a three way agent-patient-experiencer distinction in the 1st person pronoun. Australian pronouns typically have singular, plural and dual forms along with inclusive and exclusive 1st plural. In some sentences, they have what is known as double case agreement which is rare in the world’s languages:

I gave a spear to my father. I gave a spear mine-to father’s-to.

Both elements of the phrase my father are in both dative and genitive.

However, Aboriginal languages do have the plus of being very regular.

All Australian languages are rated 6, most difficult of all.

Tor-Kwerba Orya-Tor Tor

Berik is a Tor-Orya language spoken in Indonesian colony of Irian Jaya in New Guinea.

Verbs take many strange endings, in many cases mandatory ones, that indicate what time of day something happened, among other things.

TelbenerHe drinks in the evening.

Where a verb takes an object, it will not only be marked for time of day but for the size of the object.

KitobanaHe gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight.

Verbs may also be marked for where the action takes place in reference to the speaker.

GwerantenaTo place a large object in a low place nearby.

Berik is rated 6, hardest of all.

Trans New Guinea Madang Croisilles Gum

Amele is the world’s most complex language as far as verb forms go, with 69,000 finitive and 860 infinitive forms.

Amele is rated 6, hardest of all.

Torricelli Wapei Valman

Valman is a bizarre case where the word and that connects two nouns is actually a verb of all things and is marked with the first noun as subject and the second noun as object.

John (subject) and Mary (object)

John is marked as subject for some reason, and Mary is marked as object, and the and word shows subject agreement with John and object agreement with Mary.

Valman gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Afroasiatic Semitic

Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are notoriously difficult to learn, and Arabic (especially MSA) tops many language learners’ lists as the hardest language they have ever attempted to learn. Although Semitic verbs are notoriously complex, the verbal system does have some advantages especially as compared to IE languages like Slavic. Unlike Slavic, Semitic verbs are not inflected for mood and there is no perfect or imperfect.

Central South Arabic

Arabic has some very irregular manners of noun declension, even in the plural. For instance, the word girls changes in an unpredictable way when you say one girl, two girls and three girls, and there are two different ways to say two girls depending on context. Two girls is marked with the dual, but different dual forms can be used. All languages with duals are relatively difficult for most speakers that lack a dual in their native language. However, the dual is predictable from the singular, so one might argue that you only need to learn how to say one girl and three girls.

Further, it is full of irregular plurals similar to octopus and octopi in English, whereas these forms are rare in English. With any given word, there might be 20 different possible ways to pluralize it, and there is no way to know which of the 20 paradigms to use with that word, and further, there is no way to generalize a plural pattern from a singular pattern. In addition, many words have 2-3 ways of pluralizing them. Some messy Arab plurals:

kalb -> kilaab qalb -> quluub maktab -> makaatib taalib -> tullaab balad -> buldaan

When you say I love you to a man, you say it one way, and when you say it to a woman, you say it another way. On and on.

The Arabic writing system is exceeding difficult and is more of the hardest to use of any on Earth. Soft vowels are omitted. You have to learn where to insert missing vowels, where to double consonants and which vowels to skip in the script. There are 28 different symbols in the alphabet and four different ways to write each symbol depending on its place in the word.

Consonants are written in different ways depending on where they appear in a word. An h is written differently at the beginning of a word than at the end of a word. However, one simple aspect of it is that the medial form is always the same as the initial form. You need to learn not only Arabic words but also the grammar to read Arabic.

Pronouns attach themselves to roots, and there are many different verb conjugation paradigms which simply have to be memorized. For instance, if a verb has a و, a ي, or a ء  in its root, you need to memorize the patters of the derivations, and that is a good chunk of the conjugations right there. The system for measuring quantities is extremely confusing.

The grammar has many odd rules that seem senseless. Unfortunately, most rules have exceptions, and it seems that the exceptions are more common than the rules themselves. Many people, including native speakers, complain about Arabic grammar.

Arabic does have case, but the system is rather simple.

The laryngeals, uvulars and glottalized sounds are hard for many foreigners to make and nearly impossible for them to get right. The ha’(ح ), qa (ق ) and غ sounds and the glottal stop in initial position give a lot of learners headaches.

Arabic is at least as idiomatic as French or English, so it order to speak it right, you have to learn all of the expressionistic nuances.

One of the worst problems with Arabic is the dialects, which in many cases are separate languages altogether. If you learn Arabic, you often have to learn one of the dialects along with classical Arabic. All Arabic speakers speak both an Arabic dialect and Classical Arabic.

In some Arabic as a foreign language classes, even after 1 1/2 years, not one student could yet make a complete and proper sentence that was not memorized.

Adding weight to the commonly held belief that Arabic is hard to learn is research done in Germany in 2005 which showed that Turkish children learn their language at age 2-3, German children at age 4-5, but Arabic kids did not get Arabic until age 12.

Arabic has complex verbal agreement with the subject, masculine and feminine gender in nouns and adjectives, head-initial syntax and a serious restriction to forming compounds. If you come from a language that has similar nature, Arabic may be easier for you than it is for so many others. Its 3 vowel system makes for easy vowels.

MSA Arabic is rated 5, extremely difficult.

Arabic dialects are often somewhat easier to learn than MSA Arabic. At least in Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic, the very difficult q’ sound has been turned into a hamza or glottal stop which is an easier sound to make. Compared to MSA Arabic, the dialectal words tend to be shorter and easier to pronounce.

To attain anywhere near native speaker competency in Egyptian Arabic, you probably need to live in Egypt for 10 years, but Arabic speakers say that few if any second language learners ever come close to native competency. There is a huge vocabulary, and most words have a wealth of possible meanings.

Egyptian Arabic is rated 4.5, very to extremely difficult.

Moroccan Arabic is said to be particularly difficult, with much vowel elision in triconsonantal stems. In addition, all dialectal Arabic is plagued by irrational writing systems.

Moroccan Arabic is rated 4.5, very to extremely difficult.

Maltese is a strange language, basically a Maghrebi Arabic language (similar to Moroccan or Tunisian Arabic) that has very heavy influence from non-Arabic tongues. It shares the problem of Gaelic that often words look one way and are pronounced another.

It has the common Semitic problem of difficult plurals. Although many plurals use common plural endings (-i, -iet, -ijiet, -at), others simply form the plural by having their last vowel dropped or adding an s (English borrowing). There’s no pattern, and you simply have to memorize which ones act which way. Maltese permits the consonant cluster spt, which is surely hard to pronounce.

On the other hand, Maltese has quite a few IE loans from Italian, Sicilian, Spanish, French and increasingly English. If you have knowledge of Romance languages, Maltese is going to be easier than most Arabic dialects.

Maltese is rated 4, very difficult.

South Canaanite

Hebrew is hard to learn according to a number of Israelis. Part of the problem may be the abjad writing system, which often leaves out vowels which must simply be remembered. Also, other than borrowings, the vocabulary is Afroasiatic, hence mostly unknown to speakers of IE languages. There are also difficult consonants as in Arabic such as pharyngeals and uvulars.

The het or glottal h is particularly hard to make. However, most modern Israelis no longer make the het sound or a’ain sounds. Instead, they pronounce the het like the chaf sound and the a’ain like an alef. Almost all Ashkenazi Israeli Jews no longer use the het or a’ain sounds. But most Jews who came from Arab countries (often older people) still use the sound, and some of their children do (Dorani 2013).

Hebrew has complex morphophonological rules. The letters p, b, t, d, k and g change to v, f, dh, th, kh and gh in certain situations. In some environments, pharyngeals change the nature of the vowels around them. The prefix ve-, which means and, is pronounced differently when it precedes certain letters. Hebrew is also quite irregular.

Hebrew has quite a few voices, including active, passive, intensive, intensive passive, etc. It also has a number of tenses such as present, past, and the odd juissive.

Hebrew also has two different noun classes. There are also many suffixes and quite a few prefixes that can be attached to verbs and nouns.

Even most native Hebrew speakers do not speak Hebrew correctly by a long shot.

Quite a few say Hebrew is as hard to learn as MSA or perhaps even harder, but this is controversial.

Hebrew gets a 5 rating for extremely difficult.

Berber Northern Atlas

Berber languages are considered to be very hard to learn. Worse, there are very few language learning resources available.

Tamazight allows doubled consonants at the beginning of a word! How can you possibly make that sound?

Tamazight gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

In Tachelhit , words like this are possible:

tkkststt You took it off.

tfktstt You gave it.

In addition, there are words which contain only one or two consonants:

ɡ be

ks feed on

Tachelhit gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

South Ethiopian South Transversal Amharic–Argobba Amharic

Amharic is said to be a very hard language to learn. It is quite complex, and its sentence structures seem strange even to speakers of other Semitic languages. Hebrew speakers say they have a hard time with this language.

There are a multitude of rules which almost seem ridiculous in their complexity, there are numerous conjugation patterns, objects are suffixed to the verb, the alphabet has 274 letters, and the pronunciation seems strange. However, if you already know Hebrew or Arabic, it will be a lot easier. The hardest part of all is the verbal system, as with any Semitic language. It is easier than Arabic.

Amharic gets a 4.5 rating, very hard to extremely hard.

Cushitic East Cushitic

Dahalo is legendary for having some of the wildest consonant phonology on Earth. It has all four airstream mechanisms found in languages: ejectives, implosives, clicks and normal pulmonic sounds. There are both glottal and epiglottal stops and fricatives and laminal and apical stops.

There is also a strange series of nasal clicks and are both glottalized and plain. Some of these clicks are also labialized. It has both voiced and unvoiced prenasalized stops and affricates, and some of the stops are also labialized. There is a weird palatal lateral ejective. There are three different lateral fricatives, including a labialized and palatalized one, and one lateral approximant. It contrasts alveolar and palatal lateral affricates and fricatives, the only language on Earth to do this.

The Dahalo are former elephant hunting hunter gatherers who live in southern Kenya. It is believed that at one time they spoke a language like Sandawe or Hadza, but they switched over to Cushitic at some point. The clicks are thought to be substratum from a time when Dahalo was a Sandawe-Hadza type language.

Dahalo gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Somali

Somali has one of the strangest proposition systems on Earth. It actually has no real prepositions at all. Instead it has preverbal particles and possessives that serve as prepositions.

Here is how possessives serve as prepositions:

habeennimada horteeda the night her front before nightfall

kulaylka dartiisa the heat his reason because of the heat

Here we have the use of a preverbal particle serving as a preposition:

kú ríd shandádda Into put the suitcase. Put it into the suitcase.

Somali combines four “prepositions” with four deictic particles to form its prepositions.

There are four basic “prepositions”:

to in from with

These combine with a four different deictic particles:

toward the speaker away from the speaker toward each other away from each other

Hence you put the “prepositions” and the deictic particles together in various ways. Both tend to go in front of and close to the verb:

Nínkíi bàan cèelka xádhig kagá sóo saaray. …well-the rope with-from towards-me I-raised. I pulled the man out of the well with a rope.

Way inoogá warrámi jireen. They us-to-about news gave. They used to give us news about it.

Prepositions are the hardest part of the Somali language for the learner.

Somali deals with verbs of motion via deixis in a similar way that Georgian does. One reference point is the speaker and the other is any other entities discussed. Verbs of motion are formed using adverbs. Entities may move:

towards each other    wada
away from each other  kala
towards the speaker   so
away from the speaker si

Hence:

kala durka separate
si gal     go in (away from the speaker)
so gal     come in (toward the speaker)

Somali lacks orthographic consistency. There are four different orthographic systems in use – the lists.

Somali pluralization makes no sense and must be memorized. There are seven different plurals, and there is no clue in the singular that tells you what form to use in the plural. See here:

Republication:

áf  (language) -> afaf

Suffixation:

hoóyo (mother) -> hoyoóyin

áabbe -> aabayaal

Note the tone shifts in all three of the plurals above.

There are four cases, absolutive, nominative, genitive and vocative. Despite the presences of absolutive and nominative cases, Somali is not an ergative language. Absolutive case is the basic case of the noun, and nominative is the case given to the noun when a verb follows in the sentence. There are different articles depending on whether the noun was mentioned previously or not (similar to the articles a and the in English). The absolutive and nominative are marked not only on the noun but also on the article that precedes it.

In terms of difficulty, Somali is much harder than Persian and probably about as difficult as Arabic.

Somali gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Dravidian Southern Tamil-Kannada Tamil-Kodagu Tamil-Malayalam Malayalam

Malayalam, a Dravidian language of India, was has been cited as the hardest language to learn by an language foundation, but the citation is obscure and hard to verify.

Malayalam words are often even hard to look up in a Malayalam dictionary.

For instance, adiyAnkaLAkkikkoNDirikkukayumANello is a word in Malayalam. It means something like I, your servant, am sitting and mixing s.t. (which is why I cannot do what you are asking of me). The part in parentheses is an example of the type of sentence where it might be used.

The above word is composed of many different morphemes, including conjunctions and other affixes, with sandhi going on with some of them so they are eroded away from their basic forms. There doesn’t seem to be any way to look that word up or to write a Malayalam dictionary that lists all the possible forms, including forms like the word above. It would probably be way too huge of a book. However, all agglutinative languages are made up of affixes, and if you know the affixes, it is not particularly hard to parse the word apart.

Malayalam is said to be very hard to pronounce correctly.

Further, few foreigners even try to learn Malayalam, so Malayalam speakers, like the French, might not listen to you and might make fun of you if your Malayalam is not native sounding.

However, Malayalam has the advantage of having many pedagogic materials available for language learning such as audio-visual material and subtitled videos.

Malayalam is rated 5, extremely difficult.

Tamil

Tamil, a Dravidian language is hard, but probably not as difficult as Malayalam is. Tamil has an incredible 247 characters in its alphabet. Nevertheless, most of those are consonant-vowel combinations, so it is almost more of a syllabary than an alphabet. Going by what would traditionally be considered alphabetic symbols, there are probably only 72 real symbols in the alphabet. Nevertheless, Tamil probably has one of the easier Indic scripts as Tamil has fewer characters than other scripts due to its lack of aspiration. Compare to Devanagari’s over 1,000 characters.

But no Indic script is easy. A problem with Tamil is that all of the characters seem to look alike. It is even worse than Devanagari in that regard. However, the more rounded scripts such as Kannada, Sinhala, Telegu and Malayalam have that problem to a worse degree. Tamil has a few sharp corners in the characters that helps to disambiguate them.

In addition, as with other languages, words are written one way and pronounced another. However, there are claims that the difficulty of Tamil’s diglossia is overrated.

Tamil has two different registers for written and spoken speech, but the differences are not large, so this problem is exaggerated. Both Tamil and Malayalam are spoken very fast and have extremely complicated, nearly impenetrable scripts. If Westerners try to speak a Dravidian language in south India, more often than not the Dravidian speaker will simply address them in English rather than try to accommodate them.

Tamil has the odd evidential mood, similar to Bulgarian.

However, on the plus side, the language does seem to be very logical and regular, almost like German in that regard. In addition, there are a lot of language learning materials for Tamil.

Tamil is rated 4, very difficult.

Altaic Korean

Most agree that Korean is a hard language to learn.

The alphabet, Hangul at least is reasonable; in fact, it is quite elegant. But there are four different Romanizations- Lukoff, Yale, Horne, and McCune-Reischauer – which is preposterous. It’s best to just blow off the Romanizations and dive straight into Hangul. This way you can learn a Romanization later, and you won’t mess up your Hangul with spelling errors, as can occur if you go from Romanization to Hangul.

Hangul can be learned very quickly, but learning to read Korean books and newspapers fast is another matter altogether because you really need to know the hanja or Chinese character that are used in addition to the Hangul. After World War 2, the Koreas decided to officially get rid of their Chinese characters, but in practice this was not successful. With the use of Chinese characters in Korean, you can be a lot more precise in terms what you are trying to communicate.

