Finished My Paper

139 pages. I really don’t think it was supposed to be so long. 395 references. I wonder if that’s a record. How many hours? 574 hours. Basically almost four months at a full-time job. Pay? LOL I won’t make a nickel.

Why the length and all the references? I really wanted to make my case as well as I could, so I couldn’t help but go on and pile on more and more arguments and especially references. The more you do this, the harder it gets for your opponents to argue with your ideas.

You can check it out here if you want, but I doubt if most of you are interested unless you are into the subject.

I suppose I should get back to regular posing now.

Still Working on My Paper

This is taking up all my time these days. Oh well, at least I have a job that I’m working at full-time.

If you are interested, you can check the progress of it here. The problem with this sort of thing is that once you start down one of the rabbit holes, you can stay down there a long time and still not feel that you’ve finished. At some point, you have to say enough is enough and move on. 75 pages on the page and over 200 references. I’m going nuts on references. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, bury them with bullshit. Works pretty good.

There are two other drafts up. One is on consensus in the Altaic language controversy. Another is on a misreading of a comparison of Japonic with Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Koreanic which shows that Japonic is absolutely related to the other languages.

Not sure if any of you are interested in this rather esoteric, specialized, and abstruse stuff, but some of you might be.

Splitters Versus Lumpers in Historical Linguistics

Warning:  Long, runs to 57 pages. This article is intended at the moment more for the general audience than for specialists,  but specialists may also find it of interest. At the moment, it is not properly formatted or edited to be of use for publication in an academic journal, but perhaps it could be published in such a format some day.

For background into what Historical Linguistics is, see this Wikipedia article. Basically it involves determining which languages are related to each other via various means and once that is determined, reconstructing a proto-language that the related languages descended from, along with, hopefully, regular sound correspondences which supposedly proves the relationship once and for all. The argument in Historical Linguistics now is between conservatives or splitters or progressives or lumpers.

Splitters say that the comparative method – described above as reconstructing a proto-language with regular sound correspondences – is necessary in order to prove that two or more languages are related. However, they also say, probably correctly, that this method is not useful beyond ~6,000 years. Any relationships beyond that time frame would not be provable by the comparative method and hence could never be proven. This effectively shuts down all research into long-range older language families.

Some lumpers say that this method is not necessary and instead relationships can be determined by simply looking at the two or more languages, a process called comparison or mass comparison. I point out below that comparison need not be cursory but could mean deep study of languages over 10, 15, or 20 years.

They tend to focus on core vocabulary, numerals, family terms, pronouns, and deictics, in addition to small morphological particles – all things that are rarely borrowed. Once they find a number of these items that resemble one another greater than chance, they say that the two languages are related because chance and borrowing are ruled out.

They say that this is the way to prove language relatedness, not the comparative method. The comparative method instead is used to learn interesting things about language families that have already been discovered via comparison, such as reconstructing proto-languages and finding regular sound correspondences.

Splitters say that comparison or mass comparison is not a valid way of proving that languages are related and that only the comparative method can be used to prove this. However, as noted, they set a 6,000- year time limit on the method needed to prove this, and this walls off a lot of potential knowledge and about ancient and long-range language relationships as unprovable and hence undiscoverable. In a way, they are shutting the door to new scientific discovery beyond a certain time frame by claiming that the method needed to make these discoveries doesn’t work beyond X thousand years.

Other lumpers disagree that the comparative method has a time limit on it and are attempting to use the comparative method to reconstruct ancient long-range language families and find regular sound correspondences between them. Unfortunately, most of their efforts are in vain as splitters are using increasingly strict criteria for proof of language relationship and hence are shooting down most if not all of these efforts being done “in the proper way.”

So they are saying that proof must be done in a certain way, but when people try to play by the rules and use that way to find proof, they keep moving the goalposts and using increasingly strict, petty, and quibbling methods to in general say that the relationship is not proven.

So the say, “You must use this tool for your proof!” And then people play fair and use the tool, and almost always say, “Sorry, you didn’t prove it!” It all feels like a game that is rigged to fail is most if not all cases.

Hence, the current trend of extreme conservatism in Historical Linguistics has set up rules seem to be designed to prevent the discovery of most if not all new language families, in particular long-range families older than 6-8,000 years.

I am quite certain that long-range language families such as Altaic (with either three families or five), Indo-Uralic, Uralic-Yukaghir, Hokan, Penutian, Mosan, Almosan, Japanese-Korean, Gulf, Yuki-Gulf, Elamite-Dravidian, Quechumaran, Austroasiatic-Hmong Mien, Coahuiltecan, North Caucasian, or Na-Dene will never be proven in my lifetime, and that’s not to mention the more extreme proposals such as Eurasiatic, Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Austric, and Amerind, although the evidence for the first and last of these is quite powerful.

There are simply too many emotions tied up in any of these proposals. Further, many linguists have spent a good part of their careers arguing against these proposals. It is doubtful that any amount of evidence will cause them to change their minds. Scientists, like any other humans, don’t like to be shown that they’re wrong.

Lyle Campbell, Maryanne Mithun, Mauricio Mixco, Sarah Grey Thomason, Joanna Nichols, William Poser, Peter Daniels, Dell Hymes, Larry Trask, Gerrit Dimmendaal, Donald Ringe, Juha Janhunen, William Bright, and Paul Sidwell are among the leaders of this new conservatism.

At first I was very angry at what these people were doing, especially the most egregious cases such as Campbell. Then I realized that people lie and misrepresent things all day long every single day in my life and that this behavior is fairly normal behavior in humans, especially in a mushy area like this one where hard truths are hard to come by and most stated facts are more properly matters of opinion or could be construed that way.

I realized that they are simply defending a scientific paradigm and that unfortunately, this is the rather underhanded and emotion-ridden environment that defending paradigms tends to produce.

Though to be completely honest, I should not be singling these people out because the current conservatism is simply consensus and acts as the current paradigm on the language relatedness question in Historical Linguistics. The people listed above are at the top of the profession and are often considered the best historical linguists. They write books on historical linguistics. A number are considered to be ultimate authorities on questions of language relatedness. They are simply the leading edge of the current conservative consensus and paradigm in the field.

Although granted, of all of them, Campbell seems to be the most extreme conservative. He is also one of the top historical linguists in the world. Mixco, Mithun, and Poser are about on the same level as Campbell.

Campbell, Mithun, Thomason, and Mixco are Americanists whose conservatism was set off by the publication of Joseph Greenberg’s Language in the Americas (LIA) in 1987.

All of the linguists above are noted for the excellent scholarship.

The conservatives who are denying most if not all new families are are called splitters.They tend to be very angry if not out and out abusive, engaging in bullying, mockery, ridicule, ostracization, and all of the usual techniques used in science against the proposers of a new paradigm.

The people who propose long-range families are called lumpers. Lumpers are heavily disparaged in the field nowadays such that almost no one wants to be known as a lumper or associated with such. However, many other historical linguists seem to be taking a more moderate fence-sitter stance where they are open to questions of new language families, including long-range families.

Among the long-range families that the moderates are open to considering nowadays are Indo-Uralic, Dene-Yenisien, and Austro-Tai. Some of the smaller long-range families in the Americas even have supporters among the most hardline of splitters. I’m even dubious about well-argued proposals such as Dene-Yenisien.

Thomason takes extreme umbrage to the notion that splitters have a bias that will not allow few if any new families to be discovered after Greenberg compared them with Malcolm Guthrie’s objections to Greenberg’s new classification of Bantu. However, after thinking this over for some time now, I now believe that Greenberg is correct. The splitters have their minds made up. They are going to allow few if any new families to be discovered. A few of them have caved a bit.

I also work in mental health, and it’s pretty obvious to me when something is not right about a scientific debate. I’ve been getting that vibe about the splitters versus lumpers debate from the very start. When a debate in science has degenerated into bias, ideology and ideologues, propaganda, politics, and in particular extreme emotion, it gives off a certain intuitive feel about it. This debate has felt this way from Day One. To put it simply, the debate simply doesn’t smell right. I have a feeling that science left the room along time ago here.

One thing I noticed was that people who have worked on one particular language or family for much of their careers are especially angry and aggressive about the notion that their family could possibly be related to anything else. Indeed famous linguists were remarking on this tendency as early as 1901. Among the reasons given was that they had their hands full already without new work to take on and a disinclination to see their language family related to anything else as this would deny its specialness.

Trask is forceful that Basque could not possibly have any outside relatives.

I saw a debate on the Net some years ago with Trask and a Spanish assistant holding court over a debate over the external relations of Basque. Those who argued for external relations were pushing a relationship with the Caucasian languages, which is possible though not proven in my opinion. Trask and his assistant were very angry and aggressive in holding down the fort. Apparently everything was a Spanish borrowing. The debate didn’t smell right at all.

With a background in psychology, I wonder what is going on here. One possibility is as Greenberg suggests and as was suggested back in 1901 – simple narcissism. When one specializes in a language family for a long time, it probably become blurred with the self such that the self and the family become married to each other, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Yourself and the family you’ve spent your career working on become one and same thing. If your family is not related to anything else, it’s special.

We all think we are special. This is the essence of human narcissism. To say that their favorite language has relatives is to deny its specialness almost as if to say that our egos were not real but were instead extensions of other people’s egos. Actually if you read Sartre or study modern particle physics, that’s not a bad theory, but most people bristle at the notion.

I met Korean and Japanese people when I was doing my Masters. Both beamed when they told me that their language had no known relatives. Of course that made it special in their eyes and played right into their ethnocentrism.

Another problem may be the trajectory of one’s career. If one has been arguing forcefully for 30 years that there are no known relations to your family, your reputation is going to take a huge hit if you have to agree that you were wrong all those years.

There is also a politics question.

Another reason is Politics. We are dealing here with a Paradigm. For a good description of a Scientific Paradigm, see Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn holds that science is by its nature very conservative, some sciences being more conservative than others. A Paradigm is set up when the field reaches a satisfactory consensus that a particular theory is correct. After a while, serious barriers go up to any challenges to overthrow the proven theory.

The challenges are first ignored, then ridiculed (often severely), then attacked (often ferociously) and then, if the challenge is successful, it is accepted (often slowly and grudgingly). Kuhn pointed out that defenders of the old theory are usually so reluctant to see the paradigm overthrown that we often must wait literally until their deaths to finally overthrow the paradigm. They defend it to their deathbeds. I suggest we are dealing with something more than pure empiricism here.

It is quite risky to challenge a paradigm in science. People’s careers have suffered from it. A supporter of Keynesian economics, then challenging the current paradigm in economics, could not get hired at any university in the US during the 1930’s.

In the splitters versus lumpers debate, we have been in the Anger phase for some time now. We seem to be settling out of it, as many are taking a fence-sitting position and arguing for attempts to resolve the debate to make it less heated.

The Paradigm here involves extreme skepticism about any new language families to the point that any new families are simply going to be rejected on all sorts of grounds. Paradigms involve politics at the academic level. When a Paradigm is set up in science, almost all scientists write and do research within the paradigm. Anything outside of the paradigm is derided as pseudoscience or worse.

The problem is that when a Paradigm in in effect, all scholars are supposed to publish within the Paradigm. Publishing outside the paradigm is regarded as evidence that one is a kook, a crank, is practicing pseudoscience, or that one is crazy or a fool. It is instructive in this debate to note that most of the prominent lumpers are independent scholars operating outside of the politics of academia.

I have had them tell me that the only reason they can take the lumper position that they do is because they are independent and don’t have a university job, so there are no repercussions if they are wrong. They told me that if they had a professorship, they would not be able to do this work. They have also told me that they know for a fact that certain splitters might jeopardize their jobs, careers, and especially their funding if they took a lumper position. This was given as one of the reasons for their dogmatic splitterism.

In addition, science works according to fads, or more properly, standard beliefs. The trends for these beliefs are set by the biggest names in the field. The biggest names in Linguistics are all splitters now. They are the trendsetters, especially in whatever specialty of Historical Linguistics you are working in. Everyone else in the field is dutifully following in their footsteps. As an up and coming young scholar, you are supposed to follow the proper trends and hypotheses of your field to uphold the consensus of scholars in your area of specialty. As you can see there is a lot more than simple empiricism going on here.

With my background, I look for psychological motivations anywhere I can find them. And science is no stranger to bias and emotional psychological motivations driving, or usually distorting it. We are human and humans have emotions. Emotion is the enemy of logic. Logic is the basis of empiricism. Hence, emotions are the enemy of science.

Scientists are supposed to remain objective, but alas, they are humans themselves and subject to all of the emotional psychological motivations that the rest of them are. Scientists are supposed to police themselves for bias, but that’s probably hard to do, especially if the bias is rooted in psychological processes or in particular if it is unconscious, as many such processes are.

Campbell’s case is an extreme one, but I believe it is simply motivated by internal psychological process inside of the man himself.

Campbell is driven by psychological complexes. His entire turn towards extreme conservatism in this debate was set off by the huge feud he had with Greenberg, and everything since has flowed from that. He took a very angry position that LIA was completely false and did his best to trash its reputation far and wide. This disparagement is still the order of the day, and Greenberg’s name is as good as mud in the field.

Then Campbell generalized his extreme splitterist reaction to LIA out to all of the language families in the world because if he allowed any new families elsewhere in the world, he might have to allow them in the Americas, and he could not countenance that. Note also that Campbell has gone out of his way to specifically attack Greenberg’s four-family split in his proposal for language families in Africa.

This proposal, done with Greenberg’s derided method of mass comparison, has had a successful result in Africa and has been proven with the test of time. Campbell cannot allow this because if he admits that Greenberg was right in Africa, he might have to accept that he might be right in the Americas too, and that’s beyond the pale. So in his recent works he has specifically set out to state that Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Khoisan – the four families of Greenberg’s classification – have not been proven to exist yet. The truth is exactly the opposite, but the psychological process here is bald and naked for all to see.

Here he specifically trashes these language families because they were discovered by Joseph Greenberg, Campbell’s bete noir. Campbell’s agenda is to show the Greenberg is a preposterous kook and crank, although he was one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. Greenberg’s African work is regarded as true, and this poses a problem if Campbell is to characterize Greenberg as a charlatan.

If Greenberg was right about one thing, could he not be right about another? In order to lay the foundation for the theory that Greenberg’s method doesn’t work and that it cannot discover any language relationships, Campbell will have to deny the method ever had any successes. So he sets about to deny that Greenberg’s four African families are proven.