Bizarrely, there are two different numeral sets used, but one is derived from Chinese so it should be familiar to Chinese, Japanese or Thai speakers who use similar or identical systems.

Korean has a wealth of homonyms, and this is one of the tricky aspects of the language. Any given combination of a couple of characters can have multiple meanings. Japanese has a similar problem with homonyms, but at least with Japanese you have the benefit of kanji to help you tell the homonyms apart. With Korean Hangul, you get no such advantage.

Similarly, there seem to be many ways to say the same thing in Korean. The learner will feel when people are using all of these different ways of saying the same thing that they are actually saying something different each time, but that is not the case.

One problem is that the bp, j, ch, t and d are pronounced differently than their English counterparts. The consonants, the pachim system and the morphing consonants at the end of the word that slide into the next word make Korean harder to pronounce than any major European language. Korean has a similar problem with Japanese, that is, if you mess up one vowel in sentence, you render it incomprehensible.

The vocabulary is very difficult for an English speaker who does not have knowledge of either Japanese or Chinese. On the other hand, Japanese or Chinese will help you a lot with Korean.

Korean is agglutinative and has a subject-topic discourse structure, and the logic of these systems is difficult for English speakers to understand. In addition, there are hundreds of ways of conjugating any given verb based on tense, mood, age or seniority. Adjectives also decline and take hundreds of different suffixes.

Meanwhile, Korean has an honorific system that is even wackier than that of Japanese. A single sentence can be said in three different ways depending on the relationship between the speaker and the listener. However, the younger generation is not using the honorifics so much, and a foreigner isn’t expected to know the honorific system anyway.

Maybe 6

Speakers of Korean can learn Japanese fairly easily. Korean seems to be a more difficult language to learn than Japanese. There are maybe twice as many particles as in Japanese, the grammar is dramatically more difficult and the verbs are quite a bit harder. The phonemic inventory in Korean is also larger and includes such oddities as double consonants.

Korean is rated by language professors as being one of the hardest languages to learn.

Korean is rated 5, extremely hard.

Japonic

Japanese also uses a symbolic alphabet, but the symbols themselves are sometime undecipherable in that even Japanese speakers will sometimes encounter written Japanese and will say that they don’t know how to pronounce it. I don’t mean that they mispronounce it; that would make sense. I mean they don’t have the slightest clue how to say the word! This problem is essentially nonexistent in a language like English.

The Japanese orthography is one of the most difficult to use of any orthography.

There are over 2,000 frequently used characters in three different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in confusing ways. Due to the large number of frequently used symbols, it’s said that even Japanese adults learn a new symbol a day a ways into adulthood.

The Japanese writing system is probably crazier than the Chinese writing system and it often makes it onto lists of worst orthographies. The very idea of writing an agglutinative language in a combination of two syllabaries and an ideography seems wacky right off the bat. Japanese borrowed Chinese characters.

But then they gave each character several pronunciations, and in some cases as many as 24. Next they made two syllabaries using another set of characters, then over the next millennia came up with all sorts of contradictory and often senseless rules about when to use the syllabaries and when to use the character set. Later on they added a Romanization to make things even worse.

Chinese uses 5-6,000 characters regularly, while Japanese only uses around 2,000. But in Chinese, each character has only one or maybe two pronunciations. In Japanese, there are complicated rules about when and how to combine the hiragana with the characters. These rules are so hard that many native speakers still have problems with them. There are also personal and place names (proper nouns) which are given completely arbitrary pronunciations often totally at odds with the usual pronunciation of the character.

There are some writers, typically of literature, who deliberately choose to use kanji that even Japanese people cannot read. For instance, Ryuu Murakami  uses the odd symbols 擽る、, 轢く、and 憑ける.

The Japanese system is made up of three different systems: the katakana and hiragana (the kana) and the kanji, similar to the hanzi used in Chinese. Chinese has at least 85,000 hanzi. The number of kanji is much less than that, but kanji often have more than one meaning in contrast to hanzi.

After WW2, Japan decided to simplify its language. They both simplified and reduced the number of Chinese characters used, and they unified the written and spoken language, which previously had been different.

Speaking Japanese is not as difficult as everyone says, and many say it’s fairly easy. However, there is a problem similar to English in that one word can be pronounced in multiple ways, like read and read in English.

A common problem is that a perfectly grammatically correct sentence uttered by a Japanese language learner, while perfectly correct, is still not acceptable by Japanese speakers because “we just don’t say it that way.” The Japanese speaker often cannot tell why the unacceptable sentence you uttered is not ok. On the other hand, this problem may be common to more languages than Japanese.

There is also a class of Japanese called “honorifics” or “keigo” that is quite hard to master. Honorifics are meant to show respect and to indicate one’s place or status in the social hierarchy. These typically effect verbs but can also affect particles and prefixes. They are usually formed by archaic or highly irregular verbs. However, there are both regular and irregular honorific forms. Furthermore, there are five different levels of honorifics. Honorifics vary depending on who you are and who you are talking to. In addition, gender comes into play.

Although it is true the Japanese young people are said to not understand the intricacies of keigo, it is still expected that they know how to speak this well. Consequently, many young Japanese will opt out of certain conversations because they feel that their keigo is not very good. Books explaining how to use keigo properly have been big sellers among young people in Japan in recent years as young people try to appear classy, refined or cultured.

In addition, Japanese born overseas (especially in the US), while often learning Japanese pretty well, typically have a very poor understanding of keigo. Instead of embarrassing themselves by not using keigo or using it wrong, these Japanese speakers often prefer to speak in English to Japanese people rather than bother with keigo-less Japanese. Overcorrection in keigo is also a problem when hypercorrection leads to someone making errors in keigo due to “trying to hard.” This looks like phony or insincere politeness and is often worse than not using keigo at all.

One wild thing about Japanese is counting forms. You actually use different numeral sets depending on what it is you are counting! There are dozens of different ways of counting things which involve the use of a complex numerical noun classifier system.

Japanese grammar is often said to be simple, but that does not appear to be the case on closer examination. Particles are especially vexing. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs. Nouns can act like adjectives and adverbs. Meanwhile, honorifics change the behavior of all words. There are particles like ha and ga that have many different meanings. One problem is that all noun modifiers, even phrases, must precede the nouns they are modifying.

It’s often said that Japanese has no case, but this is not true. Actually, there are seven cases in Japanese. The aforementioned ga is a clitic meaning nominative, made is terminative case, -no is genitive and -o is accusative.

In this sentence:

The plane that was supposed to arrive at midnight, but which had been delayed by bad weather, finally arrived at 1 AM.

Everything underlined must precede the noun plane:

Was supposed to arrive at midnight, but had been delayed by bad weather, the plane finally arrived at 1 AM.

One of the main problems with Japanese grammar is that it is going to seem to so different from the sort of grammar and English speaker is likely to be used to.

Speaking Japanese is one thing, but reading and writing it is a whole new ballgame. It’s perfectly possible to know the meaning of every kanji and the meaning of every word in a sentence, but you still can’t figure out the meaning of the sentence because you can’t figure out how the sentence is stuck together in such a way as to create meaning.

The real problem is that the Japanese you learn in class is one thing, and the Japanese of the street is another. One problem is that in street Japanese, the subject is typically not stated in a sentence. Instead it is inferred through such things as honorific terms or the choice of words you used in the sentence. Probably no one goes crazier on negatives than the Japanese. Particularly in academic writing, triple and quadruple negatives are common, and can be quite confusing.

Yet there are problems with the agglutinative nature of Japanese. It’s a completely different syntactic structure than English. Often if you translate a sentence from Japanese to English it will just look like a meaningless jumble of words.

However, Japanese grammar has the advantage of being quite regular. For instance, there are only four frequently used irregular verbs.

Like Chinese, the nouns are not marked for number or gender. However, while Chinese is forgiving of errors, if you mess up one vowel in a Japanese sentence, you may end up with incomprehension.

Although many Japanese learners feel it’s fairly easy to learn, surveys of language professors continue to rate Japanese as one of the hardest languages to learn. A study by the US Navy concluded that the hardest language the corpsmen had to learn in the course of service was Japanese. However, it’s generally agreed that Japanese is easier to learn than Korean. Japanese speakers are able to learn Korean pretty easily.

Japanese is rated 5, extremely hard.

Classical Japanese is much harder to read than Modern Japanese. Though you can get by with much less kanji when reading the modern language, you will need a minimum knowledge of 3,000 kanji for reading Classical Japanese, and that’s using a dictionary. There are only about 500-1,000 frequently used characters, but there are countless other words that will come up in your reading especially say special words used in the Imperial Court. Many words have more than one meaning, and unless you know this, you will be lost. 東宮(とうぐう) for instance means Eastern Palace. However, it also means Crown Prince because his residence was to the east of the Emperor’s.

The movie The Seven Samurai (set in the late 1500’s) seems to use some sort of Classical Japanese, or at least Classical vocabulary and syntax with modern pronunciation. Japanese language learners say they can’t understand a word of the archaic Japanese used in this movie.

Classical Japanese gets 5.5, nearly hardest of all.

Turkic Oghuz Western Oghuz

Turkish is often considered to be hard to learn, and it’s rated one of the hardest in surveys of language teachers, however, it’s probably easier than its reputation made it out to be. It is agglutinative, so you can have one long word where in English you might have a sentence of shorter words. One word is

Çekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz? Were you one of those people whom we could not turn into a Czechoslovakian?

Many words have more than one meaning. However, the agglutination is very regular in that each particle of meaning has its own morpheme and falls into an exact place in the word. See here:

göz            eye
göz-lük        glasses
göz-lük-çü     optician
göz-lük-çü-lük the business of an optician

Nevertheless, agglutination means that you can always create new words or add new parts to words, and for this reason even a lot of Turkish adults have problems with their language.

There is no verb to be, which is hard for many foreigners. Instead, the concept is wrapped onto the subject of the sentence as a -dim or -im suffix. Turkish is an imagery-heavy language, and if you try to translate straight from a dictionary, it often won’t make sense.

However, the suffixation in Turkish, along with the vowel harmony, are both precise. Nevertheless, many words have irregular vowel harmony. The rules for making plurals are very regular, with no exceptions (the only exceptions are in foreign loans). In Turkish, incredible as it sounds, you can make a plural out of anything, even a word like what, who or blood. However, there is some irregularity in the strengthening of adjectives, and the forms are not predictable and must be memorized.

Turkish is a language of precision in other ways. For instance, there are eight different forms of subjunctive mood that describe various degrees of uncertainty that one has about what one is talking about. This relates to the evidentiality discussed under Tuyuca above, and Turkish has an evidential form similar to Tamil and Bulgarian. On Turkish news, verbs are generally marked with miş, which means that the announcer believes it to be true though he has not seen it firsthand. The particle miş is interesting because this evidential form is coded into the tense system, which is an unusual use of evidentiality.

The Roman alphabet and almost mathematically precise grammar really help out. Turkish lacks gender and has but a single irregular verb – olmak. Nevertheless, there are many verbal forms. However, this is controversial and it depends on how you define grammatical irregularity. There is some strangeness in some of the verb paradigms, but it is argued that these oddities are rule-based. The aorist tense is said to have irregularity.

There is some irregular morphophonology, but not much. The oblique relative clauses have complex morphosyntax. Turkish has two completely different ways of making relative clauses, one of which may have been borrowed from Persian. There are many gerunds for verbs, and these have many different uses. At the end of the day, Turkish grammar is not as regular or as simple as it is made out to be.

Words are pronounced nearly the same as they are written. A suggestion that Turkish may be easier to learn that many think is the research that shows that Turkish children learn attain basic grammatical mastery of Turkish at age 2-3, as compared to 4-5 for German and 12 for Arabic. The research was conducted in Germany in 2005.

In addition, Turkish has a phonetic orthography.

However, Turkish is hard for an English speaker to learn for a variety of reasons. It is agglutinative like Japanese, and all agglutinative languages are difficult for English speakers to learn. As in Japanese, you start your Turkish sentence the way you would end your English sentence. As in the Japanese example above, the subordinate clause must precede the subject, whereas in English, the subordinate clause must follow the subject. The italicized phrase below is a subordinate clause.

In English, we say, “I hope that he will be on time.”

In Turkish, the sentence would read, “That he will be on time I hope.”

Turkish vowels are unusual to speakers of IE languages, and Turkish learners say the vowels are hard to make or even tell apart from one another.

Turkish is rated 3.5, harder than average to learn.

Uralic

Finno-Ugric

One test of the difficulty of any language is how much of the grammar you must know in order to express yourself on a basic level. On this basis, Finno-Ugric languages are complicated because you need to know quite a bit more grammar to communicate on a basic level in them than in say, German.

Finnic Northern

Finnish is very hard to learn, and even long-time learners often still have problems with it. Famous polyglot Barry Farber said it was one of the hardest languages he learned. You have to know exactly which grammatical forms to use where in a sentence. In addition, Finnish has 15 cases in the singular and 16 in the plural. This is hard to learn for speakers coming from a language with little or no case.

For instance, talothe house

Cases:

talon        house's
taloasome    of the house
taloksiinto  as the house
talossain    the house
talostafrom  inside the house
talooninto   the house
talollaon    to the house
taloltafrom  beside the house
talolleto    the house
taloistafrom the houses
taloissa     in the houses

It gets much worse than that. This web page shows that the noun kauppashop can have 2,253 forms.

A simple adjective + noun type of noun phrase of two words can be conjugated in up to 100 different ways.

Adjectives and nouns belong to 20 different classes. The rules governing their case declension depend on what class the substantive is in.

As with Hungarian, words can be very long. For instance:

lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas non-commissioned officer cadet learning to be an assistant mechanic for airplane jet engines

Like Turkish, Finnish agglutination is very regular. Each bit of information has its own morpheme and has an exact place in the word.

Like Turkish, Finnish has vowel harmony, but the vowel harmony is very regular like that of Turkish. Unlike Turkish or Hungarian, consonant gradation forms a major part of Finnish morphology. In order to form a sentence in Finnish, you will need to learn about verb types, cases and consonant gradation, and it can take a while to get your mind around those things.

Finnish, oddly enough, always puts the stress on the first syllable. Finnish vowels will be hard to pronounce for most foreigners.

However, Finnish has the advantage of being pronounced precisely as it is written. This is also part of the problem though, because if you don’t say it just right, the meaning changes. So, similarly with Polish, when you mangle their language, you will only achieve incomprehension. Whereas with say English, if a foreigner mangles the language, you can often winnow some sense out of it.

However, despite that fact that written Finnish can be easily pronounced, when learning Finnish, as in Korean, it is as if you must learn two different languages – the written language and the spoken language. A better way to put it is that there is “one language for writing and another for speaking.” You use different forms whether conversing or putting something on paper.

Some pronunciation is difficult. The the contrast between short and long vowels and consonants is particularly troublesome. Check out these minimal pairs:

sydämellä sydämmellä

jollekin jollekkin

A problem for the English speaker coming to Finnish would be the vocabulary, which is alien to the speaker of an IE language. Finnish language learners often find themselves looking up over half the words they encounter. Obviously, this slows down reading quite a bit!

In the grammar, the partitive case and potential tense can be difficult. Here is an example of how Finnish verb tenses combine with various cases to form words:

I A-Infinitive
Base form mennä

II E-Infinitive
Active inessive    mennessä
Active instructive mennen
Passive inessive   mentäessä

III MA-Infinitive
Inessive            menemässä
Elative             menemästä
Illative            menemään
Adessive            menemällä
Abessive            menemättä
Active instructive  menemän
Passive instructive mentämän

Verbs in Finnish

Finnish verbs are very regular. The irregular verbs can almost be counted on one hand:

juosta käydä olla nähdä tehdä

and a few others. In fact, on the plus side, Finnish in general is very regular.

One easy aspect of Finnish is the way you can build many forms from a base root:

kirj-

kirjabook kirjeletter kirjoittaato write kirjailijawriter

As in many Asian languages, there are no masculine or feminine pronouns, and there is no grammatical gender. The numeral system is quite simple compared to other languages. Finnish has a complete lack of consonant clusters. In addition, the phonology is fairly simple.

Finnish is rated 5, extremely hard to learn.

Southern

Estonian has similar difficulties as Finnish, since they are closely related. However, Estonian is more irregular than Finnish. In particular, the very regular agglutination system described in Finnish seems to have gone awry in Estonian. Estonian has 14 cases, including strange cases such as the abessive, adessive, elative and inessive. On the other hand, all of these cases can simply be analyzed as the genitive case plus a single unvarying suffix for each case. In addition, there is no gender, so the only things you have to worry about when forming cases are singular and plural.

Estonian has a strange mood form called the quotative, often translated as “reported speech.”

tema onhe/she/it is

tema olevatit’s rumored that he/she/it is or he/she/it is said to be

This mood is often used in newspaper reporting and is also used for gossip.

Estonian has an astounding 25 diphthongs. It also has three different varieties of vowel length, which is strange in the world’s languages. There are short, vowels and extra-long vowels and consonants.

linalinen – short n linnathe town’s – long n, written as nn `linnainto the town – extra-long n, not written out!

There are differences in the pronunciation of the three forms above, but in rapid speech, they are hard to hear, though native speakers can make them out. Difficulties are further compounded in that extra-long sonorants (m, n, ng, l, and r) and vowels and are not written out. All in all, phonemic length can be a problem in Estonian, and foreigners never seem to get it completely down.

Estonian pronunciation is not very difficult, though the õ sound can cause problems. However, Estonian has completely lost the vowel harmony system it inherited from Finnish, resulting in words that seem very hard to pronounce.

At least in written form, Estonian is not as complex as Finnish. Estonian can be seen as an abbreviated and modernized form of Finnish. The grammar is also like a simplified version of Finnish grammar and may be much easier to learn.

Estonian is rated 4.5, very to extremely difficult.

Sami Eastern

Skolt Sami‘s Latinization is often listed as one of the worst Latinizations around. The rest of the language is quite similar to, and as difficult as, Finnish.

Skolt Sami gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Ugric Hungarian

It’s widely agreed that Hungarian is one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Even language professors agree. The British Diplomatic Corps did a study of the languages that its diplomats commonly had to learn and concluded that Hungarian was the hardest. Hungarian grammar is maddeningly complex, and Hungarian is often listed on craziest grammar lists. For one thing, there are many different forms for a single word via word modification. This enables the speaker to make his intended meaning very precise. Looking at nouns, there are about 257 different forms per noun.

Hungarian is said to have from 24-35 different cases (there are charts available showing 31 cases), but the actual number may only be 18. Nearly everything in Hungarian is inflected, similar to Lithuanian or Czech. Similar to Georgian and Basque, Hungarian has the polypersonal agreement, albeit to a lesser degree than those two languages. There are many irregularities in inflections, and even Hungarians have to learn how to spell all of these in school and have a hard time learning this.

The case distinctions alone can create many different words out of one base form. For the word house, we end up with 31 different words using case forms:

házbainto the house házbanin the house házból from [within] the house házraonto the house házonon the house házróloff [from] the house házhozto the house házíguntil/up to the house háználat the house háztól [away] from the house házzá – Translative case, where the house is the end product of a transformation, such as They turned the cave into a house. házkéntas the house, which could be used if you acted in your capacity as a house or disguised yourself as one. He dressed up as a house for Halloween. házértfor the house, specifically things done on its behalf or done to get the house. They spent a lot of time fixing things up (for the house). házul – Essive-modal case. Something like “house-ly” or in the way/manner of a house. The tent served as a house (in a house-ly fashion).

And we do have some basic cases:

ház – Nominative. The house is down the street. házat – Accusative. The ball hit the house. háznak – Dative. The man gave the house to Mary. házzal – Similar to instrumental, but more similar to English with. Refers to both instruments and companions.

The genitive takes 12 different declensions, depending on person and number:

házammy house házaimmy houses házadyour house házaidyour houses házahis/her/its house házai his/her/its houses házunk our house házainkour houses házatok your house házaitok your house házuk their house házaik their houses egyházchurch, as in the Catholic Church. (Literally one-house)

In addition, the genitive suffixes to the possession, which is not how the genitive works in IE.

emberman/person házhouse a(z)the

az ember házathe man’s house (Lit. the man house-his) a házammy house (Lit. the house-my) a házadyour house (Lit. the house-your)

There are also very long words such as this:

megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért… for your (you all possessive) repeated pretensions at being impossible to desecrate

Being an agglutinative language, that word is made up of many small parts of words, or morphemes. That word means something like

The preposition is stuck onto the word in this language, and this will seem strange to speakers of languages with free prepositions.

Hungarian is full of synonyms, similar to English.

For instance, there are 78 different words that mean to move: halad, jár, megy, dülöngél, lépdel, botorkál, kódorog, sétál , andalog, rohan, csörtet, üget, lohol, fut, átvág, vágtat, tipeg, libeg, biceg, poroszkál, vágtázik, somfordál , bóklászik, szedi a lábát, kitér, elszökken, betér , botladozik, őgyeleg, slattyog, bandukol, lófrál, szalad, vánszorog, kószál, kullog, baktat, koslat, kaptat, császkál, totyog, suhan, robog, rohan, kocog, cselleng, csatangol, beslisszol, elinal, elillan, bitangol, lopakodik, sompolyog, lapul, elkotródik, settenkedik, sündörög, eltérül, elódalog, kóborol, lézeng, ődöng, csavarog, lődörög, elvándorol , tekereg, kóvályog, ténfereg, özönlik, tódul, vonul, hömpölyög, ömlik, surran, oson, lépeget, mozog and mozgolódik .

Only about five of those terms are archaic and seldom used, the rest are in current use. However, to be a fair, a Hungarian native speaker might only recognize half of those words.

In addition, while most languages have names for countries that are pretty easy to figure out, in Hungarian even languages of nations are hard because they have changed the names so much. Italy becomes Olazorszag, Germany becomes Nemetzorsag, etc.

As in Russian and Serbo-Croatian, word order is relatively free in Hungarian. It is not completely free as some say but rather is it governed by a set of rules. The problem is that as you reorder the word order in a sentence, you say the same thing but the meaning changes slightly in terms of nuance. Further, there are quite a few dialects in Hungarian. Native speakers can pretty much understand them, but foreigners often have a lot of problems. Accent is very difficult in Hungarian due to the bewildering number of rules used to determine accent. In addition, there are exceptions to all of these rules. Nevertheless, Hungarian is probably more regular than Polish.

Hungarian spelling is also very strange for non-Hungarians, but at least the orthography is phonetic. Nevertheless, the orthography often makes it onto worst orthographies lists.

Hungarian phonetics is also strange. One of the problems with Hungarian phonetics is vowel harmony. Since you stick morphemes together to make a word, the vowels that you have used in the first part of the word will influence the vowels that you will use to make up the morphemes that occur later in the word. The vowel harmony gives Hungarian a “singing effect” when it is spoken. The ty, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs and gy sounds are hard for many foreigners to make. The á, é, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű, and í vowel sounds are not found in English.

Verbs are marked for object (indefinite, definite and person/number), subject (person and number) tense (past, present and future), mood (indicative, conditional and imperative), and aspect (frequency, potentiality, factitiveness, and reflexiveness.

Elmentegettethetnélek. I could make others save you occasionally (on a disk).

Verbs change depending on whether the object is definite or indefinite.

Olvasok könyvet. I read a book. (indefinite object)

Olvasom a könvyet. I read the book. (definite object)

As noted in the introduction to the Finno-Ugric section, you need to know quite a bit of Hungarian grammar to be able to express yourself on a basic level. For instance, in order to say:

I like your sister.

you will need to understand the following Hungarian forms:

  1. verb conjugation and definite or indefinite forms
  2. possessive suffixes
  3. case
  4. how to combine possessive suffixes with case
  5. word order
  6. explicit pronouns
  7. articles

It’s hard to say, but Hungarian is probably harder to learn than even the hardest Slavic languages like Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Polish. At any rate, it is generally agreed that Hungarian grammar is more complicated than Slavic grammar, which is pretty impressive as Slavic grammar is quite a beast.

Hungarian is rated 5, extremely hard to learn.

Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Mandarin

It’s fairly easy to learn to speak Mandarin at a basic level, though the tones can be tough. This is because the grammar is very simple – short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense. But with Japanese, you can keep learning, and with Chinese, you often tend to hit a wall, often because the syntactic structure is so strangely different from English (isolating).

Actually, the grammar is harder than it seems. At first it seems simple, like a simplified English. No word is capable of declension, and there is no tense, case, and number, nor are there articles. But the simplicity makes it difficult. No tense means there is no easy way to mark time in a sentence. Furthermore, tense is not as easy as it seems. Sure, there are no verb conjugations, but instead you must learn some particles and special word orders that are used to mark tense. Mandarin has 12 different adverbs for which there is no good English translation.

Once you start digging into Chinese, there is a complex layer under all the surface simplicity. There is such things as aspect, serial verbs, a complex classifier system, syntax marked by something called topic-prominence, a strange form called the detrimental passive, preposed relative clauses, use of verbs rather than adverbs to mark direction, and all sorts of strange stuff. Verb complements can be baffling, especially potential and directional complements. The 把, 是 and 的 constructions can be very hard to understand.

The topic-prominence is interesting in that only a few major languages have topic-comment syntax, and most of those are Oriental languages with a lot of Chinese borrowing. Topicalization is not marked morphologically.

There are sentences where the entire meaning changes with the addition of a single character. Chinese sentences are SVO (Subject -Verb – Object) at their base, but that is a bit of an illusion. A sentence that causes you to discuss time duration makes you repeat the verb after the direct object – SVOVT (T= time phrase). In the case of topicalization, sentences can have the structure of OSV (Object – Subject – Verb). Relative clauses and all subordinate clauses come before the noun they modify. In other words:

English: The man who always wore red walked into the room. Chinese: Who always wore red the man walked into the room.

The relative clause in the sentences above is marked in bold.

In Chinese, the prepositional phrase comes between the subject and the verb:

English: The man hit the ball into the yard. Chinese: The man into the yard hit the ball.

The prepositional phrase is bolded in the sentences above.

In Chinese, adjectives are actually stative verbs as in Nahuatl and Lakota.

那个热菜很好吃。 Nàgè rède cài hěnhǎochī. The it is hot food is good to eat. The hot food is delicious.

The symbol turns food hot into food it is hot, an attributive verb. means something like to be.

There are dozens of words called particles which shade the meaning of a sentence ever so slightly.

Chinese phonology is not as easy as some say. There are way too many instances of the zh, ch, sh, j, q, and x sounds in the language such that many of the words seem to sound the same. There is a distinction between aspirated and nonaspirated consonants. There is also the presence of odd retroflex consonants.

Chinese orthography is probably the most hardest orthography of any language. The alphabet uses symbols, so it’s not even a real alphabet. There are at least 85,000 symbols and actually many more, but you only need to know about 3-5,000 of them, and many Chinese don’t even know 1,000. To be highly proficient in Chinese, you need to know 10,000 characters, and probably less than

In addition, the characters have not been changed in 3,000 years, and the alphabet is at least somewhat phonetic, so we run into a serious problem of lack of a spelling reform.

The Communists tried to simplify the system (simplified Mandarin) but instead of making the connections between the phonetic aspects of character more sensible by decreasing their number and increasing their regularity (they did do this somewhat but not enough), they simply decreased the number of strokes needed for each symbol typically without dealing with the phonetic aspect of all. The simplification did not work well, so now you have a mixture of two different types of written Chinese – simplified and traditional.

In addition to all of this, Chinese borrowed a lot from the Japanese symbolic alphabet a full 1,000 years after it had already been developed and had not undergone a spelling reform, adding insult to injury.

Even leaving the characters aside, the stylistic and literary constraints required to write Chinese in an eloquent or formal (literary) manner would make your head swim. And just because you can read Chinese does not mean that you can read Classical Chinese prose. It’s as if it’s written in a different language – actually, it is technically a different language similar to Middle English or Old English. However, few Middle English or Old English texts are read anymore, and Classical Chinese is still widely read.

However, the orthography is at least consistent. 9

Writing the characters is even harder than reading them. One wrong dot or wrong line either completely changes the meaning or turns the symbol into nonsense.

It’s a real problem when you encounter a symbol you don’t know because there is no way to sound out the word. You are really and truly lost and screwed. There is a clue at the right side of the symbol, but it is not always accurate.You need to learn quite a bit of vocabulary just to speak simple sentences.

Similarly, a dictionary is not necessarily helpful when trying to read Chinese. You can have a Chinese sentence in front of you along with a dictionary, and the sentence still might not make sense even after looking it up in the dictionary.

Some Chinese Muslims write Chinese using an Arabic script. This is often considered to be one of the worst orthographies of all.

The tones are often quite difficult for a Westerner to pick up. If you mess up the tones, you have said a completely different word. Often foreigners who know their tones well nevertheless do not say them correctly, and hence, they say one word when they mean another. However, compared to other tone systems around the world, the tonal system in Chinese is comparatively easy.

A major problem with Chinese is homonyms. To some extent, this is true in many tonal languages. Since Chinese uses short words and is disyllabic, there is a limited repertoire of sounds that can be used. At a certain point, all of the sounds are used up, and you are into the realm of homophones.

Tonal distinctions are one way that monosyllabic and disyllabic languages attempt to deal with the homophone problem, but it’s not good enough, since Chinese still has many homophones, and meaning is often discerned by context, stress, rhythm and intonation. Chinese, like French and English, is heavily idiomatic.

It’s little known, but Chinese also uses different forms (classifiers) to count different things, like Japanese.

There is zero common vocabulary between English and Chinese, so you need to learn a whole new set of lexical forms.

In addition, nouns often show relatedness or hierarchy. For instance, in English, you can simply say my brother or my sister, but in Chinese, you cannot do this. You have to indicate whether you are speaking of an older or younger sibling.

mei meiyounger sister jie jieolder sister ge geolder brother di diyounger brother

Mandarin scored very high on a weirdest languages study.

On the positive side, Chinese grammar is fairly regular and word derivation, compound words are sensible and the meaning can be determined by looking at the word. In other languages, compound words are not necessarily so obvious.

Many agree that Chinese is the hardest to learn of all of the major languages. A recent survey of language professors rated Chinese as the hardest language on Earth to learn.

Mandarin gets a 5.5 rating for nearly hardest of all.

However, Cantonese is even harder to learn than Mandarin. Cantonese has eight tones to Mandarin’s four, and in addition, they continue to use a lot of the older traditional Chinese characters that were superseded when China moved to a simplified script in 1949. Furthermore, since non-Mandarin characters are not standardized, Cantonese cannot be written down as it is spoken.

In addition, Cantonese has verbal aspect, possibly up to 20 different varieties. Modal particles are difficult in Cantonese. Clusters of up to the 3 sentence final particles are very common. 我食咗飯 and 我食咗飯架啦喎 are both grammatical for I have had a meal, but the particles add the meaning of I have already had a meal, answering a question or even to imply I have had a meal, so I don’t need to eat anymore.

Cantonese gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all.

Min Nan is also said to be harder to learn than Mandarin, as it has a more complex tone system, with five tones on three different levels. Even many Taiwanese natives don’t seem to get it right these days, as it is falling out of favor, and many fewer children are being raised speaking it than before.

Min Nan gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all.