Splitters have come up with a repertoire of reasons to shoot down proposed language relations and most are pretty poor.

They rely on overuse of the borrowing, chance, sound symbolism, nursery word, and onomatopoeia explanations for non-relatedness. There is also an overuse of the comparative method with excessively strict standards being set up for etymologies and sound correspondences. In a number of cases, linguists are going back to the etymologies of their proto-languages and reducing them by up to half.

In the last 20 years, Uralicists have gone back over the original Proto-Uralic etymologies and gotten rid of fully half of them (from 2,000 down to 1,000) on a variety of very poor reasons, mostly irregular sound correspondences. It appears to me that while there were some obvious bad etymologies in there, most of the ones that were thrown out were perfectly good.

Irregular sound correspondences is a bad reason to throw out an etymology. Keep in mind that 5

This is not just conservatism. It is out and out Reaction. Worse, it is nearly a Conservative Revolution, which I won’t define further. It is akin to a city council declaring that all of the old, beautiful buildings in the city are going to be torn down because they were not constructed properly. Will they be rebuilt? Well, of course not. Most of the top Uralicists are involved in this silly and destructive project.

In a recent paper, George Starostin warned that the splitters were not just conservatives determined to stop all progress. He pointed out that there was actually a trend towards rejection and going backwards in time to dismantle families that have already set up on the grounds that they were not done perfectly enough. As we can see, his warning was prescient.

There are statements being made by moderates that both sides, the splitters and the lumpers, are being equally unreasonable. As one linguist said, the debate is between lazy lumpers (Just believe us, don’t demand that we prove it!) and angry splitters (Not only is this new family false, but all new families proposed from now on will also be shot down!). He suggested that they are both wrong and that the solution lies in a point in the middle. I don’t have a problem with this moderate centrist belief

The splitter notion itself rests on an obvious falsehood, that there are hundreds of language families in the world that have no possible relationship with each other.

According to Campbell, there are 160 language families and isolates in the Americas. The question is where did all of these entities come from. Keep in mind, in Linguistics, the standard view is that these 160 entities are not related to each other in any way, shape, or form. Thinking back, this means that language would have had to have developed in humans 160 times among the Amerindians alone.

The truth is that there was no polygenesis of language.

Sit back and think for a moment. How could language possibly have been independently developed more than one time? Obviously it arose in one group. How could it have arose in other groups too? It couldn’t and it didn’t. Did some of the original speakers go deaf, become mutes, forget all their language, and  then have children, raising them without language, in which case the children devised language for themselves?

Children need comprehensible input to develop language. No language to hear in the environment, no language for the children to acquire on their own. With coclear implants, formerly deaf people are now able to hear for the first time. A woman got hers at age 32. Since she missed the Critical Period for language development, the window of which closes at age 8, she  has not, even at this late  date, been able to acquire language satisfactorily. She missed the boat. No input, no language.

Obviously language arose only once among humans. It had to. And hence, all human languages are related to each other de facto whether we can “prove” it by out fancy methods or not. In other words, all human languages are related. Those 160 language families and  isolates in the Americas? All related. Now we may not be able to prove which languages they are related to specifically and most closely, but we know they are all related to each other.

In the physical sciences, including Evolutionary Psychology, many things are simply assumed because the alternate theories could not have happened. But we have no evidence of much of anything in Evolutionary Psychology or Evolutionary Anthropology. We know our ancestors lived in X place at Y times, but we have no idea what they were doing there. We can’t go back in time to prove that this or that happened.

Using the logic of linguists, since we cannot make time machines to go back in time and make theories about Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Psychology of these peoples, we can make no statements about this matter, as the only way to prove it would be to see it. In physics, there are particles that we have never seen. We have simply posited their existence because according to our theories, they have to exist. According to linguists, we could not posit the discovery of these particles unless we see it.

Contrary to popular rumor, everything in science does not have to be “proven” by this or that rigorous method. Many things are simply posited, as no real evidence for their existence exists, either because we were not there or because we can’t see them, or in the case of pure physics, we can’t even test out our theories. They exist simply because they have to according to our existing theories, and all competing theories fall down flat.

Well, the Americanists beg to disagree. Greenberg’s theory was so extreme and radical that the entire field erupted in outrage. None of their alternate theories, not even one of them, make the slightest bit of sense.

Despite the fact that these languages are obviously related to each other, in order to “officially prove it” we have to use a method called the comparative method whereby proto-languages and families are reconstructed and regular sound correspondences are shown between the languages being studied.

This is the only way that we can prove one language is related to another. That’s simply absurd for a few reasons.

First of all, I concur with Joanna Nichols that the comparative method does not really work on language families older than 6-8,000 years. Beyond that time, so many sound changes have taken place, semantics have been distorted, and terms fallen out of use that there’s not much of anything left to reconstruct. Furthermore, time has washed away any evidence of sound correspondences.

Although Nichols is a splitter, I have to commend her. First, she’s right above.

Second, realizing this, she says that the comparative method will always fail beyond this time frame. I believe she thinks then that we need to use new methods if we are to prove that long-range families exist. The method she suggests is “individual-identifying evidence,” which seems to be another way of saying odd morpheme paradigms that were probably not borrowed and are hardly existent outside of that family.

This harkens back to Edward Sapir’s “submerged features,” where he says we can prove the existence of language families by these small morphemic resemblances alone.

The rest of the field remain sticks in the mud. They say that we must use the comparative method to discover that languages are related because no other method exists. The problem is that as noted, as splitters themselves note, if the comparative method fails beyond 6,000 years back, all attempts to prove language families that old or older are bound to fail.

The splitters seem positively gleeful that according to their paradigm, few if any new language families will be discovered. This delight in nihilism seems odd and disturbing. What sort of science is gleeful that no new knowledge will be found? Even in the even that this is true, it’s depressing. Why get excited about something so negative?

Many language families in the world were discovered by Greenberg’s “mass comparison” or simply comparing one language to another, which should be called “comparison.” And in fact, many of the smaller language families in the world are still being posited by the means of comparison or mass comparison. Comparison need not be the broad, sweeping, forest for the trees, holistic method Greenberg employs. I argue that it means lining up languages and looking for common features. We could be lining up one language against another and that would also be “comparison.”

It need not be a shallow examination. One could examine a possible language for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years.

After studying a pair or group of languages for some time, if one finds a group of core vocabulary items that resemble one another and are above the rate found by chance (

I fail to understand why examining a language or group of languages for a long period of time to find resemblances and try to rule out chance or borrowings is a ridiculous method. What’s so ridiculous about that? Sure, it’s nice to reconstruct and get nice sound correspondences going, but it’s not always necessary, especially in long-range comparisons when such methods are doomed to failure.

One more thing: if splitters say that the comparative method fails beyond 6,000 years, why do they keep putting long-range families to the test using the comparative method? After all, the result will always come up negative, right? What’s the point of doing a study you know will come up negative? Just to get your punches in?

There are a number of folks who have bought into the splitters’ arguments and are trying to discover long-range families by the comparative method of reconstructing the proto-language and finding regular sound correspondences between them. A number of them claim to have been successful. There have been attempts to reconstruct proto-languages and find regular sound correspondences with Altaic, Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Dene-Yenisien, Austro-Tai, Totonozoquean, and Uralo-Yukaghir.

Altaic, Nostratic, and Dene-Caucasian all have proto-languages reconstructed with good sound correspondences running through them. Altaic and Nostratic have etymological dictionaries containing many words, 2,300 proto-forms in the case of Altaic in a 1,000 page volume. Further, a considerable Nostratic proto-language was reconstructed by Dogopolsky and Illich-Svitych.

All of these efforts claim that they have proven their hypotheses. However, the splitters such as Campbell have rejected all of them. So you see, even when people follow the mandated method and play it by the book the way they are supposed to, the splitters will nearly always say that the efforts come up short. It’s a rigged game.

How about another question? If the comparative method fails is doomed beyond 6,000 years, why don’t we use another method to discover these relationships? The splitter rejoinder is that there is no other method. It’s the comparative method or nothing. But how do they know this? Can they prove that other methods can never be used to successfully discover a language relationship?

The following quotes are from a textbook or general text on Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell and Mario Mixco, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. The purpose of this paper will be misrepresented as critics who will say that I am a lumper who is saying criticizing splitters for their opposition to known language families.

There is some of that here, but more than lumper propaganda, what I am trying to do here more than anything else is to show how Campbell and Mixco have been untruthful about linguistic specialist consensus regarding these families. In most cases, they are openly misrepresenting the state of consensus in the field.

As will be shown, Campbell and Mixco repeatedly seriously distort the state of consensus regarding many language families, particularly long-range ones. They usually favor a more negative and conservative view, saying that a family has little support when it has significant support and saying it is controversial when the consensus in the field is that the family is real. Campbell and Mixco engage in serious distortions of fact all through this text:

Campbell and Mixco:

Afroasiatic: Enjoys wide support among linguists, but it is not uncontroversial, especially with regard to which of the groups assumed to be genetically related to one another are to be considered true members of the phylum.

There is disagreement concerning Cushitic, and Omotic (formerly called Sidama or West Cushitic) is disputed; the great linguistic diversity within Omotic makes it a questionable entity for some. Chadic is held to be uncertain by others. Typological and areal problems contribute to these doubts. For example, some treat Cushitic and Omotic together as a linguistic area (Sprachbund) of seven families within Afroasiatic.

Campbell and Mixco are wrong. Afroasiatic is not controversial at all. There is widespread consensus that the family exists and that all of the subfamilies are correct.

The “we can’t reconstruct the numerals” argument is much in evidence here too. See the Altaic debate below for more on this. One argument against Altaic is “We can’t reconstruct the numerals.” However, Afroasiatic is a recognized family and not only has reconstruction itself proved difficult, but the numerals in particular are a gigantic mess. It seems that one does not need to have a fully reconstructed numeral set after all to have a proven language family.

There is consensus that Cushitic is a valid entity. Granted, there has been some question about Omotic, but in the last 10-15 years, consensus has settled on an agreement that Omotic is part of Afroasiatic.

The great diversity of Omotic is no surprise. Omotic is probably 13,000 years old! It’s amazing that there’s anything left at all after all that time.

Where do we get the idea that a language family cannot possibly be highly diverse? Chadic is also uncontroversial by consensus. I am not aware of any serious proposals to see Cushitic and Omotic as an Altaic-like Sprachbund of mass borrowings. Campbell and Mixco’s comments above are simply not correct. The only people questioning the validity of Afroasiatic or any of its components are Campbell and Mixco, and they are not an experts on the family.

Campbell and Mixco:

Berber is usually believed to be one of the branches of Afroasiatic.

This is far too pessimistic. Berber is recognized by consensus as being one of the branches of Afroasiatic.

Campbell and Mixco:

Niger-Kordofanian (now often just called Niger-Congo): A hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Joseph H. Greenberg in his classification of African languages. Estimated counts of Niger-Kordofanian languages vary from around 900 to 1,500 languages. Greenberg grouped ‘West Sudanic’ and Bantu into a single large family, which he called Niger-Congo, after the two major rivers, the Niger and the Congo ‘in whose basins these languages predominate’ (Greenberg 1963: 7).

This included the subfamilies already recognized earlier: (1) West Atlantic (to which Greenberg joined Fulani, in a Serer-Wolof-Fulani [Fulfulde] group), (2) Mande (Mandingo) (thirty-five to forty languages), (3) Gur (or Voltaic), (4) Kwa (with Togo Remnant) and (5) Benue-Congo (Benue-Cross), with the addition of (6) Adamawa-Eastern, which had not previously been classified with these languages and whose classification remains controversial.

For Greenberg, Bantu was but a subgroup of Benue-Congo, not a separate subfamily on its own. In 1963 he joined Niger-Congo and the ‘Kordofanian’ languages into a larger postulated phylum, which he called Niger-Kordofanian.

Niger-Kordofanian has numerous supporters but is not well established; the classification of several of the language groups Greenberg assigned to Niger-Kordofanian is rejected or revised, though most scholars accept some form of Niger-Congo as a valid grouping.

As Nurse (1997: 368) points out, it is on the basis of general similarities and the noun-class system that most scholars have accepted Niger-Congo, but ‘the fact remains that no one has yet attempted a rigorous demonstration of the genetic unity of Niger-Congo by means of the Comparative Method.’

There is consensus among scholars that Niger-Kordofanian is a real thing.

Campbell and Mixco:

Nilo-Saharan: One of Greenberg’s four large phyla in his classification of African languages. In dismantling the inaccurate and racially biased ‘Hamitic,’ of which Nilo-Hamitic was held to be part, Greenberg demonstrated the inadequacy of those former classifications and argued for the connection between Nilotic and Eastern Sudanic.

He noted that ‘the Nilotic languages seem to be predominantly isolating, tend to monosyllabism, and employ tonal distinctions’ (Greenberg 1963: 92). To the extent that this classification is based on commonplace shared typology and perhaps areally diffused traits, it does not have a firm foundation. Nilo-Saharan is disputed, and many are not convinced of the proposed genetic relationships. It is generally seen as Greenberg’s wastebasket phylum, into which he placed all the otherwise unaffiliated languages of Africa.

First of all, Nilo-Saharan is not classified based on its language typology which were perhaps areally diffused. There is also a great deal of the more typical evidence in favor of this language family. Second,  it is not true that it lacks a firm foundation and that many are not convinced of its reality. The consensus among experts is that this family exists and the overwhelming majority of the subfamilies and isolates Greenberg put it in are correct.

Saying that it is a wastebasket phylum does not make sense because the Nilo-Saharan languages are only found in  a certain part of Africa. If it was truly such a phylum, there would be languages from all over Africa placed in this family.

According to Roger Bench, a moderate, there is now consensus in the last 10-15 years that Nilo-Saharan is a real thing.

Consensus has formed that 7

Yes, Campbell and Mixco say that Nilo-Saharan is not real, but they are not specialists.

Campbell and Mixco:

Khoisan: A proposed distant genetic relationship associated with Greenberg’s (1963) classification of African languages, which holds some thirty non-Bantu click languages of southern and eastern Africa to be genetically related to one another. Greenberg originally called his Khoisan grouping ‘the Click Languages’ but later changed this to a name based on a created compound of the Hottentots’ name for themselves, Khoi, and their name for the Bushmen, San.

Khoisan is the least accepted of Greenberg’s four African phyla. Several scholars agree in using the term ‘Khoisan’ not to reflect a genetic relationship among the languages but, rather, as a cover term for all the non-Bantu and non-Cushitic click languages.

Although it is probably true that Khoisan is the least accepted of Greenberg’s families, that’s not saying much, as it only means that 8

According to George Starostin, in the last 5-10 years, there is now consensus that Khoisan exists. There are five major Khoisan scholars, and four of them agree that Khoisan is real, with all of them including Sandawe and most including Hadza. There is one, Traill, who says it’s not real, but he is also a notorious Africanist splitter.

Campbell and Mixco:

Eurasiatic: Greenberg’s hypothesis of a distant genetic relationship that would group Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean–Japanese–Ainu, Nivkh, Chukotian and Eskimo–Aleut as members of a very large ‘linguistic stock’. While there is considerable overlap in the putative members of Eurasiatic and Nostratic there are also significant differences. Eurasiatic has been sharply criticized and is largely rejected by specialists.

I have no doubt that Eurasiatic has been sharply criticized, but apart from a negative review in Language by Peter Daniels, the controversy seems quite muted compared to the furor over Amerind. I am also not sure that it is largely rejected by specialists. It probably is, but most of them have not even bothered to comment on it. I believe that this family is one of the best long-range proposals out there.

Based on the data from the pronouns alone, it’s obviously a real entity, though I would include Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic including Japanese and Korean, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut, leaving out Nivki for the time being and certainly leaving out Ainu. Nivki does seem to be a Eurasiatic language but it’s not a separate node. Instead it may be a part of the Chukotian family. Or even better yet, it seems to be part of a family connected to the New World via the Almosan family in the Americas.

I feel that Eurasiatic is a much more solid entity than Nostratic. Not that I am against Nostratic, but it’s more that Eurasiatic is a simple hypothesis to prove and with Nostratic, I’m much less sure of that. On the other hand, to the extent that Nostratic overlaps with Eurasiatic, it is surely correct.

Campbell and Mixco:

Indo-Anatolian: The hypothesis, associated with Edgar Sturtevant, that Hittite (or better said, the Anatolian languages, of which Hittite is the best known member) was the earliest Indo-European language to split off from the others. That is, this hypothesis would have Anatolian and Indo-European as sisters, two branches of a Proto-Indo-Hittite.

The more accepted view is that Anatolian is just one subgroup of Indo-European, albeit perhaps the first to have branched off, hence not ‘Indo-Hittite’ but just ‘Indo-European’ with Anatolian as one of its branches. In fact the two views differ very little in substance, since, in either case, Anatolian ends up being a subfamily distinct from the other branches and in the view of many the first to branch off the family.

The view that Anatolian is just another subgroup of IE is not the more accepted view. In fact, it has been rejected by specialists. Indo-Europeanists have told me that Indo-Anatolian is now the consensus among Indo-Europeanists, so Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Indo-Anatolian is a minority view is false.

Campbell and Mixco:

Nostratic (< Latin nostra ‘our’): A proposed distant genetic relationship that, as formulated in the 1960s by Illich-Svitych, would group Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian and Hamito-Semitic (later Afroasiatic), though other versions of the hypothesis would include various other languages. Nostratic has a number of supporters, mostly associated with the Moscow school of Nostratic, though a majority of historical linguists do not accept the claims.

There are many problems with the evidence presented on behalf of the Nostratic hypothesis. In several instances the proposed reconstructions do not comply with typological expectations; numerous proposed cognates are lax in semantic associations, involve onomatopoeia, are forms too short to deny chance, include nursery forms and do not follow the sound correspondences formulated by supporters of Nostratic.

A large number of the putative cognate sets are considered problematic or doubtful even by its adherents. More than one-third of the sets are represented in only two of the putative Nostratic branches, though by its founder’s criteria, acceptable cases need to appear in at least three of the Nostratic language families. Numerous sets appear to involve borrowing. (See Campbell 1998, 1999.) It is for reasons of this sort that most historical linguists reject Nostratic.

It is probably correct that consensus among specialists is to reject Nostratic, but serious papers taking apart of the proposal seem to be lacking. Nevertheless, most dismiss it and it is beginning to enter into the emotionally charged terrain of Altaic and Amerind, particularly the former, and belief in it is becoming a thing of ridicule as it is for Altaic. Nevertheless, there have been a few excellent linguists doing work on this very long-range family for decades now.

Campbell and Mixco:

Indo-Uralic: The hypothesis that the Indo-European and Uralic language families are genetically related to one another. While there is some suggestive evidence for the hypothesis, it has not yet been possible to confirm the proposed relationship.

This summary seems too negative. Indo-Uralic is probably one of the most promising long-range proposals out there. I regard the relationship between the two as obvious, but to me it is only a smaller part of the larger Eurasiatic family. Frederick Kortland has done a lot of good work on this idea. Even some hardline splitters are open to this hypothesis.

Campbell and Mixco:

Altaic: While ‘Altaic’ is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related. In spite of this, Altaic does have a few dedicated followers.

The most serious problems for the Altaic proposal are the extensive lexical borrowing across inner Asia and among the ‘Altaic’ languages, lack of significant numbers of convincing cognates, extensive areal diffusion and typologically commonplace traits presented as evidence of relationship.

The shared ‘Altaic’ traits typically cited include vowel harmony, relatively simple phoneme inventories, agglutination, their exclusively suffixing nature, (S)OV ([Subject]-Object-Verb) word order and the fact that their non-main clauses are mostly non-finite (participial) constructions.

These shared features are not only commonplace typological traits that occur with frequency in unrelated languages of the world and therefore could easily have developed independently, but they are also areal traits shared by a number of languages in surrounding regions the structural properties of which were not well-known when the hypothesis was first framed.

This one is still up in the air, but Campbell and Mixco are lying when they say that idea has been abandoned. Most US linguists regard it as a laughingstock, and if you say you believe in it you will experience intense bullying and taunting from them. Oddly enough, outside the US, in Europe in particular, Altaic is regarded as obviously true. However, notorious anti-Altaicist Alexander Vovin has camped out in Paris and is now spreading his nihilistic doctrine to Europeans there.

The problem is that almost all of the US linguists who will laugh in your face and call you an idiot if you believe in Altaic are not specialists in the language. However, I did a study of Altaic specialists, and 7

So the anti-Altaicists are pushing a massive lie – that critical consensus has completely abandoned Altaic and regards as a laughingstock, but their project is more Politics and Propaganda than Science. In particular, it’s a fad. So Altaic is in the preposterous position where almost all of the people who know nothing about it will laugh in your face and call you an idiot if you believe in it and the overwhelming majority of specialists will say it’s real.

Altaic must be the only nonexistent family that has an incredibly elaborate 1,000 page etymological dictionary, full reconstructions of the proto-languages, etymologies of over 2,000 Altaic terms, and elaborate sound correspondences running through it. The anti-Altaicists use the silly “we can’t reconstruct the numerals so it’s not real” line here.

Altaic is obviously true based on 1-2 person pronoun paradigms at an absolute minimum. The anti-Altaic argument of course, is preposterous. As noted, they dismiss a vast 1,000 page Etymological Dictionary with 2,300 reconstructed etymologies as a hallucinated work.

There are vast parallels in all three families at all levels, in particular in the Mongolic-Tungusic family, which gets a 10

The argument that entire 1-2 pronoun paradigms have been borrowed is particularly preposterous because 1-2 pronouns are almost never borrowed anyway, and there has never been a single case of on Earth of the borrowing of a 1-2 person pronoun paradigm, much less the borrowing of one at the proto-language level. So the anti-Altaicists are arguing that something that has never happened anywhere on Earth not only happened, but happened more than once among different proto-languages. So the anti-Altaic argument is that something that could not possibly have happened actually occurred.

This is the conclusion of every paper the splitters write. Something that has never occurred on Earth and probably could not possibly happen not only occurred, but occurred many times around the globe for thousands of years.

Many regard including Japonic and Koreanic in Altaic as dubious, although having looked over the data, I am certain that they are part of Altaic. But they seem to be further away from the traditional tripartite system than the traditional three families are to each other. If we follow the theory that Japanese and Korean have been split from Proto-Altaic for 8,000 years, this starts to make a lot more sense.

The ridiculous massive borrowings argument specifically fails for geographical reasons. Proto-Turkic was never next door to Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Tungusic. The Proto-Altaic homeland is in the Khingan Mountains in Western Manchuria and Eastern Mongolia. Tungusic split off from Altaic 5,300 years ago, leaving Proto-Turkic-Mongolic in Khingans. 3,400 years ago, Proto-Turkic broke from Proto-Turkic-Mongolic and headed west to Northern Kazakhstan and the southern part of the Western Siberian Plain, leaving Mongolic alone in the Khingans.

Proto-Transeurasian – Khingans 9,000 YBP

Proto-Korean – Liaojiang on the north shore of the Bohai Sea 8,000 YBP.

Proto-Japanese – Northern coast of the Shandong Peninsula on the southern shore of the Bohai Sea 8,000 YBP

Proto-Tungusic – Amur Peninsula 5,300 BP. Breaks apart 2,000 YBP.

Proto-Turkic – Northern Kazakhstan 3,400 BP.

Proto-Mongolic – Khingans 3,400 BP.

Can someone explain to me how Mongolic and Tungusic borrow from Turkic 3,000 miles away in a different place at a different time in this scenario? Can someone explain to me how any of these proto-languages borrowed from each other at all, especially as they were in different places at different times?

Not only that but supposedly both Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Tungusic each borrowed from Proto-Turkic separately. These borrowings included massive amounts of core vocabulary in addition to an entire 1st and 2nd person pronoun paradigm.

Keep in mind that the borrowing of this paradigm, something that has never happened anywhere, supposedly occurred not just once but twice, between Proto-Tungusic 5,300 YBP on the Amur from Proto-Turkic in North Kazakhstan 3,000 miles away 2,000 later, and at the same time, between  Proto-Mongolic in the Khingans and Proto-Turkic in Northern Kazakhstan 3,000 miles away. How exactly did this occur?

And can someone explain to me how Proto-Korean and Proto-Japanese borrow from either of the others under this scenario?

Campbell and Mixco:

Turkic: A family of about thirty languages, spoken across central Asia from China to Lithuania. The family has two branches: Chuvash (of the Volga region) and the non-Chuvash Turkic branch of relatively closely related languages. Some of the Turkic languages are Azeri, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, Uighur, Uzbek, Yakut, Tuvan, and Tofa. Turkic is often assigned to the ‘Altaic’ hypothesis, though specialists have largely abandoned Altaic.

As noted above, it is simply incorrect that specialists have largely abandoned Altaic. This is simply carefully crafted propaganda on the part of Campbell and Mixco. In fact, my own study showed that 7

Campbell and Mixco:

Some scholars classify Korean in a single family with Japanese; however, this is a controversial hypothesis. Korean is often said to belong with the Altaic hypothesis, often also with Japanese, though this is not widely supported.

Japonic-Koreanic has considerable support among specialists in these languages, although it is not universally accepted. Campbell and Mixco are excessively negative about the level of support for an expanded Altaic. In fact, an expanded Altaic which includes Japanese and Korean in some part of it has significant though probably not majority support. Perhaps 30-4

Shandong Peninsula with Tianjin and Liaojiang across the Bohai Sea, location of the Proto-Japonic and Proto-Korean homelands.

Proto-Japanic and Proto-Koreanic were both spoken in Northeastern China 8,000 YBP. Proto-Japonic was spoke on the north of the Shandong Peninsula and Proto-Koreanic was spoken across the Bohai Sea in Tianjin and especially across the Bohai Straights on the Liaodong Peninsula. They may have stayed here next to each other for 3,000 years until the Proto-Koreanics moved to the Korean Peninsula 5,000 YBP, displacing the Ainuid types there. Proto-Japonics probably stayed in Shandong until 2,3000 YBP when they left to populate Japan and the Ryukus, displacing the Ainu who were already there.

Campbell and Mixco:

Yeniseian, Yenisseian: Small language family of southern Siberia of which Ket (Khet) is the only surviving member. Yeniseian has no known broader relatives, though some have been hypothesized (see the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis).

Campbell and Mixco state and serious untruth here, including some weasel words. By discussing Dene-Caucasian in the same breath as relatives of Yenisien, they are able to deflect away from the more widely accepted proposal of a link between Yenisien in the Old World and Na-Dene in the New World. This is Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yenisien proposal.

The problem is that this long-range proposal has the support of many people, including splitter Johanna Nichols. Of the 17 experts who weighed in on Dene-Yenisien, 15 of them had a positive view of the hypothesis. Campbell and Mixco are the only two who are negative, but neither are experts on either family. All specialists in either or both families support the proposal. When 15 out of 17 is not enough, one wonders at what point the field reaches a consensus. Must we hold out for Campbell and Mixco’s approval for everything?

Campbell and Mixco:

Nivkh (also called Gilyak): A language isolate spoken in the northern part of Sakhalin Island and along the Amur River of Manchuria, in China. There have been various unsuccessful attempts to link Nivkh genetically with various other language groupings, including Eurasiatic and Nostratic.

Granted, there is no consensus on the affiliation of Nivkhi. However, a recent paper by Sergei Nikolaev proved to me that Nivkhi is related to Algonquian-Wakashan, a family of languages in the Americas. One of these languages is Wakashan, and there has been talk of links between Wakashan and the Old World for some time.

Michael Fortescue places Nivkhi in Chukotko-Kamchatkan. Greenberg places it is Eurasiatic as a separate node. But as Chukotko-Kamchatkan is part of Eurasiatic, they are both saying the same thing in a way. My theory is that Nivkhi is Eurasiatic, possibly related to Chukoto-Kamchatkan, and like Yeniseian, is also connected to languages in North America as some of the Nivkhi probably migrated to North America and became the American Indians. In this way, we can reconcile both hypotheses.

There are three specialist views on Nivkhi. One says it is Eurasiatic, the other that it is Chukotian, and the third that it is part of the Algonquian-Wakashan or Almosan family in the New World. Consensus is that Nivkhi is related to one of two other entities – other languages in Northeastern Asia or a New World Amerindian family. So expert consensus seems to have moved away from the view of Nivkhi as an isolate.

Campbell and Mixco:

Paleosiberian languages (also sometimes called Paleoasiatic, Hyperborean languages): A geographical (not genetic) designation for several otherwise unaffiliated languages (isolates) and small language families of Siberia.