A recent 15 year survey out of Fudan University utilizing both the departments of Linguistics and Anthropology looked at 579 different languages in 91 linguistic families in order to try to find the most complicated language in the world. The result was that a Wu language dialect (or perhaps a separate language) in the Fengxian district of southern Shanghai (Dônđän Wu) was the most phonologically complex language of all, with 20 separate vowels (Wang 2012). The nearest competitor was Norwegian with 16 vowels.

Dônđän Wu gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all.

Classical Chinese is still read by many Chinese people and Chinese language learners. Unless you have a very good grasp on modern Chinese, classical Chinese will be completely wasted on you. Classical Chinese is much harder to read than reading modern Chinese.

Classical Chinese covers an era extending over 3,000 years, and to attain a reading fluency in this language, you need to be familiar with all of the characters used during this period along with all of the literature of the period so you can understand all the allusions. Even with a knowledge of Classical Chinese, you need to read it in context. If you are good at Classical Chinese and someone throws you a random section of it, it will take you a good amount of time to figure it out unless you know context.

The language is much more to the point than Modern Chinese, but this is not as good as it sounds. This simplicity leaves a room for ambiguity, and context plays an important role. A joke about some obscure historical or literary anecdote will be lost you unless you know what it refers to. For reading modern Chinese, you will need at least 5,000 characters, but even then, you will still need a dictionary. With Classical Chinese, there are no lower limits on the number of characters you need to know. The sky is the limit.

Classical Chinese gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Tibeto-Burman Qiangic Northern Qiang

In Quiang, a language of Sichuan Province in China, not only are there rhotic vowels, which are present in only

ʀuɑ +e˞ > ʀuɑ˞kʰ me + w ˞> mw

Rhotic vowels are found in US English – Unstressed ɚ: standard, dinner, Lincolnshire, editor, measure, martyr.

Qiang also has a very bad romanization, so bad that the Qiang will not even use it. Voiced consonants are written by adding a vowel to the symbol for the voiceless consonant. It has long and short vowels, but these are not represented in the system.

Qiang gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Western Tibeto-Burman Bodish Central Bodish Central

Tibetan probably has one of the least rational orthographies of any language. The orthography has not changed in ~1,000 years while the language has gone through all sorts of changes. A langauge learner in Tibet can get by using phonetic spelling. The problem comes when you try to spell using the Classical Alphabet. For instance:

Srong rtsan Sgam po (written) soŋtsɛn ɡampo (spoken)

bsgrubs (written)

d`up (spoken)

While the orthography is etymological and completely outdated, it is quite predictable.

Tibetan gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Southern

Dzongka, the official language of Bhutan, has some pretty wild phonology, in addition to having the Tibetan writing system, this time using Bhutanese forms of the Tibetan script.

It contrasts all of the following: s, , ʰs, ʰsʰ, ts, ʰts, tsʰ, z, ʱz, dz, ʱdz, ⁿsʰ, ᵐtsʰ, ⁿtsʰ, ⁿdz, ᵖts, ᵖtsʰ, ᵖtsʷʰ, and ᶲs, and in addition it has four tones, but there is no single word that is distinguished by tone only. On top of that, there are 22 different vowels.

Dzongka gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer Vietic

Vietnamese is also hard to learn because to an outsider, the tones seem hard to tell apart. Therefore, foreigners often make themselves difficult to understand by not getting the tone precisely correct. It also has “creaky-voiced” tones, which are very hard for foreigners to get a grasp on.

Vietnamese grammar is fairly simple, and reading Vietnamese is pretty easy once you figure out the tone marks. Words are short as in Chinese. However, the simple grammar is relative, as you can have 25 or more forms just for I, the 1st person singular pronoun. In addition, the Latin orthography is said to be quite bad. It was invented by missionaries a few centuries ago, and it has never made much sense.

Vietnamese gets 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Mon-Khmer Khmer

Khmer has a reputation for being hard to learn. I understand that it has one of the most complex honorifics systems of any language on Earth. Over a dozen different words mean to carry depending on what one is carrying. There are several different words for slave depending on who owned the slave and what the slave did. There are 28-30 different vowels, including sets of long and short vowels and long and short diphthongs. The vowel system is so complicated that there isn’t even agreement on exactly what it looks like. Khmer learners, especially speakers of IE languages, often have a hard time producing or even distinguishing these vowels.

Speaking it is not so bad, but reading and writing it is pretty difficult. For instance, you can put up to five different symbols together in one complex symbol. The orthographic script is even worse than the Thai one. There are actually rules to this mess, but no one seems to know who they are.

Khmer gets a  4.5 rating, very to extremely hard.

Bahnaric North Bahnaric West Sedang-Todrah Sedang

Sedang, a language of Vietnam, has the highest number of vowel sounds of any language on Earth, at 55 distinct vowel sounds.

Sedang gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Hmong-Mien Hmongic Chuanqiandian

Hmong is widely spoken in this part of California, but it’s not easy to learn. There are eight tones, and they are not easy to figure out. It’s not obviously related to any other major language but the obscure Mien.

It has some very strange consonants called voiceless nasals. We have them in English as allophones – the m in small is voiceless, but in Hmong, they put them at the front of words – the m in the word Hmong is voiceless. These can be very hard to pronounce.

The romanization is widely criticized for being a lousy one, but the Hmong use it anyway.

Hmong gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Austro-Tai Austronesian Tsouic

Tsou is a Taiwanese aborigine language spoken by about 2,000 people in Taiwan. It has the odd feature whereby the underlying glides y and w turn into or surface as non-syllabic mid vowels e̯ and o̯ in certain contexts:

jo~joskɨ -> e̯oˈe̯oskɨ  -= fishes

Tsou is also ergative like most Formosan languages. Tsou is the only language in the world that has no prepositions or anything that looks like a preposition. Instead it uses nouns and verbs in the place of prepositions. Tsou allows more potential consonant clusters than most other languages. About 1/2 of all possible CC clusters are allowed.

Tsou has an inclusive/exclusive distinction in the 1st person plural and a very strange visible and non-visible distinction in the 3rd person singular and plural. Both adjectives and adverbs can turn into verbs and are marked for voice in the same way that verbs are. Verbs are extensively marked for voice. Nouns are marked for a variety of odd cases, often referring to perception, (visible/invisible) person, and place deixis.

‘e –               visible and near speaker si/ta –           visible and near hearer ta –               visible but away from speaker ‘o/to –           invisible and far away, or newly introduced to discourse na/no ~ ne – non-identifiable and non-referential (often when scanning a class of elements)

Tsou gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Malayo-Polynesian Malayo-Chamic Malayic Malay

Bahasa Indonesia is an easy language to learn. For one thing, the grammar is dead simple. There are only a handful of prefixes, only two of which might be seen as inflectional. There are also several suffixes. Verbs are not marked for tense at all. And the sound system of these languages, in common with Austronesian in general, is one of the simplest on Earth, with only two dozen phonemes. Bahasa Indonesia has few homonyms, homophones, homographs, or heteronyms. Words in general have only one meaning.

Though the orthography is not completely phonetic, it only has a small number of nonphonetic exceptions. The orthography is one of the easiest on Earth to use.

The system for converting words into either nouns or verbs is regular. To make a plural, you simply repeat a word, so instead of saying pencils, you say pencil pencil.

Bahasa Indonesia gets a 1.5 rating, extremely easy to learn.

Malay is only easy if you learn the standard spoken form or one of the creoles. Learning the literary language is quite a bit more difficult. However, the Jawi script, which is Malay written in Arabic script, is often considered to be perfectly awful.

Malay get a 2 rating for moderately easy.

Philippine Greater Central Philippine Central Philippine Tagalog

However, Tagalog is much harder than Malay or Indonesian. Compared to many European languages, Tagalog syntax, morphology and semantics are often quite different. Also, Tagalog is typically spoken very fast. Unlike Malay, verbs conjugate quite a bit in Tagalog. The main idea of Tagalog grammar is something called focus. Once you figure that out, the language gets pretty easy, but until you understand that concept, you are going to have a hard time.

Everything is affixed in Tagalog.

However, articles and creation of adjectives from nouns is very easy.

Compare:

gandabeauty (noun) magandabeautiful (adjective)

Tagalog gets a 4 rating, very difficult.

Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian Eastern Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Central-Eastern Oceanic Remote Oceanic Central Pacific East Fijian-Polynesian Polynesian Nuclear East Central Tahitic

Maori and other Polynesian languages have a reputation for being quite easy to learn. The main problem for English speakers is that the sentence structure is backwards compared to English. In addition, macrons can cause problems.

One problem with Maori is dialects. The dialects are so diverse that this means that there are multiple words for the same thing. Swiss German has a similar issue, with up to 50 words for each common household item (nearly every major dialect has its own word for common objects):

ngongi, noni, koki, waiwater whiri, rarangi, hiri –  to plait, to twist, to weave pai, maitaigood tu, , tutehu, mātikato stand mau, mouto hold pau, pouto be exhausted ika, tohorāwhale ika, ngohifish kāwei, kāwailine ori, kori, keukeu, koukou, neke, nukuto move haere, hara, here, horo, whanoto go, to come hara, hapa, to be wrong kōrerorero, wānanga, rūnangato discuss tohunga, tahungapriest matikuku, maikukufinger nail kanohi, konohi, mata, whatu, kamo, karueye, face

Entire Maori sentences can be written with vowels only.

E uu aau? Are yours firm?

I uaa ai. It rained as usual.

I ui au ‘i auau aau?’ E uaua! It will be difficult/hard/heavy!

On the plus side, the pronunciation is simple, and there is no gender. The language is as regular as Japanese. No Polynesian language has more than 16 sounds, and they all lack tones. They all have five vowels, which can be either long or short. A consonant must be followed by a vowel, so there are no consonant clusters. All consonants are easy to pronounce.

Maori gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Marquesic

Hawaiian is a pretty easy language to learn. It is easy to pronounce, has a simple alphabet, lacks complex morphology and has a fairly simple syntax.

Hawaiian gets a 2 rating, very easy to learn.

North and Central Vanuatu East Santo North

Sakao is a very strange langauge spoken by 4,000 people in Vanuatu.  It is very strange. It is a polysynthetic Austronesian language, which is very weird. It allows extreme consonant clusters. Sakao has an incredible seven degrees of deixis. The language has an amazing four persons: singular, dual, paucal and plural. The neighboring language Tomoko has singular, dual, trial and plural. The trial form is very odd. Sakao’s paucal derived from Tomato’s trial:

jørðœl they, from three to ten

jørðœl løn the five of them (Literally, they three, five)

All nouns are always in the singular except for kinship forms and demonstratives, which only display the plural:

ðjœɣmy mother/aunt -> rðjœɣmy aunts

walðyɣmy child -> raalðyɣmy children

It has a number of nouns that are said to be “inalienably possessed”, that is, whenever they occur, they must be possessed by some possessor. These often take highly irregular inflections:

Sakao 	  English
œsɨŋœ-ɣ   my mouth
œsɨŋœ-m   thy mouth
ɔsɨŋɔ-n   his/her/its mouth
œsœŋ-...  ...'s mouth	

uly-ɣ 	  my hair
uly-m 	  thy hair
ulœ-n 	  his/her/its hair
nøl-...   ...'s hair

Here, mouth is either œsɨŋœ-, ɔsɨŋɔ- or œsœŋ-, and hair is either uly-, ulœ- or nøl-

Sakao, strangely enough, may not even have syllables in the way that we normally think of them. If it does have syllables at all, they would appear to be at least a vowel optionally  surrounded by any number of consonants.

i (V) thou Mhɛrtpr. (CCVCCCC) Having sung and stopped singing thou kept silent.

Sakao has a suffix -in that makes an intransitive verb transitive and makes a transitive verb ditransitive. Ditransitive verbs can take two arguments – a direct object and an instrumental.

Mɨjilɨn amas ara./Mɨjilɨn ara amas. He kills the pig with the club/He kills with the club the pig.

Sakao polysynthesis allows compound verbs, each one having its own instrument or object:

Mɔssɔnɛshɔβrɨn aða ɛðɛ. He-shooting-fish-kept-on-walking with-a-bow the-sea. He walked along the sea shooting the fish with a bow.

Sakao gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Central-Eastern Oceanic Southeast Solomonic Malaita–San Cristobal Malaita Northern Malaita

Kwaio is an Austronesian language spoken in the Solomon Islands. It has four different forms of number to mark pronouns – not only the usual singular and plural, but also the rarer dual and the very rare paucal. In addition, there is an inclusive/exclusive contrast in the non-singular forms.

For instance:

1 dual inclusive (you and I) 1 dual exclusive (I and someone else, not you)

1 paucal inclusive (you, I and a few others) 1 paucal exclusive (I and a few others)

1 plural inclusive (I, you and many others) 1 plural exclusive (I and many others)

Pretty wild!

Kwaio gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Greater Barito East Barito Malagasy

Malagasy, the official language of Madagascar, has a reputation for being even easier to learn than Indonesian or Malay.

Malagasy gets a 1 rating, easiest of all to learn.

Tai-Kadai Kam-Tai Tai Southwestern

Thai is a pretty hard language to learn. There are 75 symbols in the strange script, there are no spaces between words in the script, and vowels can come before, after, above or below consonants in any given syllable. There seem to be many different glyphs for every consonant, but the different glyphs for the same consonant will sometimes change the sound of the neighboring vowel. The orthography is as insensible as that of English since centuries have gone by with no spelling reforms, in fact, Thai has not changed its system in 1000 years. The wild card of having tone thrown in adds to the insanity.

Consonant pronunciations vary depending on the location of the syllable in the word – for instance, s can change to t. There are many vowels which are spoken but not written. There are many consonants that are pronounced the same – for instance, there are six different t‘s, not counting the s‘s that turn into t‘s. The Thai script is definitely one of the most difficult phonetic scripts. Nevertheless, the Thai script is easier to learn than the Japanese or Chinese character sets. In spite of all of that, the syntax is simple, like Chinese.

There are five tones, including a neutral tone. Tones are determined by a variety of complex things, including a combination of tone marks, the class of consonants, if the syllable ends in a sonorant or a stop and what the tone of the preceding syllable was. Tone marking in the orthography is quite complex.

The vowels are different than in many languages, and there are some unusual diphthongs: eua, euai, aui and uu. There is a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants.

There is a system of noun classifiers for counting various things, similar to Japanese. In addition, common to many Asian languages, there is a complicated honorifics system.

On the plus side, Thai is a regular language, with few exceptions to the rules. However, the rules are quite complex. The syntax is about as complex as that of Chinese, and the grammar is dead simple.

Thai gets a 5 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Lao is very similar to Thai, in fact it is identical to a Thai language spoken by 16 million people in northeast Thailand called Northeastern Thai. The Lao script is similar to Thai, but it has fewer letters so there is somewhat less confusion.

Lao gets a 4.5 rating, very to extremely hard to learn.

Kam-Sui

The Kam languages of the Dong people in southwest China were rated by the Fudan University study referenced above under Wu as the 2nd most phonologically complex on Earth (Wang 2012). There are 32 stem initial consonants, including oddities like , tɕʰ, , pʲʰ, ɕ, , kʷʰ, ŋʷ, tʃʰ, tsʰ. Note the many contrasts between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants, including bilabial palatalized stops, labialized velar stops, and alveolar affricates. There are an incredible 64 different syllable finals, and 14 others that occur only in Chinese loans.

There are an astounding 15 different tones, nine in open syllables and six in checked syllables (entering tones). Main tones are high, high rising, high falling, low, low rising, low falling, mid, dipping and peaking. When they speak, it sounds as if they are singing.

Kam gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Kra Paha

According to the Fudan University study quoted above, Buyang in the 3rd most phonologically complex language in the world. Buyang is a cluster of 4 related languages spoken by 1,900 people in Yunnan Province, China. Buyang has a completely wild consonant inventory.