Perhaps the main thing that unites these languages is that they are not Turkic, Russian or Tungusic, the better known languages of Siberia. Languages often listed as Paleosiberian are: Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadal (Itelmen), Yukaghir, Yeniseian (Ket) and Nivkh (Gilyak). These have no known genetic relationship to one other.

Taken as a broad statement, of course this is true. However, Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal or Itelmen are part of a family called Chukutko-Kamchatkan. This family has even been reconstructed. Campbell and Mixco’s statement that these languages have no known genetic relationship with each other is false.

Campbell and Mixco:

Austroasiatic: A proposed genetic relationship between Mon-Khmer and Munda, accepted as valid by many scholars but not by all.

The fact is that Austroasiatic is not a “proposed genetic relationship.” Instead it is now accepted by consensus. That there may be a few outliers who don’t believe in it is not important. I’m not aware of any linguists who doubt Austroasiatic other than Campbell and Mixco, and neither is a specialist. Austroasiatic-Hmong-Mien is the best long-range proposal for Austroasiatic, but it has probably not yet been proven. Austroasiatic is also part of the expanded version of the Austric hypothesis.

Campbell and Mixco:

Miao-Yao (also called Hmong-Mien): A language family spoken by the Miao and Yao peoples of southern China and Southeast Asia. Some proposals would classify Miao-Yao with Sino-Tibetan, others with Tai or Austronesian; none of these has much support.

This seems to be more weasel wording on the part of the authors. By listing Tai or Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan as possible relatives of Miao-Yao and then correctly dismissing it, they leave out a much better proposal linking Hmong-Mien to Austroasiatic.

This shows some promise, but the relationship is hard to see amidst all of the Chinese borrowing. As noted, the relationship between Hmong-Mien and Sino-Tibetan is one of borrowing. The relationship with Tai or Austronesian is part of Paul Benedict’s original Austric proposal. He later turned against this proposal and supported a more watered down Austric with Austronesian and Tai-Kadai, which seems to be nearing consensus support now.

Campbell and Mixco:

Austric: A mostly discounted hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Paul Benedict that would group together the Austronesian, Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao.

More weasel wording. It is correct that Benedict’s original Austric (which also included Austroasiatic) was abandoned even by Benedict himself, a more watered down Austric that he later supported consisting of Austronesian and Tai-Kadai called Austro-Tai has much more support. They get around discussing the watered down Austro-Tai with good support by limiting Austric to Benedict’s own theory which even he rejected later in life. In this sense, they misrepresent the debate, probably deliberately.

In fact, evidence is building towards acceptance of Austro-Tai after papers by Weera Ostapirat and Laurence Sagart seem to have proved the case using the comparative method. Roger Blench also supports the concept. In addition, to Benedict, it is also supported by  Lawrence Reid, Hui Li, and Lawrence Reid. It is opposed by Graham Thurgood, who is a specialist (he was my main academic advisor on my Master’s Degree in Linguistics). It is also opposed by Campbell and Mixco, but they are not specialists. Looking at expert opinion, we have seven arguing for the theory and one arguing against it. Specialist consensus then is that Austro-Tai is a real language family.

Even the larger version of Austric, including all of Benedict’s families plus Ainu and the South Indian isolate Nihali, has some supporters and some suggestive evidence that it may be correct.

Campbell and Mixco:

Tai-Kadai: A large language family, generally but not universally accepted, of languages located in Southeast Asia and southern China. The family includes Tai, Kam-Sui, Kadai and various other languages. The genetic relatedness of several proposed Tai-Kadai languages is not yet settled.

Tai-Kadai is not “mostly but not universally accepted.” It is accepted by consensus as an existent language family. Perhaps whether some languages belong there is in doubt but the proposal itself is not controversial. Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Tai-Kadai remains controversial is a serious distortion of fact.

Campbell and Mixco:

Na-Dene: A disputed proposal of distant genetic relationship, put forward by Sapir, that would group Haida, Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan. There is considerable disagreement about whether Haida is related to the others. The relationship between Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan seems more likely, and some scholars misleadingly use the name ‘Na-Dené’ to mean a grouping of these two without Haida.

Levine and Michael Krauss, two top Na-Dene experts, are on record as opposing the addition of Haida to Na-Dene for 40 years. A recent conference about Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yenisien concluded that there was no evidence to include Haida in Na-Dene. However, a recent paper by Alexander Manaster-Ramer made the case that Haida is part of Na-Dene. This paper was enough to convince me. Further, the scholar with the most expertise on Haida has said that Haida is part of Na-Dene. So Campbell and Mixco are correct here that the subject is up in the air with both supporters and opponents.

The statement that a relationship between Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan seems “more than likely” is an understatement. I believe it is now linguistic consensus that Tlingit is part of Na-Dene, so Campbell and Mixco’s statement is not quite true.

Campbell and Mixco:

Tonkawa: An extinct language isolate of Texas. Proposals to link Tonkawa with the languages of the Coahuiltecan or Hokan-Coahuiltecan hypotheses have not generally been accepted.

I’m sure it is the case that Coahuiltecan and Hokan-Coahuiltecan affiliations of Tonkawa have been rejected. A Coahuiltecan connection was even denied by Manaster-Ramer, who recently proved that the family existed. That said, there are interesting  parallels between Tonkawa and Coahuiltecan that I cannot explain. However, a recent paper by Manaster-Ramer made the much better case that Tonkawa was in fact Na-Dene.

Campbell and Mixco:

Amerind: The Amerind hypothesis is rejected by nearly all practicing American Indianists and by most historical linguists. Specialists maintain that valid methods do not at present permit classification of Native American languages into fewer than about 180 independent language families and isolates. Amerind has been highly criticized on various grounds.There is an excessive number of errors in Greenberg’s data.

Where Greenberg stops – after assembling superficial similarities and declaring them due to common ancestry – is where other linguists begin. Since such similarities can be due to chance similarity, borrowing, onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, nursery words (the mama, papa, nana, dada, caca sort), misanalysis, and much more, for a plausible proposal of remote linguistic relationship one must attempt to eliminate all other possible explanations, leaving a shared common ancestor as the most likely.

Greenberg made no attempt to eliminate these other explanations, and the similarities he amassed appear to be due mostly to accident and a combination of these other factors.

In various instances, Greenberg compared arbitrary segments of words, equated words with very different meanings (for example, ‘excrement/night/grass’), misidentified many languages, failed to analyze the morphology of some words and falsely analyzed that of others, neglected regular sound correspondences, failed to eliminate loanwords and misinterpreted well-established findings.

The Amerind ‘etymologies’ proposed are often limited to a very few languages of the many involved. Finnish, Japanese, Basque and other randomly chosen languages fit Greenberg’s Amerind data as well as or better than do any of the American Indian languages in his ‘etymologies’; Greenberg’s method has proven incapable of distinguishing implausible relationships from Amerind generally. In short, it is with good reason Amerind has been rejected.

The movement into the Americas came in three waves.

The first wave brought the Amerinds. It is here where the 160 language families reside. According to the reigning theory in Linguistics, this group of Amerindians came in one wave that spoke not only 160 different languages but spoke languages that came from 160 different language families, none of which were related to each other. These being language families which, by the way, we can find scarcely a trace of in the Old World.

The second wave was the Na-Dene people who came along the west coast and then went inland.

The last wave were the Inuits.

Greenberg simply lumped all of the 600 languages of the  Americas into a single family. The argument was good, though I’m not sure he proved that every single one of those languages were all part of Amerind. But a lot of them were. The n- m- 1st and 2nd person pronouns are found in 450 of those languages. The ablauted t’ana, t’una, t’ina word, meaning respectively human child  of either sex, all females including family terms, and all males including family terms are extremely common in Amerind.

So t’ana just means child. T’una means girl, woman, and includes various names for all sorts of female relatives – grandmother, cousin, aunt, niece, etc. T’ina means boy, man, and includes the family terms grandfather, brother-in-law, uncle, cousin, and  nephew. This ablauted paradigm is found across a vast number of these Amerind languages, and it is nonexistent in the rest of the world.

Quite probably most to all of those languages having that term are part of a single family. What are the other arguments? That 300 languages independently innovated these terms, in this precise ablauted paradigm, on their own? What is the likelihood of that?

That these items occurring across such vast swathes of languages is due to chance? But this paradigm does not exist anywhere else, so how could it be due to chance? That these core vocabulary items were borrowed massively all across the Americas, when family terms like that are rarely borrowed? That’s not possible. None of the alternate theories make the slightest bit of sense.

Hence, the Amerind languages that have the n- m- pronoun paradigm and the t’ana, t’una, t’ina ablauted names for the sexes and the terms of family relations by sex are quite probably part of a huge language family. I’m well aware that a few of the languages having those terms could be due to chance. I’m pretty sure that about zero of those pronouns and few, if any, of those family terms were borrowed.

However, not all Amerind languages have either the pronoun paradigm or the ablauted sex term. In those cases, I’m unsure if those languages are all part of the same language. But if you can put those languages in families and reconstruct to the proto-languages and end up with the pronoun paradigm or the ablauted family term reconstructed in the proto-language of that family, I’m sure that family would be part of Amerind. That’s about all you have to do to prove relationship in Amerind.

Campbell and Mixco:

Penutian: A very large proposed distant genetic relationship in western North America, suggested originally by Dixon and Kroeber for the Californian language families Wintuan, Maiduan, Yokutsan, and Miwok-Costanoan. The name is based on words for ‘two’, something like pen in Wintuan, Maiduan, and Yokutsan, and uti in Miwok-Costanoan, joined to form Penutian.

Sapir, impressed with the hypothesis, attempted to add an Oregon Penutian (Takelma, Coos, Siuslaw, and ‘Yakonan’), Chinook, Tsimshian, a Plateau Penutian (Sahaptian, ‘Molala-Cayuse,’ and Klamath-Modoc) and a Mexican Penutian (Mixe-Zoquean and Huave).

The Penutian grouping has been influential, and later proposals have attempted to unite various languages from Alaska to Bolivia with it. Nevertheless, it had a shaky foundation based on extremely limited evidence, and, in spite of extensive later research, it did not prove possible to demonstrate any version of the Penutian hypothesis and several prominent Penutian specialists abandoned it. Today it remains controversial and unconfirmed, with some supporters but with many who doubt it.

The statement that today it “remains controversial and unconfirmed, with some supporters but with many who doubt it,”  has no basis in fact. It is surely controversial and it is probably unconfirmed by linguistic consensus. Yes, it has a number of supporters, and there are quite a few who doubt it. However, among those who doubt it, none of them are specialists in these languages. Hence, we are dealing with an Altaic situation here, where the specialists believe in it but the non-specialists insist it’s nonsense.

In fact, the consensus among the specialists on these languages is that Penutian exists. A Penutian family comprising Maiduan, Utian (Miwok-Costanoan), Wintuan, Yokutsan, Coosan, Siuslaw, Takelma, and Kalapuyan and Alsean (Yakonan), Chinookan, Tsimshianic, Klamath-Modoc (Lutuami), Cayuse and Molala (Waiilatpuan), Sahaptian has been proven to my satisfaction. I am uncertain of the Penutian status of Mixe-Zoque and Huave (Mexican Penutian), although I believe that Huave and Mixe-Zoque are related to each other, albeit at a very deep time depth of 9,000 years.

Anti-Penutianists have not published a paper in a long time. The last one I remembered was published by William Shipley, and he’s been gone for a while. I am not aware of one expert on these languages who says Penutian does not exist.

Campbell and Mixco:

Cayuse-Molala: A genetic classification no longer believed that linked Cayuse (of Oregon and Washington) and Molala (of Oregon) in a single assumed family. The evidence for this was later shown to be wrong and the hypothesis was abandoned.

According to Campbell and Mixco, Cayuse is an isolate. I assume they see Molala as an isolate too. There probably is no Cayuse-Molala family, but Molala is part of Plateau Penutian, and Cayuse may be part of the same group. Plateau Penutian is part of the Penutian hypothesis, which appears to be true. By not mentioning these facts, Campbell and Mixco’s statement is quite misleading.

Campbell and Mixco:

Mosan: A now abandoned proposal of distant genetic relationship that would group Salishan, Wakashan and Chimakuan together.

Another part of this proposal was that Mosan was part of a larger family with Algonquian called Almosan. An excellent series of papers was published recently by Sergei Nikolaev that validated Almosan and proved to me that it was related to Nivkhi in the Old World.

Michael Fortescue argued a few years before that Mosan was a valid entity and that was related to the Old World language Nivkhi. Recently, Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin also supported Almosan and grouped it with Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkhi. David Beck recently argued that Mosan is a language area or Sprachbund instead of a genetic family.

So far we have four specialists arguing that Mosan exists, and one saying it does not. The consensus among specialists seems to be that Mosan is a valid language family. At any rate, Campbell and Mixco’s statement that this proposal is “now abandoned” is false.

For Almosan, we have four specialists saying it exists and two apparently saying it does not. Expert consensus on Almosan is optimistic.

Hokan: A controversial hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Dixon and Kroeber among certain languages of California; the original list included Shastan, Chimariko, Pomoan, Karok, and Yana, to which they soon added Esselen, Yuman, and later Chumashan, Salinan, Seri, and Tequistlatecan. Later scholars, especially Edward Sapir, proposed various additions to Hokan. Many ‘Hokan’ specialists doubt the validity of the hypothesis.

It is not true that many Hokan specialists “doubt the validity of the hypothesis.” I can’t remember the last time I saw an anti-Hokan paper. Yes, Campbell, Mixco, and Mithun say Hokan does not exist, but they are not specialists. The consensus among specialists such as Mikhail Zhikov, Terence Kaufman, and Marcelo Jokelsy is that Hokan exists. I have only found one specialist who disagrees with the Hokan hypothesis, and she merely doubts the existence of Ch’imáriko.

I believe that a Hokan family consisting of Karuk, Shasta-Palaihnihan, Ch’imáriko, Yana, Salinan, Pomoan, Yuman, Seri, and Tequistlatecan exists, although I would leave out Chumashan, Washo, and Jicaquean or Tolan. Chumashan is an isolate, and while Washo and Tolan may be Hokan at a very deep time depth, the few possible cognates are not enough to provide evidence of this. I am agnostic on Esselen, which is only known from a 350 word list collected by friars at a California mission.

I have not seen any evidence that Coahuiltecan is Hokan. There is some evidence, though not probative enough for me, that Lencan and Misumalpan may be Hokan. Nevertheless, Lencan and Misumalpan form a language family that has even been accepted by Campbell himself. This is the only long-range family proposal he has supported since the publication of LIA.

Although Campbell’s opinion on many hypotheses may be waved away as he is not an expert on that family or language, Lencan and Misumalpan are right up his alley as he is an expert in languages in Central America. He has focused mostly on Mayan, but he also knows the other languages of the region well.

Campbell and Mixco:

Cochimí–Yuman: A family of languages from Arizona, California and Baja California, with two branches, extinct Cochimí (of Baja California) and the Yuman subfamily (members of which are Kiliwa, Diegueño, Cocopa, Mojave, Maricopa, Paipai, and Walapai–Havasupai–Yavapai, among others). Cochimí–Yuman is often associated with the controversial Hokan hypothesis, though evidence is insufficient to embrace the proposed relationship.

The consensus among experts in the Cochimí–Yuman family, including Mikhail Zhikov and Terence Kaufman, is that it is part of the Hokan family. Campbell disbelieves in the association but he is not an expert. However, Mixco opposes the Hokan affinity of Cochimi-Yuman, and granted, he is actually a specialist on these languages. So among specialists, we have two who support the Hokan association and one who opposes it. The specialist consensus then would be that they are this association is a promising hypothesis, but it is not yet proven. This is different from Campbell and Mixco’s wording, which is more negative.

Campbell and Mixco:

Coahuiltecan: A hypothesis of distant genetic relationship that proposed to group some languages of south Texas and northern Mexico: Coahuilteco, Comecrudo and Cotoname, and sometimes also Tonkawa, Karankawa, Atakapa and Maratino (with Aranama and Solano assumed to be varieties of Coahuilteco).

Sapir proposed a broader classification of Hokan–Coahuiltecan, joining the Coahuiltecan proposal with the broader Hokan hypothesis, and placed this in his even larger Hokan–Siouan super-stock. None of these proposals has proven sufficiently robust to be accepted generally.

I am not aware of any specialists who have recently argued against the existence of Coahuiltecan. Yes, Campbell and Mixco do not accept it, but they are not specialists. A recent paper by Alexander Manaster-Ramer proved the existence of Coahuiltecan to my satisfaction. I believe that a Coahuiltecan family consisting of Comecrudo, Cotoname, Aranama, Solano, Mamulique, Garza, and Coahuilteco absolutely exists. Karankawa is probably a part of this family. I am not aware that any specialist is arguing against the existence of this family at the moment.

I do not think there is good evidence for other postulated languages such as Atakapa and Tonkowa. First of all, Tonkawa is probably Na-Dene as per another paper by Manaster-Ramer. Atakapa is part of the Gulf family. However, I am not yet convinced that Coahuiltecan is as member of the Hokan language family.

Campbell and Mixco:

Gulf: Hypothesis of a distant genetic relationship proposed by Mary R. Haas that would group Muskogean, Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa and Chitimacha, no longer supported by most linguists.

The notion that Gulf is no longer supported by most linguists is simply incorrect. There have only been four linguists who studied this family.

The first was Mary Haas, who also proposed a relationship with Yuki as Yuki-Gulf. Haas was always dubious about Chitimacha’s addition to Gulf.

Greenberg resurrected Yuki-Gulf in LIA.

Pam Munro is an expert on these languages. A while back she published a paper on Yuki-Gulf. I read that paper. The resemblances are so stunning between Muskogean, Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa and Chitimacha that I was shocked that anyone doubted the relationship. Furthermore, the relationship with Yuki and Wappo, a full 2,500 miles away in Northern California, was shocking.

The fourth was Geoffrey Kimball, who concluded that Gulf was probably a family but that this could not be proven.

There evidence for Gulf in Munro’s paper was good, and there even appeared to be sound correspondences running through the relationship. What was shocking about it was that Yuki and Wappo could not possibly have borrowed from Gulf because Gulf is in Louisiana 2,500 miles away. So how did all these resemblances come in? Chance is ruled out. Borrowing could not have happened. Therefore a relationship at least between Yuki and the Gulf languages is obvious.

Munro’s paper took the position that Greenberg’s Yuki-Gulf hypothesis was correct. However, there are some problems. First, Atakapa as part of Gulf has been controversial, in part because it has also been tied in with Coahuiltecan. Indeed there are resemblances between the two, and they were not spoken next to each other so borrowing can be ruled out.

Perhaps a way of solving the matter is to posit not only Yuki-Gulf but a larger family that includes Coahuiltecan as Greenberg does in LIA. I have no idea how justified this is, but there are certainly surprising resemblances between Atakapa and the Coahuiltecan languages.

Furthermore, whether or not Chitimacha is part of Gulf has been up in the air from the beginning when Haas published her paper. Recent papers have made the case that Chitimacha is related to Mesoamerican language families of Mexico such as Mixe-Zoque and Totonacan. These papers used the comparative method. Campbell has rejected this hypothesis.

That Tunica at the very least shows a close relationship with Muskogean is not even controversial. The idea has a long pedigree and is presently supported by all experts in this family.

Geoffrey Kimball examined the data recently and concluded that from the evidence, it appears that Gulf exists, but we will never be able to prove it, as he puts it. However, he stated that Tunica is almost certainly related to Muskogean. At this point, I would think that Tunica-Muskogean at the very least should be considered consensus among specialists.

Kimball’s paper had a number of problems, mostly that he was operating with a negative stance towards the existence of the family. Further, there were issues with his notions of sound symbolism and borrowing in the paper where his explanations made no sense at all.

Let’s evaluate Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Gulf is no longer supported by most linguists.

We have four specialists on record about whether or not a Gulf family exists.

Mary Haas: Positive, minus Chitimacha

Joseph Greenberg: Positive

Pamela Munro: Positive

Geoffrey Kimball: Probably exists but it’s not possible to prove it.

Brown et al: Chitimacha is a part of the Totonozoquean family, not the Gulf family. The other members of Gulf are not members of this family.

Three out of the four specialists on the Gulf family say that the Gulf family is a reality. The other feels it exists but cannot be proven. And there is uncertainty about whether Chitimacha is probably not part of Gulf. The consensus among experts is that Gulf is a real language family.

Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Gulf is no longer supported by most linguists is simply false.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that a good case can be made for the existence of a Totonozoquean family consisting of the Mixe-Zoque and Totonacan languages. Whether this is consensus among experts is somewhat up in the air.

Campbell and Mixco:

Macro-Gê: A proposed distant genetic relationship composed of several language families and isolates, many now extinct, along the Atlantic coast (primarily of Brazil). These include Chiquitano, Bororoan, Botocudoan, Rikbaktsa, the Gê family proper, Jeikó, Kamakanan, Maxakalían, Purian, Fulnío, Ofayé and Guató. Many are sympathetic to the hypothesis and several of these languages will very probably be demonstrated to be related to one another eventually, though others will probably need to be separated out.

This is much too pessimistic. Macro-Gê is not a proposed long range family -it is a large language family in South America accepted by consensus. It is not true that many are sympathetic to it; instead, the consensus is that it is correct. Nor is it correct to say that it will probably be demonstrated eventually. In fact, it is already an accepted reality.

Campbell and Mixco:

Quechumaran: Proposed distant genetic relationship that would join Quechuan and Aymaran. While considerable evidence has been gathered in support of the hypothesis, it is extremely difficult in this case to distinguish what may be inherited (and therefore evidence of a genetic relationship) from what may be diffused (and therefore not reliable evidence of a genetic connection).

It is true that there is no consensus on the existence of Quechumaran. The consensus seems to be as above that it is not yet proven. Those opposed to the idea throw out the usual borrowing scenario, but they have had to push the large number of borrowings in core vocabulary all the way back to Proto-Aymara and Proto-Quechua. In my opinion, “massive borrowing of core vocabulary at the proto-language level” is simply another word for genetics.

Gerald Clauson, the famous Turkologist opponent of Altaic, had to keep pushing his massive borrowings of core vocabulary further and further back until he eventually had the scenario taking place at the Proto-Turkic, Proto-Tungusic, and Proto-Mongolic levels. See above for my analysis on why these three proto-languages could not possibly have borrowed from each other as they were in different places in different times.

A similar problem exists with opponents of the Uralo-Yukaghir theory, in which they are also forced to deal with a large amount of core vocabulary dating back a long time. Hakkinen tried to solve this problem by pushing the borrowing all the way back to not just Proto-Uralic but Pre-Proto-Uralic. Pre-Proto-Uralic at 8,000 years to me means nothing less than Uralo-Yukaghir. What else could it mean? He has heavy borrowing of core vocabulary between Pre-Proto-Uralic and Proto-Yukaghir. That’s another way of saying genetics.

Campbell and Mixco:

Macro-Guaicuruan (also spelled Macro-Waykuruan, Macro-Waikuruan): A proposed distant genetic relationship that would join the Guaicuruan and Matacoan families of the Gran Chaco in South America in a larger-scale genetic classification. Grammatical similarities, for example in the pronominal systems, have suggested the relationship to some scholars, but the extremely limited lexical evidence raises doubts for others. Some would also add Charruan and Mascoyan to these in an even larger ‘Macro-Waikuruan cluster.’

It is not true that this is a proposed long-range family suggested by some by doubted by others. In fact, Macro-Guaicuruan is accepted by consensus and is as uncontroversial as Macro-Gê, Pama-Nyungan, and other such families. There is however debate about which families are members outside of the Guaicuruan and Mataguayo language families that make up the essence of the family. There have been suggestions to add Lule-Vilela and the Zamucoan, Charruan, and Mascoyan families to this family. I do not feel that these additions are yet warranted.

Campbell and Mixco:

Pama-Nyungan: A very large, widely spread language family of Australia, some 175 languages. The name comes from Kenneth Hale, based on the words pama ‘man’ in the far northeast and nyunga ‘man’ in the southwest. Languages assigned to Pama-Nyungan extend over four-fifths of Australia, most of the continent except northern areas.

Pama-Nyungan is accepted by most Australianists as a legitimate language family, but not uncritically and not universally. It is rejected by Dixon; it is held by others to be plausible but inconclusive based on current evidence. Some Pama-Nyungan languages are Lardil, Kayardilt, Yukulta, Yidiny, Dyirbal, Pitta-Pitta, Arrente, Warlpiri, Western Desert language(s), and there are many more.

Actually, consensus now is that this family of Australian languages does indeed exist. True, Dixon challenged the existence of Pama-Nyungan recently, but his opposition was so outrageous and it prompted a quick surge of papers from Australianists defending the existence of Pama-Nyungan. The notion that other Australianists feel that Pama-Nyungan is possible but presently inconclusive is not correct. I am not aware of a single Australianist other than Dixon who feels this way. Instead, Pama-Nyungan is about as uncontroversial as Macro-Gê, Afroasiatic, or Austroasiatic.

Campbell and Mixco:

‘Papuan’ languages: A term of convenience used to refer to the languages of the western Pacific, most in New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya), that are neither Austronesian nor Australian. Papuan definitely does not refer to a genetic relationship among these languages for no such relationship can at present be shown.

That is, the term is defined negatively and does not imply a linguistic relationship. While most are spoken on the island of New Guinea, some are found in the Bismark Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor Archipelago to the west.

There are some 800 Papuan languages divided in the a large number of mostly small language families and isolates not demonstrably related to one another.

For what it’s worth, this statement by Campbell and Mixco is correct.

Campbell and Mixco:

One large genetic grouping that has been posited for a number of Papuan languages is the Trans-New Guinea phylum, which is promising but not yet confirmed.

Trans-New Guinea is not “promising but not yet confirmed.” Instead it is an uncontroversial language family accepted by the consensus of all specialists.

References

Beck, David (1997). Mosan III: A Problem of Remote Common Proximity. International Conference on Salish (and Neighbo(u)ring) Languages.
Benedict, Paul K. (1942). “Thai, Kadai, and Indonesian: A New Alignment in Southeastern Asia.” American Anthropologist 44, 4: 576–601.
Benedict, Paul K. (1975). Austro-Thai Language and Culture, with a Glossary of Roots. New Haven: HRAF Press.
Blench, Roger (2008). The Prehistory of the Daic (Tai-Kadai) Speaking Peoples. Presented at the 12th EURASEAA Meeting in Leiden, the Netherlands, 1-5 September 2008.
Blench, Roger (2018). Tai-Kadai and Austronesian Are Related at Multiple Levels and Their Archaeological Interpretation (draft).
Blust, Robert (2014). “The Higher Phylogeny of Austronesian and the Position of Tai-Kadai: Another Look,” in The 14th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL-14).
Campbell, Lyle and Marianne Mithun (Eds.) (1979). The Languages of Native America: An Historical and Comparative Assessment.
Campbell, Lyle and Mauricio J. Mixco (2007). A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.
Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser (2008). Language Classification: History and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Fortescue, M. (1998). Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence. (Nivkhi is Mosan.)
Fortescue, Michael (2011). “The Relationship of Nivkh to Chukotko-Kamchatkan Revisited.” Lingua 121, 8: 1359-1376. (Nivkhi is Chukoto-Kamchatkan.)
Gell-Mann, Murray; Ilia Peiros, and George Starostin (2009). “Distant Language Relationship: The Current Perspective.” Journal of Language Relationship.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (2000). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (2002). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Heine, Bernd (1992). African Languages. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ed. by William Bright, Vol. 1, pp. 31-36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (No such thing as Nilo-Saharan.)
Krauss, Michael E. (1979). Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. The Languages of Native America: Historical and comparative assessment, ed. by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, pp. 803-901. Austin: University of Texas Press. (Haida not part of Na-Dene.)
Levine, Robert D. (1979). Haida and Na-Dene: A New Look at the evidence. IJAL 45: 157-70. (Haida not part of Na-Dene.)
Li, Hui (李辉) (2005). Genetic Structure of Austro-Tai Populations (Doctoral Dissertation). Fudan University.
Mixco, Mauricio J. (1976). “Kiliwa Texts.” International Journal of American Linguistics Native American Text Series 1: 92-101
Mixco, Mauricio J. (1977). “The Linguistic Affiliation of the Ñakipa and Yakakwal of Lower California”. International Journal of American Linguistics 43: 189-200.
Nicola¨i, Robert (1990). Parent´es Linguistiques (`A Propos du Songhay). Paris: CNRS. (Dimmendaal says Songhay is Nilo-Saharan.)
Nikolaev, S. (2015). Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 1: Proof of the Algonquian-Wakashan Relationship.
Nikolaev, S. (2016). Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 2: Algonquian-Wakashan Sound Correspondences.
Ostapirat, Weera (2005). “Kra-Dai and Austronesian: Notes on Phonological Correspondences and Vocabulary Distribution,”  in Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds. The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics, pp. 107-131. London: Routledge Curzon.
Ostapirat, Weera (2013). Austro-Tai Revisited. Paper Presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 29-31 May 2013, Chulalongkorn University.
Reid, Lawrence A. (2006). “Austro-Tai Hypotheses.” In Keith Brown (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition, pp. 609–610.
Sagart, Laurent (2005b). “Tai-Kadai as a Subgroup of Austronesian,” in L. Sagart, R. Blench, and A. Sanchez-Mazas (Eds.), The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics, pp. 177-181.
Sagart, Laurent (2019). “A Model of the Origin of Kra-Dai Tones.” Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale. 48, 1: 1–29.
Thurgood, Graham (1994). “Tai-Kadai and Austronesian: The Nature of the Relationship.” Oceanic Linguistics 33: 345-368.