It has a full set of both voiced and voiceless plain and aspirated stops, including voiceless uvulars. The contrast between aspirated and plain voiced stops is peculiar. The stop series also has distinctions between palatalized and rounded stops throughout the series. It has a labialized voiceless palatal fricative and a voiceless dental aspirated lateral, unusual sounds. It has four different voiceless aspirated nasals. It has voiceless y and w, more odd sounds. It also has plain and labialized palatal glides.

That is one heck of a wild phonology.

Buyang gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Niger-Kordofanian Niger-Congo Atlantic–Congo Kwa Nyo Ga-Dangme

The African Bantu language Ga has a bad reputation for being a tough nut to crack. It is spoken in Ghana by about 600,000 people. It has two tones and engages in a strange behavior called tone terracing that is common to many West African languages. There is a phonemic distinction between three different types of vowel length. All vowels have 3 different lengths – short, long and extra long. It also has many sounds that are not in any Western languages.

Ga gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Potou-Tano Tano Central Bia Northern

Anyi is a language spoken by 610,000 people in Côte d’Ivoire.  It is relatively straightforward as far as African languages go. Probably the hardest part about the language is that it is tonal, and it does have two tones. The phonology does have the unusual +-ATR contrast which will seem very odd. ATR stands for advanced tongue root, so the language has a contrast between vowels with an advanced tongue root and without one. However, the grammar is pretty regular. There are few confusing phonological processes.

Anyi has a simple tense system, with only present, past and future. There is no aspect, mood or voice marking, and it lacks the noun class systems so common in many African languages. It has a plural marker, but it is often optional.

The syntax does have serial verbs, which will seem odd to Westerners. It distinguishes between relative clauses marked with and subordinate clauses marked with .

Anyi gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Volta-Congo Benue-Congo Bantoid Southern Narrow Bantu Central M Nyika-Safwa

Ndali is a Bantu language with 150,000 speakers spoken in Malawi and Tanzania. It has many strange tense forms. For instance, in the past tense:

Past tense A: He went just now. Past tense B: He went sometime earlier today. Past tense C: He went yesterday. Past tense D: He went sometime before yesterday.

Future tense is marked similarly:

Future tense A: He’s going to go right away. Future tense B: He’s going to go sometime later today. Future tense C: He’s going to go tomorrow. Future tense D: He’s going to go sometime after tomorrow.

Ndali gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

S Nguni

Xhosa, a language of South Africa, is quite difficult, with up to nine click sounds. Clicks only exist in one language outside of Africa – the Australian language Damin – and are extremely difficult to learn. Even native speakers mess up the clicks sometimes. Nelson Mandela said he had problems making some of the click sounds in Xhosa. The phonemics in general of Xhosa are pretty wild.

Xhosa gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Zulu and Ndebele also have these impossible click sounds. However, outside of click sounds, the phonology of Nguni languages is straightforward. All Nguni languages are agglutinative. These languages also make plurals by changing the prefix of the noun, and the manner varies according the noun class. If you want to look up a word in the dictionary, first of all you need to discard the prefix. For instance, in Ndebele,

riverumfula riversimifula, but

stoneilitshe stones –  amatsheyet

treeisihlahla trees izihlahla

Ndebele gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Zulu has pitch accent, tones and clicks. There are nine different pitch accents, four tones and three clicks, but each click can be pronounced in five different ways. However, tones are not marked in writing, so it’s hard to figure out when to use them. Zulu also has depressor consonants, which lower the tone in the vowel in the following syllable. In addition, Zulu has multiple gender – 15 different genders. And some nouns behave like verbs. It also has 12 different noun classes, but 9

Zulu gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

G Swahili

For unknown reasons, Swahili is generally considered to be an easy language to learn. The US military ranks it 1, with the easiest of all languages to learn. This seems to be the typical perception. Why Swahili is so easy to learn, I am not sure. It’s a trade language, and trade languages are often fairly easy to learn. There’s also a lot of controversy about whether or not Swahili can be considered a creole, but that has not been proven. For the moment, the reasons why Swahili is so easy to learn will have to remain mysterious.

On the down side, Swahili has many noun classes, but they have the benefit of being more or less logical.

Swahili gets a 2 rating, moderately easy.

Khoisan Southern Africa Southern Hua

!Xóõ (Taa), spoken by only 4,200 Bushmen in Botswana and Namibia, is a notoriously difficult Khoisan language replete with the notoriously impossible to comprehend click sounds. Taa has anywhere from 130 to 164 consonants, the largest phonemic inventory of any language. Of this vast wealth of sounds, there are anywhere from 30-64 different click sounds. There are five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. Speakers develop a lump on their larynx from making the click sounds.

In addition, there are four types of vowels: plain, pharyngealized, breathy-voiced and strident. On top of that, there are four tones. Taa appears on many lists of the wildest phonologies and craziest languages period on Earth.

Taa gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Northern

Ju|’hoan, a Khoisan language spoken by 5,000 people in Botswana, has one of the study of the weirdest languages on Earth.

Ju|’hoan gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Eskimo-Aleut Eskimo Inuit-Inupiaq

Inuktitut is extremely hard to learn. Inuktitut is polysynthetic-agglutinative, and roots can take many suffixes, in some cases up to 700. Verbs have 63 forms of the present indicative, and conjugation involves 252 different inflections. Inuktitut has the complicated polypersonal agreement system discussed under Georgian above and Basque below. In a typical long Inuktitut text, 9

Inuktituusuungutsialaarungnanngittuaraaluuvunga. I truly don’t know how to speak Inuktitut very well.

You may need to analyze up to 10 different bits of information in order to figure out a single word. However, the affixation is all via suffixes (there are no prefixes or infixes) and the suffixation is extremely regular.

Inuktitut is also rated one by linguists one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce. Inuktitut may be as hard to learn as Navajo.

Inuktitut is rated 6, hardest of all.

Kalaallisut (Western Greenlandic) is very closely related to Inuktitut. Look at this sentence:

Aliikusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli… However, they will say that he is a great entertainer, but …

That word is composed of 12 separate morphemes. A single word can conceptualize what could be an entire sentence in a non-polysynthetic language.

Kalaallisut is rated 6, hardest of all.

Chukotko-Kamchatkan Northern Chukot

Chukchi is a polysynthetic, agglutinating and incorporating language and is often listed as one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn.

Təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən. I have a fierce headache.

There are five morphemes in that word, and there are three lexical morphemes (nouns or adjectives) incorporated in that word: meyŋgreat, levthead, and pəγtache.

Chukchi gets a 6 rating, hardest of all.

Basque

Basque, of course, is just a wild language altogether. There is an old saying that the Devil tried to learn Basque, but after seven years, he only learned how to say Hello and Goodbye. Many Basques, including some of the most ardent Basque nationalists, tried to learn Basque as adults. Some of them succeeded, but a very large number of them failed. Based on the number that failed, it does seem that Basque is harder for an adult to learn as an L2 than many other languages are. Basque grammar is maddeningly complex and it often makes it onto craziest grammars and craziest language lists.

There are 11 cases, and each one takes four different forms. The verbs are quite complex. This is because it is an ergative language, so verbs vary according to the number of subjects and the number of objects and if any third person is involved.

This is the same polypersonal agreement system that Georgian has above. Basque’s polypersonal system is a polysynthetic system consisting of two verb types – synthetic and analytical. Only a few verbs use the synthetic form.

Three of Basque’s cases – the absolutive (intransitive verb case), the ergative (intransitive verb case) and the dative – can be marked via affixes to the verb. In Basque, only present simple and past simple synthetic tenses take polypersonal affixes.

The analytical forms are composed of more than one word, while the synthetic forms are all one word. The analytic verbs are built via the synthetic verbs izanbe, ukanhave and egindo.

Synthetic:

d-akar-ki-o-gu = We bring it to him/her. The verb is ekarribring. z-erama-zki-gu-te-n = They took them to us. The verb is eramantake

Analytic:

Ekarriko d-i-o-gu = We’ll bring it to him/her. Literally: We will have-bring it to him/her. The analytic verb is built from ukanhave.

Eraman d-ieza-zki-gu-ke-te = They can take them to us. Literally: They can be taking them to us. The analytic verb is built from izanbe.

Most of the analytic verbs require an auxiliary which carries all sorts of information that is often carried on verbs in other languages – tense, mood, sometimes gender and person for subject, object and indirect object.

Jaten naiz. Eat I-am-doing. I am eating.

Jaten nintekeen. Eat I-was-able-to. I could eat.

Eman geniezazkiake. Give we-might-have-them-to-you-male. We might have given them to you.

In the above, naiz, nintekeen and geniezazkiake are auxiliaries. There are actually 2,640 different forms of these auxiliaries!

A language with ergative morphosyntax in Europe is quite a strange thing, and Basque is the only one of its kind. The ergative itself is quite unusual:

Gizona etorri da.The man has arrived. Gizonak mutila ikusi du.The man saw the boy.

gizonman mutilboy -a = the

The noun gizon takes a different form whether it is the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb. The first sentence is in absolutive case (unmarked) while the second sentence is in the ergative case (marked by the morpheme -k). If you come from a non-ergative IE language, the concept of ergativity itself is difficult enough to conceptualize, much less trying to actually learn an ergative language. Consequently, any ergative language will automatically be more difficult than a non-ergative one for all speakers of IE languages.

Ergativity also works with pronouns.  There are four basic systems:

Nor:           verb has subject only
Nor-Nork:          "    subj. + direct complement
Nor-Nori:          "    subj. + indirect comp.
Nor-Nori-Nork:     "    subj. + indir. + dir. comps.

Some call Basque the most consistently ergative language on Earth.

If you don’t grow up speaking Basque, it’s hard to attain native speaker competence. It’s quite a bit easier to write in Basque than to speak it.

Nevertheless, Basque verbs are quite regular. There are only a few irregularities in conjugations and they have phonetic explanations. In fact, the entire language is quite regular. In addition, most words above the intermediate level are borrowings from large languages, so once you reach intermediate Basque, the rest is not that hard. In addition, pronunciation is straightforward.

Basque is rated 5.5, nearly hardest of all.

References

Dorani, Yakir. Hebrew speaker, Israel. August 2013. Personal communication.

Hewitt, B. G.. 2005. Georgian: A Learner’s Grammar, p. 29.

Kim, Yuni. December 16, 2003. Vowel Elision and the Morphophonology of Dominance in Aymara. UC Berkeley.

Kirk, John William Carnegie. 1905. A Grammar of the Somali Language: With Examples in Prose and Verse and an Account of the Yibir and Midgan Dialects, pp. 73-74.

Rogers, Jean H. 1978. Differential Focusing in Ojibwa Conjunct Verbs: On Circumstances, Participants, and Events. International Journal of American Linguistics 44: 167-179.

Wang, Chuan-Chao et al. 2012. Comment on ”Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa.” Science 335:657.

This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

Islam As A “Super Culture”

In the post Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles (How is that for a title?), I discussed the possibilities that “super-cultures” may exist that exert incredible influence on the genes of the persons living in those cultures. Super-cultures have “gene-warping effects, such that gene expression is warped in a profound way, often for the better.

The example of the Moriori was given, at first one of the most ferociously evil people on Earth, transformed via a Superculture into one of the most pacifistic people on Earth, so pacifist, that they got almost completely genocided due to their inability to fight back when faced with the true Maori who attacked them in the 1800’s.

I also suggested that Islam is a Superculture. Blacks living under Islam have a fairly low crime rate rate, including a violent crime rate, and they have a relatively low level of the social pathologies that we have come to associate with Blacks all over the world. Something about Islam is so gene-warping that it is modifying typical gene expression in Blacks.

A commenter, who opposes Islam, comments below. I agree with his comments in many ways. Let us say that I do not think that the West is compatible with Islam. We can handle a few of them, but once we get over a certain tipping point it is not going to be a tea party anymore. Here in the secular, let it all hang out West, Islam is pretty much the opposite of what we want in a society.

On the other hand, I believe in people’s rights to live how they choose, and if Muslim countries wish to live under Islam, so be it. This goes along with the principle of self-determination that we advocate here on this blog. Muslims can be Muslims all they want to in Muslim countries.

Nevertheless, Muslims do not seem to do so well as minorities in non-Muslim nations. There is a sense that Muslims are not required to live under infidel rule, and in fact, they seem to bristle at the very notion. Never mind that there are correlates in Islamic Law that state that Muslims in infidel countries must follow infidel law, else just go home. This is a more liberal reading of Islamic Law. It is rather disturbing that once they get to around 3-

And once you get a large Muslim minority, you usually have some sort of an insurgency, often a separatist one, on your hands. Philippines, Thailand, India, China, Russia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Israel are good examples. While some of these are justified, the take home point, if you are a non-Muslim country, seems to be to not allow large Muslim minorities to even get started in the first place.

That word super culture. I don’t think it should be used to describe Islam…I don’t even think Islam is a culture. In fact, Islam is anti culture. Think about it. All the demands Muslims make around the world in non-Muslim countries they live in…which actually have culture…are subtractive.

They are against dance, music, mixing of genders, fashion, women, gays, sex, alcohol, etc…they offer no replacement for the things they want to subtract…except prayer and boring lifeless existence. They are anti-culture…and culture can not survive Islam…at least not without going underground.

I don’t think Islam is a religion either…not as much as it is a regimented way of life and control…those are its key elements…with fear of violent punishments for the slightest dissent…that’s why in Black Islamic communities, Blacks cannot be violent and criminal…because the consequences are basically…death.

Yes it’s a gene warping thing…un-natural selection…sticking to the system without deviating one inch…ensures survival and breeding…making each next generation more genetically fanatically religious. Gradually the power of rational thinking and logic and ability to question dogma is bred out altogether.

More on the Biology of Crime

Repost from the old site. This subject is absolutely deadly for progressives because there is a fear that an examination into the biology of crime will tend to focus on race. As is, in the US, Blacks, Hispanics, Amerindians and Polynesians have crime rates, 8, 3, 2 and 2 times higher than Whites, respectively. Asians have crime rates 5 times lower than Whites. Leaving aside race for a moment, it is reasonable to pry into the extra-racial aspects of crime. For the moment, let us look at testosterone and MAO-A levels. MAO-A inhibits the production of catecholamines, in particular serotonin. Persons low in MAO-A tend to be low in serotonin. Persons low in serotonin have elevated rates of impulsive violent behavior, including homicidal and suicidal attempts and successes. These studies have been done on successful suicides and impulsively violent criminals behind bars. Serotonin is an inhibitory chemical. It follows that low levels of an inhibitory chemical would make a person less inhibited in some ways. A UK study on abused children found that those who had good MAO-A levels did not develop antisocial behavioral problems. Those who had low MAO-A levels did become antisocial. In this way, chemical levels in the brain interacted with negative environmental effects to either promote or inhibit antisocial behavior. It’s clear that abuse alone is not enough to cause antisocial behavior de novo. In Aggression: The Testosterone-Serotonin Link , Berger et al attempted to synthesize studies showing links between low serotonin and high testosterone to better explain the enigma of criminal behavior. With regard to testosterone, they noted that results indicated a positive correlation in boys between testosterone levels and serious aggression in social situations, but no correlation with playful aggression. This is interesting. Boys with normative testosterone can be quite aggressive in play, but they are able to turn it off and keep from going over the edge into actual serious aggression. High-testosterone boys were aggressive in both play and in serious aggression. A study of 4,462 men revealed that the overall picture among the high-testosterone men is one of delinquency, substance abuse and a tendency toward excess aggressive behavior. This is the classic picture of the teenage delinquent, gang member, etc. These men have more trouble with people like teachers while they are growing up, have more sexual partners, are more likely to show disciplinary problems during their military service and to have used “hard” drugs, particularly if they had a poor education and low incomes. As we can see, poor educational outcome and low income serve as additive effects for high-testosterone men who display antisocial or sociopathic tendencies. Measurements of testosterone saliva levels in 692 adult male prisoners showed that inmates who committed violent or sexual crimes had higher testosterone levels than inmates who were incarcerated for property crimes or drug abuse. Therefore, theft and drug abuse is not necessarily related to high testosterone. Anyone can be a thief or a doper, but not anyone can be a rapist or commit violent assaults. This study also showed that inmates with higher testosterone levels violated more prison rules, especially those involving overt confrontation. When salivary testosterone levels of young adult delinquents were compared with levels of a group of college students, matched for age, gender and race, the delinquent subjects had higher testosterone levels than the student controls, a finding that was true for both male and female subjects. It is interesting that even female young adult delinquents tend to have higher testosterone levels. It can thus be concluded that high testosterone levels play a role in some criminal behavior. In a previous post, I suggested that interventions to lower testosterone may be one avenue with which to attack testosterone-driven crime and antisocial behaviors. These interventions would involve Black females taking a drug to lower the testosterone of their fetus 2 To avoid the racial screeching, we could also offer to White prisoners who perhaps had gotten tired of offending, wanted to clean up, but felt prisoner to their urges. Commenters have noted with horror the possibility of messing with the sex drives of Black males, but a 2 Now for the racial angle. Yes, Blacks do have higher testosterone than Whites. And Asians have the lowest levels of all. Precisely as we might expect from the crime findings. Hmmm.