Great Linguists

Some linguists actually range into the stratosphere of the Greats. See how many of these you can identify. I can’t even identify all of them myself.

I diss some of these guys on here, which you are not supposed to do in my field, but I’m not very well-liked anyway, so I figured I might as well. Besides I don’t have an academic job. Most of these guys don’t speak ill of each other because they have a professorship.

John Bengston – Long-ranger, outside of the academy, which is how he can to that in the first place as long-rangers wouldn’t last ten minutes in the academy. I’ve corresponded with him a few times. He’s a real nice guy!

Derek Bickerton – He responded to one of my emails. Expert on the genesis of language and creoles. He seems to have a very sunny disposition too, I’ll grant him that.

Allan Bomhard – Long-ranger. Outside of the academy, hence how he can even be a long-ranger in the first place and they would never survive in the US academy. And he answered my email! Yay!

Karl Brugmann –  Famous for Brugmann’s Law.

Lyell Campbell – Give credit where it’s due. The leader of the New Conservatives out to make sure that no new language family is discovered. This is all a rather pathetic emotional reaction to the publication of Joseph Greenberg’s Language in the Americas, a fairly innocuous work that somehow caused most historical linguists to go insane. However, he is at the top of our field, despite the fact that his long-range views should be ignored, except they aren’t and instead they’re the reigning paradigm. Science is not only irrational as scientists are human, but it goes in fads just like society’s faddists. Scientists also go insane, often collectively. An abject lesson is this man, albeit an excellent linguist. Expert in Mayan and Uralic languages, but he should be ignored on Uralic please.

Andrew Carnie – Don’t know him.

Noam Chomsky – Mostly famous for syntax theories.

Bernard Comrie – Famous linguist. Not sure if he’s still around.

Peter Daniels – Probably the most hated man in Linguistics, for good reason I might add. Notable scholar on writing systems. A brilliant man, but so what? A lot of brilliant men are pricks. Shoepenhauer once threw his landlady down the stairs, and he had to pay her a sun for the rest of her life.

Ferdinand de Saussure – Father of Saussurian structural linguistics and structuralism in social sciences, period. Also came up with the ideas of “signs,” etc., now a separate field called Semiotics.

Scott DeLancey – Penutianist. File under Peter Daniels. A most unpleasant man.

Robert Dixon – Famous in Australian linguistics.

Joseph Greenberg – The late, great long-ranger. Very controversial to say the least.

Jacob Grimm – Famous for Grimm’s Law.

Suzette Haden Elgin – Never heard of her.

Kenneth Hale – Famous polygot and linguist. All around good guy too, apparently.

Mary R. Haas – Famous Americanist.

Martin Haspelmath – Name is familiar but not sure what he does.

Ray Jackendoff – Familiar but I’m not sure what he did.

Roman Jakobson – Very famous linguist.

Arthur Kroeber – Famous anthropologist and linguist, Americanist.

William Labov – Father of sociolinguistics.

Peter Ladefoged – Famous for phonology, especially phonetics, which I don’t understand well.

George Lakoff – Famous for the use of words in politics.

Stephen Levinson – Not familiar.

John McCarthy – Not familiar.

David Nash – Not familiar.

Joanna Nichols – She’s at the top of our field too. Expert on typology and North Caucasian languages. She also went insane after Greenberg’s book, however recently she has somewhat recovered and has opened her mind to long-range stuff with some very interesting views along the lines of Sapir’s. Hey, people can change! And she’s the one who came up with the “6,000 year limit on how far back a language family can be discovered.”

Geoffrey Nunberg – Seems I’ve heard of him, but not sure what he did.

Marc Okrand – I’ve heard of him, but not sure what he did.

Pānini – The famous ancient Sanskritist

Holger Peterson – Famous Indo-Europeanist.

David Pesetsky – Heard the name, not sure what he did.

Steven Pinker – Famous for theories about the genesis of language and also the nature-nurture debate. His politics is crap, but I like his haircut and he’s very smart. He hung out with Jeff Epstein, but so did everyone.

Geoff Pullum – I have heard of him. Sociolinguist? Phonologist?

John Robert ‘Haj’ Ross – Not familiar.

Jerzy Rubach – Not familiar.

Edmund Sapir – Famous Americanist and anthropologist. One of the greats.

Sibawayh – Not familiar.

Paul Sidwell – Belligerent shouter. Plus he hates me. But he is very good on Asian linguistics, especially Afroasiatic. He was formerly sane on long-range stuff, in fact, he was a major long-ranger himself. At some point he caught the Campbell Virus and went insane and knows he’s out to insure that no new language family is ever discovered. Whatever. Science goes in fads, don’t you know?

Michael Silverstein –  Actually spoke to him on the phone once. Started out as a Penutianist Americanist. Did you hear that? He actually talked to me on the phone once. He’s gone way off into theory now, most sociolinguistics, but he’s one of the finest minds in our field.

George Starostin – Well, he answered one of my mails anyway. I guess I’ll credit him with that.

Sergei Starostin – Father of George. Moscow long-ranger.

Morris Swadesh – Very famous Americanist also known for lexicostatitistics and long-range views.

R. L. Trask – Specialist in Basque, which he insists is not related to any other language. Natch. Ever notice how all these specialists always insist that their language or family isn’t related to anything else. That’s so they can be special, er, their language or family can be special, and through it, they can be special. It’s actually narcissism in action.

Wilhelm von Humboldt  – Old-timer, very famous.

Anna Wierzbicka – Not familiar.

Three Academic Linguistics Sessions I Took Part In

Sessions on Linguistics papers that a friend of mine put up. On Academia, a lot of people put their papers up for informal peer review, which ends up being a session. They range from pleasant to heated and often the criticisms are quite barbed. This is the way that social science is supposed to be though – peer review is not supposed to be a walk in the park – if it is, you’re defeating the purpose and you’re not really doing science.
So if you wan to know the stuff I read and comment on for kicks, go ahead and dig in. Don’t expect to understand anything unless you have a background in this stuff though. I have a Masters in this subject and 30 years of independent study under my belt, and still most of the people in these sessions completely kick my ass. Historical Linguistics is one of my specialties. I study in it a lot but I don’t think I could write a paper in it. It’s just so beyond my capabilities. I don’t understand how anyone does this stuff unless they have eidictic memories, which most of them apparently do.
I took part in these discussions, so I get an author credit, which is nice as far as it goes.
But if you have a background in Linguistics like Claudius and James Schipper and a few of the others, you may find these discussions interesting.
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A copy of the whole discussion session on the draft paper version of “Some Gününa Yajüch loanword etymologies for Mapudungun,” totaling a full 17 pages (with some tangential discussion) with 20 participants. Special thanks go to those who shared their thoughts on the tangential discussion of the Altaic language hypothesis. As usual, the input will be used to improve the manuscript to hopefully publishable standards.
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No, I Don’t Lack Credibility or Legitimacy

Related to the Delphi Murders, as you well know, I am widely hated. People say have never been right even one time, lie about and make up everything I say and in general am not a credible source. I will use this piece as a general reference to my credibility instead of addressing it endlessly in every post.

However, they have been saying exactly this about many different things I ever written over the last 15 years,  Consistently, I was shown to be right and they were wrong. Not one hater ever apologized and all continued to describe me as discredited and said that nothing I had ever said had been shown to be correct.

Particularly that I have no credibility and have never been right about anything. On the contrary I have been right about many things. I’m even correct about many of my political, philosophical, and other intellectual views because I think over all of these positions intensively before I make a decision about which position or philosophy to take.

As far as the matter at hand, many of my Delphi rumors have been proven correct, mostly correct, or somewhat  correct over the years. When Leigh Kerr came out with his leaks from case documents, many of my haters on Reddit kept remarking at how similar Leaker’s shocking leaks were to and how closely they resembled many of the things I had been saying for years. Well, of course. It’s always like that. The thing is these same people who said so much of what I said was proven right are now saying I have no credibility and I’ve never been right about anything. See how people are?

I recently had a long relationship – mostly just a friendship – with a young woman aged 27-28. She was 30 years my junior. One thing she kept saying over and over is how wise I was and how I had so much wisdom. Of course. I have had other young people on the Net who called me “sensei.”

I am currently the chosen mentor of a few young men in their 20’s, though I don’t mentor them enough. They chose me as their mentor. And I have heard that there are young women whom I am a mentor to, all in their 20’s. They say I’m their hero, idol, or mentor. A man in India recently wrote me and said his father, a very learned man, read my stuff and said that it was most wise and correct view of life he’d ever read in 60 years.

I attracted a huge legion of haters that grew and grew as I got more and more famous, well, Net-famous anyway. Related to this website and the articles I wrote, I have had three offers to be on TV and one offer to be in a documentary movie in Canada. One of the shows that wanted me on was Inside Edition. Yes, Inside Edition invited me on their show. All of you haters out there – how many of you have been offered to appear on the famous TV show Inside Edition? Not one of you.

I’ve been interviewed once on real radio and several times on Net radio, often for a full hour. These have ceased because the politics of the site and mine have drifted apart.

I can’t believe how many well-known people are familiar with this website. I recently had an offer to interview a TV-famous talking head pundit who has been on TV, the radio, and podcasts many times. He has written a few books proving that Republicans have been stealing our elections with voting machines for decades. He asked the name of my site and I told him and he said, “Oh yes! Great website! I’ve read it.” What? What? This famous guy who writes books and goes on TV reads my website?  But he wasn’t the first.

I don’t know it requires to be a “professional freelance journalist,” but I would say that anyone with a BA in Journalism who has a blog qualifies. See here on Rational Wiki, where the excellent authors of this website refer to me as a freelance journalist.

Alt-left

Possibly the earliest reference to an “alternative left” comes from the blog of freelance journalist Robert A. Lindsay in August 2015.[5] Lindsay, describing some on the far-left moving away from identity and social justice politics and moving towards focusing more on Economic Populism, proposed the alt-left as a “mirror” of the alt-right and described it as left-wing on economics and right-wing on social issues.[5][6]

In general the “Alt-Left” could be considered more radical than the “Realist Left”, being to their right on social issues and to their left on most everything else.

It has also been said that I am not a “legitimate” journalist. Look. I graduated from J-School. If you’re doing journalism, you’re a journalist. Julius Stryker was a journalist, an ugly one yet still legitimate. He was hanged for his journalism. Der Strumer was a magazine, a legitimate magazine.

There are no legitimate and illegitimate journalists, newspapers, or magazines. There are only journalists, newspapers and magazines. If they exist they are legitimate.

Really all bloggers who are writing about topical events are journalists. Are they professionals? I have no idea, but some of the better ones may as well be. It really doesn’t matter whether a journalist is paid or not. Does it matter whether an artist’s work sells or not? Does it matter whether a musicians is in an actual money-making band. Does it matter if a writer’s work is published or unpublished? Not really. Plenty of great artists who never sell their stuff or make a nickel off of it.

Also I have published numerous pieces for money in magazines and small local papers. I have even published short fiction in literary magazines. In addition, I recently published a chapter in an academic book on  Linguistics published out of a university in Turkey. It took me five years to write it. I had to make it through two peer reviews with the top names in the field and it passed. So, yes, I am a published author.

I also write for peer reviewed academic journals. In addition, I have refereed for a journal. That means serving on the peer review board. The field I published in is Linguistics.

Yes, I was an assistant editor of a large magazine for a while, but that was 40 years ago.

My enemies trash my writing skills but the general opinion is that I am very good. They’ve been saying this since I was seven years old, believe it or not. I started a novel at age nine. In particular, I do not see many grammatical or spelling errors in my work. This is another accusation. My writing has better punctuation and spelling that most people I write to on the Net.

Since my enemies insist that I am seriously mentally ill, I may as well come clean. I’ve been diagnosed probably ~30 times over the years by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. It is true that I do have a mental disorder, and I do take psychiatric medication for it. Not that there’s any shame in that, despite what my enemies think. I have been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is an anxiety disorder. Most people with OCD are not crazy and do not appear crazy. Maybe a bit distracted. Maybe a little nervous like most anxiety disorder types. Most people I meet don’t treat me like I’m nuts. I don’t say weird things or engage in strange behavior. I’m the most normal guy around.

Furthermore, I’m pretty shy, so I don’t even talk much, and when I do, I have a very soft voice. If you meet me, I look like this brainy nerd soft spoken intellectual college professor guy with preppy clothes. Some people from the Net – my fans – came out to meet me and they were shocked at how introverted I was. I pretty seem like this nicest guy you’ll ever meet. This is of course the complete opposite of how my enemies describe me. If you told people who know me all the crazy stuff my enemies say about me, they would probably fall over laughing because I’m not anything like that.

I do not have any personality disorder on Axis 2. My personality is healthy. I don’t have any issues with sociopathy. I’m not narcissistic at all, but I do have high self-esteem, which is not the same thing.

I generally do not have any serious mood disorder, but I do feel a bit down a lot. I doubt it meets criteria for anything. I don’t suffer from mania.

I don’t have any psychotic disorder and I never have. I’ve never been psychotic for a day in my life.