References

Birger M, Swartz M, Cohen D, Alesh Y, Grishpan C, Kotelr M. 2003. Aggression: the Testosterone-Serotonin Link. Israel Med Assoc J 5: 653-658.

Whites Made The First Maps and Other Nonsense

The White nationalist crazies are all in a flutter over the latest news out of Spain. In a cave, a stone tablet has been found with what may be the world’s oldest map on it. The WN’s, as usual, are huffing and puffing about how this is evidence that Whites made the first maps. There are problems with this analysis. The first is that the folks living in Spain 14,000 were first of all not ancestral to modern day Europeans. Second of all, they did not look like modern day Europeans. Instead, they looked more like Arabs and their DNA resembles modern-day Arabs more than any other race. The White race only goes back maybe 9000 years or so anyway. It’s well documented that the folks living in Europe around 12000 YBP looked like Arabs and their DNA looked like the DNA of modern day Arabs. We know what they looked like by looking at skulls. White skin only goes back about 10,000 YBP and blond hair, red hair and blue eyes about 9000 YBP. Those are all just recent mutations. European Whites as we know them today are a new model. It’s not that these people were Arabs, they were sort of like proto-Arabs. White nationalists counter that “White mummies” have been found in China at 9000 YBP. The reference is to the Tarim mummies. The Tarim mummies do not go back 9000 yrs in China. More like 3-4000 YBP. Anyway, those are Tocharian speakers, who are Indo-Europeans. Indo-Europeans are some of the real Whites who moved into Europe and really “Whitened” the place up. The White European race we know today (and the Caucasian race in the Caucasus, Anatolia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North India is largely an IE legacy. This includes folks like the White Berbers and the White Arabs. If you go back before 10,000 YBP, most modern races do not even exist. Amerindians only go back 6000 YBP. At 9000 YBP, they look like Polynesians and at 12000 YBP they look like Papuans. SE Asians only go back about 5000 YBP or maybe less. Prior to that, they look like Melanesians. NE Asians go back about 9000 YBP. Prior, they look like Ainu. Aborigines go back about 13,000 YBP. Prior to that, no one knows, but maybe they looked like Negritos. East Indians go back about 8000 YBP. Prior, they look like Aborigines. African Negroid Blacks only go back about 9,500 YBP. Prior, they look like Pygmies or Bushmen. As far as whether these folks were our ancestors, they were not. We are not ancestral to the European populations of 10,000 YBP and earlier. There is an interesting article along these lines called We Are Not Our Ancestors that you can Google. What probably happened was that Paleo-Europeans were replaced by Indo-European speakers moving in.

Native Peoples Adrift in the Modern World

Repost from the old site. Note: This post has been accused, as usual, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism. Recent news articles on the disgusting degeneration of many Polynesians in New Zealand into US Black-style gangbangers seems to be the case with many “indigenous peoples” in the world today. They just do not seem to be cut out for modern, Western, high-tech society. In most cases, Whites came into their lands and either invaded and conquered them or merely colonized them, and took away their old way of life, which, limited as it may have been, was at least working for them. A description of the Micronesians of Saipan from the interesting Saipan Sucks website (my notes) is instructive. Note this is just one American expat’s point of view, and does not represent my feelings about Micronesians, but instead represents those of the author of Saipan Sucks. I know nothing of Micronesians; I have only met one in my life, and he was just fine.

There is a very high rate of sexual molestation on Saipan, along with a very high rates of women having several kids, all by different men, and men fathering children by different women and never bothering to support any of them. The locals basically refuse to work in any sort of productive occupations, and family-based corruption in politics is endemic. School performance is abysmal. Spousal abuse is common. There is more incest and cousin marriage on Saipan than anywhere in the US. The police hardly bother to investigate any homicide cases, apparently since they are too incompetent to complete an investigation. The locals are profoundly racist against all Americans – especially White Americans. The wealthy Micronesians on Saipan are almost all notorious thieves who stole every nickel they made. Theft and lying in all of the Mariana Islands is endemic, and the stealing is so bad that locals actually resort to bolting their furniture to the floor. Micronesians feel they are racially superior to everyone, especially Filipinos, who are the most talented and hardest working people on the islands, as they are in much of that part of Asia. Interestingly, the Filipino IQ of 89 is the same as the Micronesian IQ of 87. The suggestion is that the Micronesian IQ of 87 plays little or no role in much of the pathology above.

Although I have never been to Micronesia, I assume that this description is representative of the behaviors of far too many native Saipanese. Why do I think this? Because I have seen this same pattern here in the US with Native Americans and the Black and Hispanic underclasses. This panoply of attitudes and pathologies is not limited to the Micronesians, but is common amongst many native peoples in our world, based on my observation. These people used to hold traditional occupations at which they functioned well. Now, they can no longer do these jobs, and they are either not able to do or are not interested in doing modern work. The following set of pathologies (in whole or in part) seems to be common amongst far too many indigenous peoples today: Unwilling or unable for work in the modern economy, they become chronically unemployed, and are often regarded by others as lazy people who refuse to work, collect every welfare program they can, spend days sitting around doing nothing, and often drink to excess, or nowadays, take drugs. When they do work, their working style is often seen as irresponsible or lackadaisical. They often do not do well in school, in part because many of them are not even used to being inside four walls, since they are used to spending much of their time outdoors. In their traditional life, there was no formal schooling, just learning by observation. The family structure has typically been badly broken up for whatever reason, and child abuse of various forms is common. Women have kids by various different men and do not bother to marry any of them. Men for their part have children by various women and then refuse to support any of the kids. Politics is characterized by a tribal, clan-based, often vicious and immoral scheme of ultra-corruption. Police and government officials are often lazy and incompetent. Things like roads in Congo and water treatments plants in Saipan either never get built, as in Saipan where the natives apparently can’t figure out how to build one, or don’t get repaired, as in Congo where 9 Bilingual programs founder when students are said to be literate in neither English nor their native language. Crime spirals out of control as traditional village-based law enforcement systems are no longer operative, and impoverished and often unemployed natives are often confronted with mass wealth, waved right in their face. Virulent anti-White or anti-East Indian racism takes hold due to resentment that these groups may have a higher standard of living, or may have settled or colonized their land in the past, along the painful realities of their own culture’s failure to succeed in the modern world combined with their observation of the others’ great success in negotiating that same modernity. Indigenous people, selected via repeated famine to survive on very little food, are hit like a ton of bricks with the Western high-calorie, high-salt, high-fat diet, which they are not physiologically adapted for. The result is mass obesity, diabetes, hypertension, at least with some groups – Micronesians, Melanesians, Aborigines, Polynesians and North American Native Americans in particular. The set of pathologies above is quite evident in many indigenous cultures, including Native Americans in the US and Canada, some Native Americans in South America (Amazon tribes in particular), native Siberians in Russia, Inuit in Canada, Alaska and Russia, Sub-Saharan African Blacks, Negritos in the Andaman Islands and the Philippines, Aborigines in Australia, Micronesians, Polynesians and urban Melanesians in New Guinea. Some suggest that IQ may be a factor in this situation. These groups have the following average IQ’s (world average is also included):

Siberian Natives: 102.5 (est.)*
Inuit (Eskimo):   94
World Average:    92
Amerindians:      89
Polynesians:      88, but varies**
New Guinea:       86
Micronesians:     86
African Blacks:   70
Aborigines:       65

*Native Siberian IQ is not known, but Mongolian IQ is 102.5, and Siberians may be similar. **Some Polynesian groups have higher IQ’s. The New Zealand Maori IQ is 93, the Cook Islands Maori IQ is 92 and the Samoan IQ is 90.5 The first two are right at the world average IQ, and the Samoan IQ is close to the average. Interestingly, the first two islands were settled later in the Polynesian expansion. Siberian difficulties in adapting to modern life cannot be explained by IQ, nor can the problems of the Maori or the the Inuit. Average Polynesian, Micronesian, Amerindian and New Guinea IQ’s are not remarkably low, being only 3 points below the world average. Many countries that seem to function quite well with the modern world, such as Cuba, Iran and many Arab and Latin American countries, have average IQ’s in the 86-88 range, but most of these peoples have been living in a more modern way for quite some time now. Few could be considered “indigenous peoples”. It is true that the IQ’s of Aborigines and African Blacks are quite low. In short, IQ is not sufficient to explain the problems that each of the groups above have in adaptation to our modern world. In New Guinea, people living traditional lives in the mountains seem to do well, while the capital of Port Moresby is a crime-flooded, drunken urban catastrophe. In Samoa, traditional Western Samoa seems to do a lot better with their traditional lifestyle than American Samoa, where a Western way of life holds sway along with a very high crime rate. Cook Islanders and New Zealand natives are both Maori. Cook Islanders have a functional society, as they still live a traditional life and have not yet been deluged with tourists. In contrast, the Maori situation in New Zealand is often regarded as catastrophic, with very rates of crime and the sorts of pathologies described above. Biologically and IQ-wise, the two groups are identical. A few Andaman Islands Negritos have barely been contacted much at all (Sentinel Island), and they are doing quite well. Others have been contacted but still mostly live a traditional life, and they are doing less well but are still generally functional (the Onge and Jawara). Some Andaman tribes who have been removed from traditional life seem to have completely lost their way, live on government reservations, are mired in the most deplorable pathology and even seem to be slowly going extinct (Greater Andamanese). For an overview, see George Weber’s great website. A roughly similar situation holds with a number of tribes in the Amazon – the more they are left pretty much alone, the better off the are. In regard to the difficulties in adaptation described above, let us note that in their traditional societies, these people typically never had vehicle roads (or vehicles), water treatment plants, schools, money-based societies with paid government employees and cops nor written languages. In addition, marriage and divorce may have been a casual affair in many pre-contact societies. An in an effort to act like men. I don’t really know what to do about any of this. One idea is that a lot of these groups are not really cut out for modern life. Many of these people may do better if they lived more traditional lives, in traditional villages, with traditional styles of behavioral regulation (chief, elders, family or clan). Of course, the decision of whether to live a more Western or less Western life should be left completely up to the people themselves. Western life is not for everyone, and we need to consider that for many indigenous peoples, it is not only harmful, but it is also deadly. We can still provide them with medical care, make sure their structures and infrastructure are functional and intact, insure that they have water, plumbing and electricity, and provide them with food or supplementation if they need it. In many cases, they may need to return to a native diet or risk early death eating a Western diet.

Notes

1. Hill, K. and Hurtado, A.M. 1996. Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 2. Lykken, D.T. 1995. The Antisocial Personalities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles

A commenter notes that genes provide a range of behaviors, and culture may not be able to move group performance much outside of that range. The suggestion by that commenter was that genes will predispose some populations to relatively high crime, and culture can only make it lower or higher, but it’s never going to be all that low. Allow me to differ on that for a moment. Check out my post on the Moriori. In a nutshell, the Polynesians are widely regarded as extremely violent people. They were violent as Hell on contact, and their oral histories indicated a culture of extreme violence dating back as far as we can tell. They seem to have been some of the most violent folks on Earth. The Maori were some of the most violent of all of the Polynesians. To this day, they have very high rates of general instability, drug abuse, domestic violence, and all sorts of crime, including violent crime. They are are regarded as having hair trigger tempers and for being highly aggressive. They have all of the social pathologies of US Blacks, though their IQ’s seem to be higher. (IQ = 91). The Moriori were a Maori subgroup that colonized the Chatham Islands in the 1600’s. They started out being typically maniacal Maoris, but after a while of that, it become clear that they were going to massacre each other. A leader came unto them and saw God. He became a religious leader, and all of the people followed him. He ordered them to renounce all violence. For the next 300 years, they were possibly one of the least violent people on Earth. Homicide was basically unheard of, and so was rape. Conflict was settled by a twig as wide as your index finger. At the first blood it was over and done with, and the conflict was buried. Around the 1830’s, the Maori came to the Chatham Islands. They attacked the Moriori and the Moriori were so pacifist they would not even fight back. They were quickly massacred, enslaved and cannibalized. Few survived. Now, how does the most violent tribe on Earth become the most pacifist tribe on Earth? It’s clear to me that Polynesians are genetically primed for violence and aggression, but it’s also clear that a strong culture can completely overcome that. Genes provide the clay, culture is the sculptor. Now, the question is, how can these profound gene-warping cultures work? Sadly, I think they work best in small tribes and villages. In large cities and big societies, I don’t think these super-cultures can take hold. They just get washed out by the genes. So in large cities and with huge populations, genes will predominate, and maybe culture has limited effects. In very small populations, culture can be a super-warper. There is also the possibility that some races are more “plastic” than other races. Polynesians may be a “plastic race” that is highly susceptible to cultural effects. Amerindians may be another one. There are Amazonian tribes right near the “most violent people on Earth”, the Yanomamo, that, like the Moriori, are some of the pacifist people on Earth. A problem with Blacks is that they seem to commit lots of crime just about everywhere. I am willing to entertain the possibility that Blacks may not be as “plastic” or as effected by super-culture, as, say, Polynesians and Amerindians are. The Dyula are an exception, and they are Blacker than people Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Aborigines, Africa, Amerindians, Anthropology, Arabs, Blacks, Capitalism, Caribbean, Crime, Criminology, Cuba, Cultural, Dominica, Dyala, East Indians, Economics, Hispanics, Intelligence, Inuit, Islam, Left, Maori, Marxism, Melanesians, Moriori, Mozambique, New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Polynesians, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Roma, Russia, Socialism, Sociology, South Africa, Whites33 Comments on Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles

Blacks and Crime: An Examination

Repost from the old site. Note: This post has been accused, as usual, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism. Black crime rate in the US is approximately 8.1 times greater than the White crime rate. It is about 36.8 times higher than the US Asian rate, which itself is 4.6 times lower than the White rate. It is even 4 times higher than the US Amerindian and Polynesian (mostly Hawaiian) crime rates. It is also 2.4 times higher than the extremely high Hispanic crime rate. These rates are young Black males, and that Black males around 30-45+ have often got it figured out, no matter what they were like as kids. If they settle down, have some kids and own or rent a home, they often relax and are fairly peaceful and easy to deal with. I say this because my car has broken down a couple of times in the heart of the Los Angeles Black ghetto, and both times Black males around this age came out and worked on my engine to try to get it going again. Blacks have .3 standard deviation excess in aggressiveness across surveys (actually, that is not a tremendously elevated rate of aggression), including Interpol. Sailer points out that there is no discrimination involved in higher black suspension rates in schools. I would agree with that, and add, as a former teacher who taught in Black inner city schools for years, that the only discrimination is probably that far fewer Black students are suspended than ought to be. I would also add that Black 11th and 12th graders, even in the ghetto, are exceptionally well-behaved, all of the idiots being out of school, in jail, juvey or boot camp, or dead, by then. In death row sentencing, Sailer notes that the only bias is towards White inmates and this applies even to the South. What Sailer means by that is that Whites are actually more likely than Blacks to get the death penalty for the same crime, even in the South. Obviously, the days of White racist hanging juries are pretty much through in this country, even in the South. Gene Expression (not my favorite blog at all), quoting Le Griffe Du Lion (not my favorite White racist academic at all) on violent crime: Le Griffe messes around with some figures and comes up with a .84 correlation of I must point out that Le Griffe Du Lion is an academic lab coat racist, and a true White Supremacist, with a stated agenda of getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws in the US. Yet Black crime rates are not adequately explained on a global basis merely by presence of Blacks. For instance, the Miami Herald (dead link) quotes the World Health Organization saying that Latin America, with a mixed Caucasian-Amerindian population, has a higher homicide rate (27.5 per 100,000) than even Black Africa (22 per 100,000), lily-White but organized crime-overrun Eastern Europe (15 per 100,000) and Industrialized nations – generally speaking, the West (1 per 100,000). Furthermore, other studies show that the mixed Caucasian-Amerindians of Latin America, with only 8 percent of the global population, account for 75 percent of the world’s kidnappings. Clearly, there is something other than pure genetics at work in high Latin American crime rates. I know it’s heresy in these free market times to mention this, but perhaps, could an insane gap between rich and poor, among the worst on Earth, have a might bit to do with this? Gini coefficient map for Latin America. Oh no, of course not, capitalism doesn’t cause any problems, and all societal problems are caused by too much socialism. How do I know this? Wikipedia told me 10,000 times so far, and Wikipedia is God, you know. Shall we end this on a upbeat tone? Please do. Given the genetics that Blacks bring to the table, Black crime rates can either be relatively higher or relatively lower, depending on societal variables. A recognition that Blacks bring a different genetic set to the table, which may make them more susceptible to crime, is essential in devising societal actions to reduce Black crime. What works for other races with different genetic sets may not work for Blacks with their own mental toolbox. This is why race realism or racialism is so important. One suggestion I would like to make as a socialist is that socialism seems to dramatically reduce Black crime. Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, has a homicide rate 5 In Mozambique in the 1980’s there was a Communist regime under one of my heroes, Samora Machel. The crime rate was almost nonexistent. They were all poor together. According to a resident, anyone, male or female, native or foreigner, could walk across the all-Black capital city, Maputo, in the middle of the night, with scarcely a worry. Abiola Lapite, one of my least favorite human beings on Earth, does note that there is a tribe called the Dioula in Burkina Faso who have a homicide rate of 1.3/100,000, nearly as low as Japan’s rate of 1.1/100,000. Why don’t we get some Western criminologists over to Burkina Faso to study the very Black Dioula? Until there is a recognition of the existence of race as a salient variable in human diversity, and that races may differ genetically and biologically on behavioral outcomes, this will never occur. Genetics provides the clay. Culture or society is the sculptor. No Black population anywhere is doomed to an insane crime rate. If the Dioula can do it, so can any Blacks anywhere.

R-K Scale or Introversion-Extroverion Scale?

Repost from the old site. There are clearly some differences between the races, at least between Northeast Asians, European Caucasians and Blacks. Those differences are obvious to me and to many others, and show up in many statistics on a variety of societal variables. Whether or not there are global personality differences between the races is very controversial, but it seems obvious to many folks just looking around at the world, and as a former US schoolteacher who taught classes full of Anglo-Americans, Japanese Americans and Afro-Americans for years all over Los Angeles, after a while you have to really lie to yourself to believe that such a thing does not exist. At Gardena High School, there were many Blacks and many Japanese-Americans, and the contrast simply belts you in the face with a knockout punch. Even those experts who agree that there are differences go on and on about whether they are genetic or cultural, when it’s clear that they are both. Some recent studies have come out (by Jewish psychologists, of course) claiming that there are no significant personality differences between Blacks and Whites. I don’t even care to read such a study, as it flies in the face of common sense observation. Philippe Rushton is a racist who dislikes Blacks and his books are very controversial. He has suggested r-strategy versus k-strategy for the differences between Blacks, Whites and Asians. R-k selection theory is a theory in biology relating different modes of adaptation that animals use to survive in the environment. I’m going to stay agnostic on the r/k thing and I don’t wish to align myself with the oily Mr. Rushton, who, by the way, wishes to do away with all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, but one thing I think Rushton makes clear is that there is an extroversion-introversion scale that closely mirrors that r/k scale. As introverts have a vastly lower crime rate and extroverts tend to make up the vast majority of criminals (even among Whites) that makes good sense to me. Also, extroverts are much more likely to be bored with school, tend to use and manipulate others more, have a “strong prey on the weak and that’s ok” mindset, are vastly less moral and mannered, less inclined to repay debts, have much more regard for self than others, are more promiscuous, gamble, drink and take drugs more, take worse care of their health, are less cautious, have more accidents, take way more risks, are much more aggressive, impulsive prone to wild and excessive mood swings (wild emotionality) and are financially irresponsible and have a lowered life expectancy. It’s clear to me that all of these are true even within a race, say, with Whites (that’s the race I’m most familiar with). It’s obvious to me that Blacks are the most extroverted race, NE Asians the least, and Whites in between. Honestly, I have no idea what to do with most of the other races. SE Asians psychologically resemble NE Asians, though I think they are somewhat more extroverted. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do with Amerindians, Hispanics, Polynesians, Micronesians and Papuans. I suspect that Papuans and Aborigines may be more like Blacks in extroversion. Polynesians are very odd. They’re obviously part-Asian and can be pretty quiet and introverted, yet at the same time, they are collectivist, love parties and are surrounded by people all the time. Filipinos are much the same. East Indians, Arabs, North Africans and South Asians are pretty much like Whites, cultural baggage aside. Culture seems to intervene a lot here, as with everything else, and it gets real hard to disentangle everything. Sure, there are introverted Blacks (I’ve known a few of them!) and there are extroverted NE Asians, but we are looking at these groups globally here.

An Analysis of Different US Immigrant Groups By Nationality

Repost from the old site. This piece tries to look at all of the major immigrant groups that are currently immigrating to the US in large numbers in order to determine which ones are causing problems and which ones are being a net positive for society. When I say net positive, I do not mean to be pro-immigrant. I mean that they are positive above and beyond any inherent detractions is their mere being immigrants. The question of whether huge numbers of even good immigrants are good for the country is another one altogether and goes beyond the scope of this post. This post hopes to put across the idea of a points system for immigration. We need to quit importing low quality immigrants to the US. If they are to be imported at all (and I have no problems with say up to 400,000 immigrants a year) we should only import high-quality immigrants from the rest of the world. Importing problem humans to a country that already has its hands full with the problem humans already residing there has to be the ultimate in insanity. This article has been praised by a famous person, who shall remain nameless. We have quite a few folks coming to this blog who are opposed to immigration. To be honest, almost everyone in the US who is opposed to immigration is White, and to some extent, it’s associated with White nationalism. There are also anti-immigrant sites out there like Vdare, but they are almost always on the crazy end of the spectrum. Vdare is not White nationalist, but they do want to end all immigration altogether. On the far moderate end of White nationalism, we have American Renaissance. I do like to hang out there because it’s nice to hear real, honest talk on race for once. In general, the White nationalists on Amren want to end non-White immigration altogether. I’d like to point out that this is a crazy and extremist point of view. Furthermore, Whites are only 6 I suppose with a White population declining like this, we would expect to see wild and crazy proposals like this. It’s really just a sign of desperation. Few non-Whites want to limit immigration this strictly, and even many Caucasians don’t. Keep in mind that most White nationalists call only Europeans White. Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Indians – none of them count. So almost everyone who is not a European White in the US has recent immigrant roots and does not want to end immigration. We should feel lucky if they want to limit it at all. Arabs, Turks, Kurds, North Africans, Africans, Hispanics of all types (even White Hispanics), Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, SE Asians, Filipinos, Polynesians, East Indians, Central Americans, Caribbeans, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis – none of these folks are on board for an immigration moratorium. That leaves us the 61. Looking around the world, we would be very hard-pressed to find even one country that has banned all immigration. Someone find me one, please! Japan and Korea are always being brought up, but there are plenty of immigrants in both places. What may be a lot more difficult there is getting citizenship. But that’s not unusual, nor is it the point here. Germany had race-based citizenship until recently, and may still have it. Syria and probably other Arab nations has race-based citizenship (The Kurds have not even been allowed to be citizens, because they are not Arabs!) So White nationalists are really changing the subject here. We ask them to show us some countries who have been so crazy as to ban all immigration, and they point to Japan and Korea, who have merely made it difficult to be a citizen, while immigrants are fairly common (indeed, Jared Taylor, head of Amren, was an immigrant in Japan for years). So the truth is that there are almost no nations that have banned immigration altogether. Why are White nationalists promoting this then? Because they are nuts. At this point, this project isn’t going anywhere, like every White nationalist project. So I would say it’s time for those of us on the anti-immigrant spectrum to cut our losses and do some damage control. As immigration isn’t going to be ended, sensible folks ought to focus on limiting it. Negative Population Growth advocates an end to illegal immigration to the extent possible, a removal of all illegal immigrants, and a reduction in legal immigration to 200,000. This is reasonable, and I support that organization. Here is a good example of the White nationalist mindset from my comments section:

Why do Whites oppose massive non-White immigration?Because non-White immigration causes higher crime, declining standards in education and morality, more drugs, more economic degradation and economic inequality, more strife/suspicion/competition between ethnic groups, more welfare and big government, more overpopulation and pollution, and so on. ALL countries and empires have eventually fallen or balkanized after being swamped by millions of ‘immigrant’ invaders, even the non-White empires and countries — and the same is now happening in America. Those opposing massive non-White immigration to America are more opposed to the decline of America than they are against other races and ethnicities. If they are against other races or ethnicities it is because their presence hastens and is an obvious sign of this decline.