Perhaps my writing rambles a bit. Who knows? A lot of us writers ramble on. It’s not pathological and it’s not even a sign of bad writing. Read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, or William Burroughs some time. Some of the greatest authors of all “rambled.” We ramble because we write too much. That’s why they have these people called editors. Because most of us serious writers ramble and go on and on and write forever, as in way too much. Editors exist to cut the typical good writers prose down to size.

I’ve already stated many times that I never made up a lie one time on here. I am a professional, and this is a violation of professional ethics.

Many critics think it’s ridiculous that I get access to good sources, official documents, including confidential sources with important people who give information that is secret or supposed to be under wraps. I was trained to do this. I know how to interview and how to acquire, cultivate and keep sources around. I know how to get secret and official documents that are supposed to be confidential.

I talk to people all the time who tell me they will get in trouble if it gets out that they talked to me. I honor strict confidentiality and will do anything to protect my sources. So, yeah, I do know how to get “inside sources,” “special sources,” etc. I’m trained to do that. I’m sort of an investigative reporter because I specialize stories where a lot of the information is supposed to be secret. I’ve also broken some pretty huge stories that even caught the attention of documentary film makers.

In addition, I founded a brand new political movement, so I am a political activist. At one time this movement had 18,000 members on Facebook groups. It’s a movement with its own carefully thought out political philosophy with position statements, manifestos, etc. A political scientist, a professor at a university in Poland, found out about my movement and wrote a couple of articles about it for political science journals. So it was important enough to get written up in the journals.

Alt Left: The Rind Et Al Study on Long-term Effects of Child Abuse: Its History and Ramifications

A famous study on childhood sexual abuse was done 20 years ago by Rind et al. I think I still have a copy of it on my desktop here.

It provoked wild outrage. Even the idiotic American Psychological Association denounced it, notable as one of the most anti-scientific statements this anti-scientific organization has ever issued. Even the US Congress got in on the act. The Congress passed a resolution condemning the study! Congressmen, mostly Republicans, stood up and denounced it forcefully.

The problem? The study came up with the wrong answer. In other words, the truth was wrong and society preferred to believe pleasant lies over unpleasant truths, so the paper was condemned for discovering the wrong facts.

Usually when theory and facts do not match up, we say that the theory was wrong and go back to the drawing board.

However, in this case and with all ideological arguments by ideologues and politics types, when the theory and the facts don’t match up, the facts are wrong, and the facts are not the facts! Why? Because the theory is said to be automatically a priori true. The theory must be true. It cannot be false. So the facts must be wrong and we need to change the facts, wipe out the truth, and say that reality isn’t real, instead, what is real is some fantasy world that doesn’t  exist.

A number of fake “studies” were undertaken by other behavioral “scientists” taking about the Rind findings and finding fault with this or that conclusion. None of the fake studies denouncing it were worth a hill of beans. That they made it into the journals at all shows that pathetic anti-scientific nature of the social sciences, sadly also including Psychology, which has been trying to become more of a science for a long time now.

But by the very fact that it is a social science means that Psychology will always be a fake science in some ways because its findings have to do with people, and the science of people will always be twisted by politics, ideology, bias, and mostly emotional reaction.

It’s hard to get emotional about a new finding in math or physics. Who cares! But findings in the social sciences are inherently emotional because we are always emotional about ourselves and our fellow humans, and anything people are strongly emotional about will always be tainted by bias, propaganda, politics, and ideology. In other words, lies. This is why the social sciences will always be doomed to the charge of being fake sciences and will always carry the guilty burden of physics envy.

Ritter et al conducted a meta-analysis of a huge number of studies on the effects of childhood sexual abuse on children as adults. Child abuse was mostly defined as sexual abuse below age 13, so sex with teenage girls and boys, a massive minefield, was left out.

The available evidence shows that consensual sex with teenage girls and boys and adults causes little if any damage to teenagers. This behavior is illegal not because it is harmful to the teens, as I doubt that it is. Instead it is outlawed because society’s morals say that members of society do not wish to live in a society where adults are free to have sex with teenagers of various ages.

It’s seen as unsavory, unpleasant, disgusting or revolting, and often morally wrong. But this behavior is not psychologically disordered in any way. This is a moral and legal problem, not a psychological one.

Unfortunately we are now in the midst of a truly insane mass hysteria around the sexuality of teenage girls in which 9

In fact, the people who quote the science and the facts about this question are attacked as pedophiles! Because I guess only pedophiles believe in science and truth when it comes to this sort of thing. If you don’t want to be called a pedophile, just spout the usual lies about this subject. As long as you keep lying and don’t ever resort to facts, you’re in the clear!

Fact: nothing published in an academic journal has ever produced evidence suggesting that teen/adult relationships are harmful or predatory. Literally not even one. Anthropological and historical studies all over the world have found that such relationships are common in many societies and no harm was reported in any society ever studied.

How do I know this? I’ve studied them. A particularly large one was done out of Germany in the 1950’s. You can find this evil science of banned truths on the Net, though I can’t tell you where to look. The pedo advocate sites have links to it, but I don’t want to send you there. I suspect the motives of those who wrote this study, but the science seems good.

Furthermore, historically speaking, I’ve learned from the Psychohistorian sites that teen/adult relations were normal in most of the world including the West up until 1900. Zero harm was reported.

Sadly, mass molestation of children was also reported in the West from Roman and Greek times until 1900. Under the crowded urban conditions that arose with the onset of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, where families were packed together in tiny spaces, a great deal of molestation went on. I’m not happy about this at all, but it’s notable that no ill effects were observed in Greece and Rome until the pre-1900 West.

Perhaps the reason for this was that molestation of children was simply an expected fact of life. If you grow up as a female and get molested and all of your woman friends also got molested, it’s seen as a normal thing. There’s usually nothing inherently wrong with this behavior absent physical damage. Things that are normalized in any society tend to cause little if any damage.

I disagree here with some folks like psychohistorians who argue that all sexual abuse of children under any circumstances, normalized or condemned, results in inevitable terrible lifetime damage to the person. They also believe that many other things experienced in childhood cannot but cause horrible lifelong damage.

I doubt if that is true. If you grow up in a society that normalizes this or that behavior, outside of extreme perversion, aggression, and sadism, it’s probably seen as normalized and shrugged off. In other words, the damage of most of these things is relative and depends on the degree to which your society condemns or pathologizes the behavior.

However, for small children, the true victims of child molestation, it is quite different.

Granted, the victims were interviewed when in college so the abuse was a long ways away. Conceivably if they had interviewed them earlier as minors, they would manifested more damage. The findings were shocking:

Rind et al found that the long-term effects of child sexual abuse were typically neither pervasive nor intense, and men reacted much less negatively than women. Ritter et al also found that less than 1

To explicate that further, the effects were shame about having been abused, blame for themselves for allowing it to happen to them, and confusion about the abuse itself.

The confusion may manifest in various ways. A female friend of mine from 10 years ago was molested. Of course she absolutely hates my guts now, but that’s not an unusual reaction for women who get involved with me in some way or another. I’m used to it.

She told me that she was molested by a pedophile in her church group when she was 8 years old. The molester was a young man and he does appear to have been a pedophilic or preferential molester. She told me, “It’s confusing because it feels good but it’s wrong.” This is part of the thinking behind the confusion that kids experience after being abused.

She also told me that she had completely gotten over it by age 50, but she seemed to have gotten over it much before then. I knew two other women (I actually got involved with these two whereas with the other one it was more email and hot phone conversations) of the same age who were sexually abused as girls, one by a probable pedophile and the other by her opportunistic teenage older brother. They both told me that they had gotten over it by age 50 but implied that they had gotten over it much before then.

The shame, blame, and confusion are apparently short-term effects in most victims, and at the very least have dissipated by college age.

The implication is that children or minors may experience those effects for some time in their youth, but these effects mostly go away by adulthood, and there is no lasting damage in almost all (9

Unfortunately, pedophiles have gotten a hold of the Rind et al study and like to wave it around to try to push for legalization of child/adult sexual relations.

That’s not my intention here. I don’t care if most victims get over it. Good for them. I’m happy that they are not damaged in the long term.

Nevertheless, this behavior still needs to be outlawed because I don’t want to live in a society where adults are allowed to have sex with young children below age 13. I don’t have to have a reason. I just don’t like it. That’s all the reason I need.

All Roads Lead to Math and Philosophy

I never considered myself much of a philosopher. But I am now in my 60’s and I sort of find that as all roads used to lead to Rome, all roads seem to lead to philosophy! For a while I was studying famous scholars across all of the humanities. And I began to notice something. As one moved deeper and deeper upwards into the various disciplines, two things happened:

1. Everything started turning into mathematics. I suppose math is really at the root of just about everything if you think about it. We can even reduce many day to day questions or even philosophical bits of wisdom down to binary statements of even equations. Wittgenstein seemed to be getting at this. People have remarked that mathematics is “the ultimate language.”

2. Everything started turning into philosophy. After writing and doing research in their specialty for a long time, scholars all across the humanities started turning late in their careers to philosophy and how their branch of humanities could be explained philosophically. Obviously this is true of literature. Look at literary criticism nowadays. Especially with critical theory, so much of lit crit deals with actual philosophy. Philosophy in a way seems to be the peak one reaches whenever one starts climbing of the stairs of any humanities branch. They all meet in philosophy at the top. If mathematics is the ultimate language, perhaps philosophy is the ultimate mode of thinking. Philosophy after all is the “science of thought” or the “study of human knowledge.” That’s a pretty impressive endeavor right there, just to even attempt to explain such deep things.

At my age, we are said to peak in wisdom. I suppose that’s true. Younger friends have been telling me that lately and some colleagues even call me sensei. Some don’t like it. A 20 year old Asian hottie recently dumped me cruelly:

What’s wrong with you. You’re so different from when I met you. You sound like some philosopher! Come back when you want to act like a man!

Ouch.

I’m not trying to do this.

But in the last few years, I am finding that my writing is tending more and more towards philosophical questions not because I intend to but instead because I seem to be reaching the limits of a lot of the subjects I write about, and when you reach for the sky of most any humanities subject, as I noted, everything starts turning into philosophy. Philosophy is where you end up when you start traveling down any humanities road. Philosophy is where it all starts coming together in some sort of “ultimate explanation.”

To tell the truth, I always thought philosophy was unreadable and stupid. But it’s nothing more than wisdom, and we all want to be wise. And it gives great explanatory power to the world for those of us who are always looking to put together the “big picture” of most anything around us. That’s precisely what philosophy is always trying to do: look for the “big picture” behind anything.

The Preposterous Altaic Controversy, or the Failure of Empiricism and Growth of Faith-Based Dogmatism in Modern Linguistics

Polar Bear: Interesting how North Chinese Mongol types made it down to Korea.

Yes, and keep in mind that that same group on the shores of Shandong Peninsula also became the Japanese. They were together as some sort of Proto-Japanese-Koreans as early as 8,000 YBP. That finding is controversial though because it is based on Altaic Theory and a paper by noted Altaicist Martine Robeets of the Max Plank Institute in Switzerland.

Although Altaic is as obvious a language family as Algonquian, for some reason, a group of fanatics have attacked the idea and have now turned it into the “crazy theory.”

However, I did a recent survey of Altaic linguists, and 7

General Linguistics despises Altaic Theory, it is now an ojbect of ridicule, and if you believe in Altaic you are regarded as a super-kook. I think most linguists are just going along with the fanatics due to peer pressure. Peer pressure is extreme in my field. It’s as bad an 8th grade playground, especially when they are under the cover of anonymity like the losers on the Bad Linguistics Reddit. They’re such cowards that they won’t even tell us their names.

I think the peer pressure and bullying of the erudite by the ignorant obscurantists has gotten so bad that if you said you believed in Altaic, you might have a hard time getting hired at a university nowadays.

Anti-Altaic fanaticism has come out of the US. This is unfortunate and it is because the US is the center of the linguistic scholarly universe. US linguists act as arrogant American exceptionalist “linguistic imperialists of the US hegemon” in the same way that US politics revolves around the arrogant American exceptionalist Deep State theorists promoting the US Empire and the US as the hegemon or dictator of the world.

That most of these linguists are actually on the Left while spouting the worst conservatism and reaction is even more pathetic, but it makes sense if one sees the modern Cultural Left as actually a backwards, reactionary, throwback movement.

As an example, the Cultural Left is now the Sex-Hating Left, the Victorian Left, the Comstockian Left, the Prude Left. Conservatives are more sex-positive than your average dour, sour-faced, turd-in-the-punchbowl, party-pooping Cultural Leftist.

Problem with this is that like American foreign policy know-it-all dimwits, US linguist know-it-all dimwits leading the charge against Altaic overwhelmingly know absolutely nothing whatsoever about Altaic Theory. They’re just going along with crowd, and following the bully-boys, throwing rocks and calling names at the designated victims, the Altaicists. Like I said above, it’s 8th grade all over again.

It’s pathetic, especially if you realize that these are grown men and not pubescent children engaging in such theatrics and over the top histrionics.

As an example, the Wikipedia article on Altaic has been completely ruined by these fanatics, and it stands now more as a monument to know-nothingism in the social sciences than to any sort of actual empiricism. It’s a sad day when we linguists join the rest of the social “science” crowd in their war against facts and truth in favor of ideology being led by ideologues masquerading as scientists.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

As a result of this “virus pandemic” of ignorant anti-Altaicism coming out of the land of the free, a large majority of linguists reject Altaic Theory. I might point out that this stupidity virus didn’t spread too far across the pond.

European linguists still generally believe in Altaic, though most don’t know it well. I have seen these poor sods wander into linguistic debates shaking their heads wondering why the Hell Altaic is even controversial at all, when it’s really about as easily proven as Uto-Aztecan. They’re dumbfounded.

So this ignorance epidemic is a lot less contagious than we first feared. The anti-Altaic virus is not particularly harmful for those who catch it. The coarse is mild but very long-lasting. The only notable symptom is being reduced to drooling, screeching, straitjacket cases whenever the word Altaic is mentioned. The prognosis is good, but some might be cooking a heart attack or stroke if they don’t calm down soon.

Please note though that my research has proven that among those who specialize in Altaic,  the overwhelming majority (7

Praise for my Work

I hope I haven’t published this before, but if I did, hey, chalk it up to vanity, eh?

These two glowing  recommendations are from  this fellow. I really like him a lot!