You will find this mindset all over Amren, and probably deep down inside Vdare, too. The problem with this is that it is in large part false. The notion that immigration leads to inevitable strife, group competition, environmental degradation in an already crowded nation, etc. is going to be true with any group of immigrants. However, White nationalists are pro-natalists who cheer stories about White women having 18 kids, so they really shouldn’t talk about overpopulation leading to environmental degradation. Furthermore, your average White nationalist is a hard rightwinger, and at least their voting patterns suggest that they are quite hostile to environmentalism. All of the other points are not true for non-White immigration in toto. There is no problem with “non-White” immigration per se, but there are problems, sometimes major problems, with select groups. As a good rule, less restricted immigration from US colonies, of refugees and illegal immigration is problematic because of a lack of a rigorous selection process that winnows out many applicants. Legal immigration with a rigorous selection process has been associated with few problems, except in the odd case of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic. Let us look at the “non-White” immigrant groups in the US: South Americans: No problems here. They are very well-screened, and with the exception of some Colombians in New York City, pretty well behaved. It’s not a large group. There are small Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Argentine enclaves in Los Angeles, and there are Venezuelan enclaves in Florida and Texas. Japanese: Always one of the best immigrant groups. There are enclaves in San Francisco and Gardena, California. The enclaves are safe as far as the Japanese go, but Gardena now has many Blacks. When I taught school in Los Angeles, the non-PC teachers used to joke, “Gimme a class full of Japs and Jews and I’ll never complain.” A teacher friend of mine was asked to fill out a form that idiotically said, “Ethnic preference”. He was White, but he put, “Japanese”. The principal called him in and asked, “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not Japanese.” He answered, “It said ethnic preference. I prefer to teach Japanese students.” I was amazed that Japanese students got a little squirrelly in 8th grade. All humans are horrible at age 13, but I thought maybe the Japanese transcended that. They didn’t, but they were the breeziest 8th graders I’ve ever taught. By 9th grade, they were back to normal, and by 7th grade, they were still ok. If all kids were like this, parenting could be done with your eyes closed. Chinese: See Japanese. There are many new immigrants with poor English who are are adding to already existing Chinatown enclaves in many large cities, but this problem will sort itself out. There is poverty in Chinatowns, but there is little crime. For some reason, poverty in Chinatowns is not a serious societal problem. There are also quite a few exploited Chinese illegal immigrants, but almost all are working in Chinatowns and speaking Chinese on the job. They are taking few, if any, jobs from Americans. Very low crime rate. Chinatowns are safe places in the daytime at least and generally pleasant at night. Koreans: More or less the same as Chinese. They are probably better assimilated than Chinese. There is a vast enclave in Los Angeles (Koreatown) and a large enclave in Garden Grove, California. The enclaves are safe both night and day. Very low crime rate. Vietnamese: Most came as refugees and got off to a rocky start. There are some gangs, but overall it appears that their crime rate is far below Whites. Their criminals generally prey on their own. Young Vietnamese in Orange County, California are becoming a new high-achieving elite. This is the highest scoring group in the CA school system and US Irvine is full of Vietnamese students. They have formed some ethnic enclaves, but the young ones are assimilating, and even their enclaves are pleasant, non-dangerous places in both night and day. One large ethnic enclave is in Garden Grove, California. There is an enclave in Richmond, California that has a high crime rate and is not doing well, but this seems to be anomalous. Khmer: Not a large group, but there are some enclaves, especially in Long Beach and Santa Ana, California. There is still heavy welfare use, but a new generation is coming up. There are some youth gangs, but overall, the crime rate seems low. Khmer enclaves are pleasant and not dangerous at least in daytime. Hmong: This group of refugees still has very heavy welfare use. There are also gangs, but the overall crime rate seems much lower than the White rate, at least here in Fresno. There are enclaves in California’s Central Valley and in Minnesota. The new generation is coming of age, going to school and doing well. Highly intelligent; they resemble Chinese. Their enclaves are not that pleasant and tend to be poor and rundown, but don’t seem to be all that dangerous. Their criminals generally prey on their own. Mien: There are enclaves in Northern California in Davis and Merced in the Central Valley. They are refugees that came in with the Hmong. In appearance and behavior, they are very Chinese like the Hmong. A friend of mine worked in Social Services in Davis and said she would go to these poverty-stricken, blighted, rundown, hellhole apartment complexes and visit the Mien welfare families. The parents would be sitting on the floor eating out of a rice bowl and did not speak a word of English. They seemed like they were fresh out of the jungle of SE Asia. The walls would be covered with the kids’ report cards – all A’s. Think about it. On balance, seems to be a good group. High welfare use is balanced by a crime rate probably way lower than Whites, and the kids seem to have a good future. Lao: This group of refugees still has high welfare use, and there are youth gangs. The young people seem to be doing well, going to school, graduating, moving on. Despite the gangs, the crime rate seems to be much lower than the White rate, at least in Fresno. There are enclaves in Fresno and Santa Ana, California. Their enclaves are poor and run-down, but not that dangerous for non-SE Asians. They are part of the high-crime, poorly-performing Asian enclave in Richmond, California that is so far pretty anomalous. Khmu: Khmu from Laos are part of the poorly-performing, high-crime Asian enclave in Richmond, California, along with Vietnamese, Lao and Samoans. So far, this situation is pretty anomalous. This seems to be a case of very poor Asian refugees moving into a horrible Black ghetto and aping the worst Black behaviors. I don’t have any data on Khmu other than the Richmond report, and on that basis, I’m inclined to mark them as a problem ethnic group, but to tell the truth, I lack good data on them, and they really are a miniscule group anyway. Thai: Not a large group, but there are some enclaves in Los Angeles. They seem to be doing well and are out of poverty. Little or no gangs or crime. Professionals, owners of shops and restaurants. Burmese: A tiny group that seems to be doing quite well, at least those I met. Tibetans: A very small group that is active politically. No known problems. Behaviorally resemble Chinese. Filipinos: A much-vilified group, even by other Asians. There are youth gangs. They form large enclaves in California in Carson, Wilmington, north of downtown Los Angeles and in San Fransisco. There are also a number in the Central Valley. I have no idea what the crime rate is, but their enclaves in the Harbor area are pleasant enough at daytime. I taught them in school for a long time and felt they were well-behaved and pleasant students. Some are quite intelligent. Filipinos may undergo high selection pressure by US immigration, because they are said to be one of the highest performing immigrant groups of all, and the highest performing of the Asian groups. Indonesians, Aborigines, Melanesians, Papuans, Malays, Mongolians, Nepalese: For all intents and purposes, these groups don’t even exist as immigrant communities in the US. I’ve never met an immigrant from most of these groups. I have met a few Indonesian and Malay students who were very well-behaved. Micronesians (Marshall Islands): There are a few of them in the US, but not many. Some have serious diseases, because the islands are a disease haven. As immigrants, they are totally unscreened, as the islands are still pretty much US territory. Overall, little problem. Warm, friendly, pleasant, easy-going people. I do recommend completely cutting these islands off from US colonization. Polynesians (Hawaiians, Tongans and Samoans): Samoa is still a colony of the US, so they get to come here totally unscreened. I taught them for years in LA, and I really don’t mind them too much, but some can be violent. Easy-going, warm, friendly, pleasant people who like to laugh and party. There are gangs, but Samoans are not a large community, so it’s dubious how much of a problem they are. They are reportedly causing major problems in Salt Lake City. There appear to be some problems with Tongan gangs, but it doesn’t seem to be serious because there are just not that many of them. This is one immigrant group that may on balance be a problem, albeit a small one. They are an issue purely because they are unscreened. Hawaiians are not immigrants in Hawaii, but they are a serious problem there, where they form a vast and teeming underclass. They are not violent so much as thieving. This is not an immigrant issue because Hawaiians are native to the US. Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans: This group more or less does not exist in the US. Never met one. East Indians: This is a fairly large immigrant group here in California. H-1B scab guest workers are a problem, but they are not immigrants, so they are best dealt with elsewhere. Here in this part of California, this group is mostly Punjabis. Punjabis are a very high-functioning ethnic group in the US who cause almost no problems at all. Punjabis in the US have surprisingly high intelligence, work extremely hard and commit almost no crime. Other Indians are not so common, but they tend to be very high-functioning also, and are often professionals. Mass immigration of this group would be a bad idea, but it’s not happening yet. Afghans: A very small group of very high-functioning immigrants. I have met some. Many professionals. Those here tend to be quite secular and even progressive or even Leftist. There is a small enclave in Fremont, California. Pakistanis: We have some here in California. Here again, a very high-functioning group with few to no problems. Many professionals, some shopkeepers and a few students. Tend to be seculars or even Christians. Iranians: This group is doing very well in the US. There is an enclave in Beverly Hills, California. The ones who are here are often the rich and secular supporters of the Shah. This group causes almost no problems at all. High education attainment and professional involvement. Kurds: A very small group that appears to cause minimal problems, but some in Tennessee have formed street gangs for some reason. Little known. Iraqis: Those here tend to be Chaldean Christians who cause almost no problems at all. We have a few in California. There is an enclave in Michigan. A very traditional group who do not mingle much with outsiders. Palestinians: We have some in my area. They run small stores, gas stations, bakeries, and cause no problems at all. A very high-functioning group. Most around my place seem to be pretty apolitical. Quite a few are Christians. Warm, easy-going, happy, talkative and very hard-working. A few are militant in a quiet way. Syrians: Mostly secular, often secular Muslims or Christians. Often well-educated. A small group. Lebanese: A small group that does quite well. A very large number are Christians. Often run small stores. An enclave in Michigan. Many have been in the US for a long time. Yemenis: There is a small group around me who run markets. They do very well, are extremely hard-working and cause no problems at all. Tend to be apolitical religious Muslims who are very conservative and traditional. Turks: A small group in the US who often run stores, dry cleaners, etc. Very well-behaved. Tend to be secular. Kuwaitis: There are some students here. Tend to be very, very religious Muslims. I’m not aware of any problems though. They seem to go home after school. This is a tiny group. Jordanians: Secular, often Palestinian, mostly students. I only met one, and she was a militant but secular Palestinian-Jordanian and was very well-to-do. A tiny group. North Africans: Honestly, I have never met one other than Egyptians. This must be a very tiny group. The US is not having problems with Kurds, Iraqis, Turks and North Africans like the Europeans are. Mass immigration of Turks, North Africans, Kurds and Arabs as the Europeans did would probably be a disaster – this entire whole group is extremely well-screened, and that needs to continue. Egyptians: Run gas stations or work in the professions. Many are Coptic Christians. Absolutely zero problems at all. Most here are apolitical, secular and divorced from Middle Eastern issues altogether. Often traditional, even the Copts. Often surprisingly intelligent and educated, as is the case with many Arabs in the US. Ethiopians: There are enclaves in California’s Central Valley and in Los Angeles down around the airport (LAX). This group seems to cause few to no problems. Many are students and are quite intelligent. They very much keep to themselves. Many are Christians. The women are often quite beautiful. Somalis: Apparently a disaster. They are also causing terrible problems in Europe, especially Norway and Finland. Almost all are coming to the US as refugees, and refugees are typically a more or less unscreened population. In other words, almost anyone gets in. Probably 9 There are not many of them here, but the few that are have quickly descended into an Underclass of chaos, crime, poverty, unemployment and heavy welfare use. These refugees are not appropriate for America. They come from Africa, and are not the sort of Africans who do well here (see the next listing). They can easily go to other African nations. It won’t be ideal, but I assume that in general, they won’t starve. There’s no reason to bring an African refugee all the way to the US. Sub-Saharan Black Africans: There are few in the country. There are some Nigerians, but they are often extremely high-functioning professionals. There are reportedly some Nigerian criminals in the US, but the number is not large. This group undergoes extreme screening (99. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz: Virtually nonexistent in general, yet there is now a large Uzbek community in New York City. They are mostly Bukharan Jews, but there are quite a few Uzbek Muslims moving there too. No problems to speak of. Armenians: Some White nationalists say they are not White, so we include them (Just for the record, I strongly disagree with that – in fact, I think Armenians may be the remains of some of the most ancient Whites of them all). A very high-functioning group. There are some street gangs in Los Angeles around Hollywood and Glendale, and there is some organized crime also, but overall, they appear to not be much a problem. There are enclaves in California in Los Angeles (East Hollywood), Glendale and vicinity and around Fresno in the Central Valley. The enclaves are quite safe. Most Armenian crime involves fighting amongst and preying on their own kind. Here in the Valley this is a very high-performing, intelligent group that is still quite traditional and often still keeps to themselves somewhat. They are farmers and run retail stores, restaurants and repair outfits, work in sales and the professions, and in general, do all sorts of things. Can be very warm and friendly. They have actually formed an elite in this area. Georgians, Azeris, people of the Caucasus: They barely exist in the US. Europeans: White nationalists seem to think this group is not a problem, and indeed they are not. Some formed highly criminal and impoverished Underclasses in the US for decades in the past, but they have moved out of that now. In my area, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, etc. (Mediterraneans) form a White elite and do very well, despite some White nationalists who insist they are not White. Gypsies: Disaster. Fortunately, there are few of them in the US, and it needs to stay that way. They have adopted crime as a way of life. Very few should be allowed to enter the US. A small number are assimilated, out of crime and doing very well, but it’s not typical. Cubans: Hard to say. They have taken over Miami, turned it into a part of Latin America and virtually torn it off from the US. Many are arrogant and refuse to learn English. Miami as a city has virtually done away with the English language. They have formed a Latin American style White reactionary elite that has seriously corrupted Miami. Miami has one of the most extreme wealth differentials in the US, as the reactionary Cubans have transplanted semi-feudal Latin American economics to their pet city. The wet foot – dry foot policy needs to end, and this group needs to be well-screened at least. I feel that on balance this group is not positive, mostly because they are arrogantly refusing to assimilate and are recreating Batista’s Cuba in the US. Dominicans: Reports indicate that this group is on balance a nightmare. Some are educated and intelligent and doing very well – I know one who is a clinical psychologist. Many others have transformed New York City neighborhoods into crime-ridden Underclass hellholes. My understanding is that the vast majority of them in Washington Heights in New York came to the US as illegal aliens pretending to be Puerto Ricans, starting in the 1970’s. They gave birth to anchor babies who are now all US citizens. This group needs to be much better screened at the very least. This group formed an Underclass quickly after they came here post-1965, and in general this scenario has continued or even gotten worse. Puerto Ricans: Same as Dominicans – a nightmare. A colony of the US. As such, they get to immigrate unscreened. Some are highly intelligent, are doing very well and are even in the professions. Back East, they have formed crime-ridden, gang-infested Underclass hellholes, especially in New York City. We need to cut this colony loose and let them go their own way. Like Dominicans, they have formed long-lasting Underclass wrecked zones that have lingered or even gotten worse. This is one group that is not climbing out of the Underclass. Future immigrants need much better screening, but that will never happen as long as Puerto Rico is a US colony. As long as Puerto Rico is a colony, Puerto Ricans can go to the US the same way I can move from California to Nevada. Jamaicans: Tough call. There are supposed to be some drug gangs around, but I’m not sure how serious of a problem this is. I’ve met a few who were very warm, pleasant, friendly, hard-working and honest. It does not seem to be a large group. Mass immigration would be a mistake. Haitians: Although we turn most of them away, there are quite a few in the US anyway. One might think they would form Underclass hellholes, but that does not seem to be the case. I don’t know much about them. There are quite a few in New York and Florida. Other Caribbeans (Virgin Islands, Grenada, etc.): There are not many here. Those who are here are often professionals. I met two who were schoolteachers and were doing very well. Panamanians: Few, doing well. Very small group. Costa Ricans: Small group that is doing well in the US. Nicaraguans: On balance, seems to be a positive group, but little is known about them. Those that I have met were functioning well. Seems to be a small group. There is an enclave in Florida. Hondurans: This group seems to be a problem. Many are illegals, and are caught up in the usual Mesoamerican illegal immigrant scenario. Doesn’t appear to be a really large group. Needs much better screening and needs more research to be done on them – poorly known. Salvadorans: Disaster. Many came here in the war as refugees and eventually got legalized. Many are in street gangs, selling dope, living in barrios and ghettos, and not doing well. They have a vast enclave near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles that is probably quite dangerous at night. I have been there in the daytime, and even then it seems run-down, teeming, Third-Worldish, horribly overcrowded, impoverished, chaotic and somewhat Hellish, but I used to walk around there anyway, and nothing ever happened to me. The English language does not exist in this part of Los Angeles. This group is not working out at all. Needs much better screening at the least. Guatemalans: Nightmare. Huge numbers are illegal immigrants. Others are caught up in the gangsta thing. Many do not speak English well. This group is doing very poorly. Seem to have very high rates of criminality and gang membership. Needs much better screening at an absolute minimum. Mexicans: A very complex group that makes up the huge majority of Hispanic immigrants to the US. A vast number of Mexicans are illegal immigrants who have destroyed towns all up and down California and all over Arizona and Texas. They are now fanning out across the US, causing crime and chaos everywhere they go. Typically, cities with large numbers of Mexican illegals become run-down, dirty, trash-ridden (they don’t believe in trash cans), graffiti-covered, crime-ridden, drug-drenched, gang-infested, noisy, chaotic, dangerous and overcrowded wrecks. Sex crimes in particular seem to escalate. Petty thievery becomes epidemic. Spanish becomes the native language and English is sidelined. Services are quickly overrun, hospitals close and schools are overwhelmed. Very political, and many harbor irredentist and revanchist (in particular) aims on the US Southwest, which many claim as a part of Mexico. This treasonous mindset has also been adopted by the Left and is highly disturbing. Cities with many Mexican illegals may quickly become very corrupt. Mexican farm labor contractors utilize employer-employee relations out of the Third World. Cities taken over by Mexican illegals come to more resemble Tijuana than American cities. Many are hostile towards the US and especially towards Whites. This group, viewed as a whole, is a total catastrophe, and is the main source of immigration problems in the US today. At the same time, many older Mexican illegals are hard-working, pleasant, polite, generous, family-oriented, religious and very well-behaved, but their children are often a horror. There is also a large group of Mexicans who have been here a while, in some cases for over 100 years as the original residents of the US Southwest. In most cases, they are assimilated and doing very well. Another group of Mexican legal immigrants came more recently and has assimilated well, though they continue to speak Spanish a lot. Their English is also often good to excellent, and many are lighter-skinned. This group could be classed as the White Mexicans, and they tend to form a bit of an elite in these Mexican communities, although the extreme racial stratification of Mexico seems to be breaking down in the US. They are often very well-behaved and so are their children. There is another group of recent legal immigrants that are not necessarily White Mexicans, but are also also assimilating and doing very well. As you can see, this is a very complex group that is split in two huge classes, one a good-functioning and assimilating group that causes few to no problems and the other a vast Underclass that is a total clusterfuck. There are also many that are floating somewhere in between these two vast sets in a transition zone, or into one set and out of another, or back and forth into the transition zone. At the very least, illegals need to be tossed out or encouraged to leave, Mexican legal immigration must be lowered, and we urgently need to do a lot of research on which Mexican immigrants are likely to join the positive assimilating group and which are going to augment our Mexican Underclass horror. Continued mass immigration of this group will cause a continuation and vast deepening of the gang and Underclass horrorshow in the US, along with an increasingly radical and militant Mexican politics in the US. As they get into power in some states, Mexicans will tend to promote Open Borders with Mexico. If they ever get into power, expect to see Spanish made into an official language at the state level at least. If they get into power at the national level, expect Spanish as an official language in the US and an open border with Mexico. Abortion may be made illegal. Women’s rights may nosedive. We may develop a much more corrupt society. Human rights and basic liberties may go out the window in favor of the usual Latin American authoritarianism and lack of respect for the individual. Gay rights will take a nosedive. We may get a politics of either the Hard Left or Hard Right, as in Latin America. The result of open borders with Mexico would quickly be 1/2 of Mexico in the US, and the US would be transformed just another Latin American country. This endgame must be resisted at all costs and with all of our might. This is an issue that transcends Left, Right and Center and needs to be put front and center by US patriots of all ethnicities across the spectrum. Conclusion: There is an urgent need for more research on the immigrant groups that are performing poorly, or at least those have large sections that are performing poorly. Some of these groups, such as Mexicans, have large groups that are doing well, large groups that are doing horribly, and probably a large group drifting in between or in and out of the two main groups. It is essential to determine the characteristics of those sections of Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants that are causing so many problems for our society. This research will be difficult to do because the usual suspects will scream racism at the very mention of it. No one is talking about keeping certain ethnicities off of the immigration rolls altogether. We are only trying to determine a set of characteristics that winnows the successful from the unsuccessful and then hopefully allows us to proceed to a saner immigration policy from there. Problems with native citizens are bad enough, but you can hardly keep them out of the country – you are more or less stuck with them. Immigrants are guests at best; they are here at our whim and can be either expelled or denied entry in the first place as we see fit. It is sheer madness to import large numbers of persons who are bad for the nation. By that definition, America has been an insane nation for many years now. It’s time for some treatment. Time is of the essence and we have little to spare. We also need to seriously reconsider family reunification immigration. 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