Peter S Piispanen Stockholm University, Graduate Student

On my work below, presently a 242 page, well, let’s face it, at this point, it’s basically a book, right? I have not yet found a publisher for it, though I have received some rave reviews from such far-flung places as Japan and Russia.

Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family

Intelligibility studies are both interesting and of importance for the study of phonology, grammar, historical linguistics, the effect of language contact situations, as well as the sociocultural factors influencing languages perceived as high or low status, and so on.

Lindsay here presents the intelligibility between many of the Slavic languages in great detail – and this clears up many common and unspoken questions about these languages…the paper comes well recommended!

This paper was actually published, believe it or not, and it had to go through two peer reviews to get there.  The second peer review included the world’s top Turkologists.

Here’s the cite in case any of you are interested:

Lindsay, Robert. 2016. “Mutual Intelligibility among the Turkic Languages,” in Süer Eker and Ülkü Şavk. Çelik. Endangered Turkic Languages Volume I: Theoretical and General Approaches: Before the Last Voices Are Gone (Tehlİkedekİ Türk Dİllerİ Cİlt I: Kuramsal Ve Genel Yaklaşimlar Son Sesler Duyulmadan), Ankara, Turkey/Astana, Kazakhstan: International Turkish-Kazakh University and International Turkic Academy.

I also came up with the subtitle of the series – “Before the Last Voices Are Gone.” We went round and round about a few choices until we settled on that one. It has a nice literary beauty to it, I think.

I never did get a hard copy of that book I am published in. It was extremely hard to get a copy in part because it cost $75 and also because it would have had to have been shipped from Turkey to the US, and I understand that shipping costs for such things are just awful.

I have an e-copy of course, but it’s just not the same thing as a book, right? A book – you know, that hard thing with pages in it that you actually hold in your hand? Remember those things from a long time ago, maybe before some of you were born? If you don’t remember what a book is, perhaps ask your parents. They should definitely know what a book is.

It seems that a lot of publications are going pretty much e-publication only with no hardcover. Color me disappointed. No folks, it’s not the same thing. It’s just not. Sorry.

Mutual Intelligibility Among the Turkic Languages

A massive paper by Robert Lindsay on the study of mutual intelligibility of the Turkic languages, dispelling many myths and including language examples, historical considerations, and more – heartily recommended for any Turkologist or student of any Turkic language!

Why Destroy the Reputation or Ruin the Career of any Scholar?

There are a group of linguists on the Net who have dedicated themselves to the cause of completely destroying my reputation in that field. Whenever anyone links to any of my work, often saying how great it is, one of these brainwashed clowns jumps in to say, “Robert Lindsay lacks all credibility in Linguistics. He is not a credible source of linguistic knowledge.” Usually a few other pieces of shit jump in too.

This is an odd statement. You mean in all of my work, there is not even one single true statement? That would be remarkable if it were true.

Even more curious is why they are on this kick in the first place. I’m not out to destroy anyone’s scholarly reputation. I’m not out to destroy anyone’s career or life or whatever.

What do I care? So they say things that aren’t true? Ok, then they are like 9

In particular, I do not have time to destroy scholars who publish nonsense. I assure you they are out there, but even they publish a lot of great work full of great data and brilliant conclusions. On a few subjects, they are so wrong it is pathetic. But why should I try to destroy their careers over that? Isn’t that a bit vicious?

I am not sure if there are many scholars in this country who deserves to have his scholarly reputation ruined, and of those that do, it will never happen anyway because they are printing lies that the Establishment wants to gobble up. Even the ones most laughably full of it have legions of SJW followers biding on every word they utter.

Why should I try to get some dangerous Establishment liar or some deranged SJW kook fired from their job? Over what they said? Isn’t that a violation of free speech and the principle of academic freedom?

Alt Left: About Those “Worthless Social Science Degrees”

The argument that social science degrees are absolutely worthless for getting a job in modern society has been coming up for decades, but it has grown louder in the last ten years.

Supposedly these degrees are absolutely useless in terms of finding a job, so they are a  waste of money. Further, they are a waste of society’s money.

This argument mostly comes from conservatives, but some liberals have taken it up too. I’d like to point out that the roots of this argument lie in laissez faire free market neoliberal capitalism. So all of you making this argument are in bed with Milton Friedman. I hope you’re happy.

This is so because the only degrees that are said to be worthwhile are those degrees that are useful in a sociopathic hyper-individualistic anything goes free market economy such as we are blighted with here in the US.

The only degrees that are worthwhile are those that will get Bill Gates,  Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Howard Schmidt, Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Jobs,  or other semi-sociopathic heartless maniac billionaires to hire you for whatever capitalist scam they are cooking up at the moment.

And everything else, everything that doesn’t allow you to be a cog in a lying, cheating, thieving corporate world, is completely and utterly useless. Because the Market is everything and everything is the Market.

In such a society it should not be surprising that conservatives, mostly conservative males, say that anything other than a math, science, tech, business or management degree is utterly worthless.

Japan is thinking of phasing out all of its social sciences in the next decade or two. There have been many calls to reduce or eliminate social science programs at US universities. These calls go right along with the total commodification of life that we are experiencing.

Furthermore, they display a contempt for knowledge and the scholarship needed to obtain it as a core value of human existence. Why are we here anyway? How about to learn? That would be one of my arguments. Not that most folks have any use for much learning, but the species as a whole does. It’s a value. No you can’t slap a dollar sticker on it and it often has little or no monetary value.  In modern society that means it is utterly worthless. Why? Because it doesn’t make a buck.

How SJW's Are a Threat To Human Intelligence Itself

Thinking Mouse: “What about the exceptions?!?” is good for research, though. You want to know as much as possible.

Even in research, we don’t care much about that. I write for academic journals. In a lot of fields, we don’t care about exceptions. We just look for a statistical effect. Of course we have to discuss the exceptions statistically in our findings, but in a lot of fields, no one really cares about them. The purpose of life is looking for patterns that help you to explain reality. The SJW What about the exceptions? nonsense is intended to completely stop humans for seeking or discussing any patterns in humans because all patterns in humans are necessarily generalizations, stereotypes, and various forms of bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and all the rest of the folly . On Quora, they often ask people with genius+ IQ’s (140+) how they think. Over and over you hear that they are always looking for patterns everywhere they go in life. If all patterns in human life are generalizations, stereotypes, and various forms of bigotry, and if What about the exceptions? nullifies all generalizations, we are talking about wiping out the very pillars of human thought. All this dangerous silliness is coming out of postmodernism, a theory which denies even the possibility of truth or the ability of humans to discover it. That’s why in all Identity Politics like feminism, gay rights, trans rights, anti-racism, all the rest of the foolishness, you always get hand-waving away of the scientific facts they don’t like because the facts conflict with their precious theory. All Identity Politics is based on the primacy of theory over fact, and as such, all IP is intellectually fraudulent. The fact that it is mandatory for all humans in the West to go along with a manifestly intellectually fraudulent and provably false set of theories on pain of job firing, career destruction, etc. is one of the most anti-scientific and anti-intellectual outrages of our modern era. I lay this whole travesty at the foot of the intellectual joke called the Cultural Left, a miasma of propaganda and lies masquerading as truth and science.  The SJW’s are an actual menace to human intelligence itself.

How to Define Sexual Orientation – Behavior or Attraction?

It is often said that the statement “Straight men who have sex with men” is an oxymoron because any man who has sex with men is at least bisexual. I disagree.

It depends on how you want to define sexual orientation.

First of all we need to realize that most gay men have had sex with women, and many continue to do so. And all the talk about married gay men. Most lesbians have had sex with men, and many continue to do so. So none of these gay men (almost all of them) who have had sex with women are really gay? So none of these lesbians (almost all of them) who have had sex with men are really lesbians?

I do not define sexual orientation on behavior. Behavior is one thing and orientation is another. They tend to line up pretty well but not completely and not always.

Orientation is the largely biological tendency or setup of what at least men and many women are attracted to. A lot of lesbians appear to be biologically set up to be this way.

Behavior is who you have sex with, which usually lines up fairly well but sometimes not completely with orientation.

It’s well known that when women are not around, straight men (men who are attracted to women only and men not at all) will have sex with men.

Many lesbians who have little or no attraction to men nevertheless have sex with them, often quite a bit of sex. Note how many prostitutes are lesbians.

Many straight women will have sex with other women in all-female institutions if there are no men around.

The people engaging in this opportunistic homosexuality are often not bisexual; instead they are just deprived straights fulfilling their sexual needs with the same sex as the opposite sex is not available.

The only men who are bisexual are those are who attracted to both sexes.

We also get into how people identify, which is important. I know women who have sex with men and women but identify as straight, as they only have relationships with men. I know a woman who identifies as lesbian though she has sex with men too because she can only fall in love with a woman. This woman was a 25-75, which normally should mean lesbian-leaning bisexual, but she defined herself as lesbian.

Many men are 90-10’s or 80-20’s (very straight leaning bisexuals), but as they have no interest in and refuse to act on their male interest, they identify as straight, which is reasonable. Many women who define themselves as straight to me tell me that they have some lesbian interest but refuse or choose not to act on it.

The GLBTQWTF SJW’s have been wildly antiscientific about sexual orientation since forever. You almost never read anything truthful, factual, or scientific about sexual orientation in the popular press and increasing even in academic journals. That is because the debate has been taken over by GLBTQWTF SJW’s who have twisted all the science into propaganda and lies for their nonheterosexual orientations.

There are very few clinicians or scholars who are doing actual scientific work in sexual orientation nowadays because GLBTQWTF SJW’s are utterly hostile to even having science look at the question.

Joe Kort is a gay psychologist. He is one of the few humans in the US who is actually doing real work on sexual orientation. He has written a book called Straight Guise about straight men who have sex with men. He lists all the different reasons why they do this.

Kort defines them as straight because they are not attracted to men or men’s bodies.

Alt Left: Why Does Albania Have the Lowest Average IQ in the Whole of Europe?

Answered on Quora.

I am thinking that perhaps the IQ of Albania or of the Balkans as a whole is in error. A lot of Lynn’s data has not held up well. His figures on Vietnam, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, Croatia, and Northern Italy vs. Southern Italy are all false. Dr. Lynn seems to cherry pick his data to go along with his “latitude = IQ” hypothesis.

Someone sent me an article in a recent journal testing the IQ of Croatia. I forget what the score was, but it was ~100. That’s much higher than Lynn’s 90. I have a feeling that Lynn’s scores for those other Balkan lands may be off too. Maybe it is time to do some more testing.

A Look at the Altaic Question, a Current Controversy in Linguistics

               Turkic    Tungusic*        Written Mongolian
1P sing.:
 
nominative      ban      bi               bi
oblique stem    man-     min-             min-
2P sing.:
nominative      san      chi    (<*ti)    si
oblique stem    san-     chiin- (<*tin)   sin-
(e.g. Evenki and Manchu)

The Altaic argument is one of the biggest controversies in current linguistics. It is said that Linguistics has decided that Altaic does not exist. Actually, the field has not decided that at all. The consensus in the field is that Altaic is still an open question. In other words, they are fighting about it. The field is split up into Pro-Altaicists and Anti-Altaicists. It’s not true that the field has decided in favor of the Anti-Altaicists. The Antis say that there is no such thing as Altaic. The Pros said that Altaic exists, and here is the evidence. The consensus instead rejects both positions and says we don’t know if Altaic exists or not. There is a big difference between we don’t know if it exists (maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t) and it doesn’t exist. One statement is uncertainty and the other statement is negative. According to Anti-Ataicists, every time a human can’t make up their mind about something yes or no, they actually are saying no. No they’re not! They’re not saying yes or no. They are rejecting both positions and saying instead that they are undecided. What the Anti-Altaicists are doing is akin to saying everyone who answers undecided on a political candidate poll is actually saying that want to vote against the person! The entire basis of political polling would change. The Anti-Altaicists are typically quite vicious, while the other side is not. The safe position is Anti-Altaicism, so a lot of wimpy linguists too scared to stand up and fight have sought refuge in the negative position. Furthermore, Linguistics is like an 8th grade playground. Some positions are openly ridiculed. Pro-Altaicism is openly ridiculed, and taking that position is seen as prima facie evidence that a linguist is a crank, an idiot or a fool. I would imagine that if you told a hiring committee that you believed in Altaic, it would be harder to get hired than if you took the negative stand. And I could imagine that being pro-Altaic might keep you from getting tenure. Not only are the Antis vicious (all of them are vicious, bar none), but many of them are complete idiots and fools, as seen above in the preposterous conflation of uncertain opinions with negative opinions above. The fools on Bad Linguistics Reddit are evidence of this. They all hate Altaic because they are wimps who are too afraid of a fight, so they take a safe position. They bashed me for saying Altaic was real, saying it was evidence of what a kook and crank I am, when in fact, Altaic exists is a completely acceptable position to take. Many famous linguists have supported Altaic in the past, and a number of top linguists currently support it. Anti-Altaic papers are often vicious from an academic paper standpoint. In academic papers, you are supposed to be restrained and keep your strong opinions to yourself. Not so with anti-Altaicists. They are over the top insulting and ridiculing towards Altaicists. Altaicists have accumulated quite a bit of evidence in support of their position. The pronouns above prove Altaic for me. All I have to do is look at those pronoun sets (and there are other pronouns that also line up precisely like above) and I know it’s real. This is what Joseph Greenberg means when he says that proving whether language families exist and reconstructing proto-languages are two different things. You figure out a language family by simple inspection. Greenberg uses the mass comparison method, and it has worked very well for him for African languages. His Amerindian languages proposals have not been well accepted, but it’s clear that there is a large family called Amerind. There is 1st person m and second person n all through the family, occurring ~450 times. Personal pronouns are rarely borrowed, and entire personal pronoun sets are almost never borrowed (Piraha did borrow all of its pronouns, but Piraha is bizarre in many ways). Joanna Nichols, a current spokesperson for the conservative Linguistics Establishment as good as any other (and a fine linguist to boot) states that the current consensus is that there is no such thing as Amerind and that those 450 similar pronouns are all cases of borrowing. Wow! Personal pronoun sets (not just one pronoun but an entire paradigm) were borrowed 450 times in the Americas! That’s one of the most idiotic statements that one could make, but this is the current consensus of linguistic “science.” Dumb or what? A much better position would be to say that Amerind is uncertain (maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t), as the negative position is preposterous and idiotic right on its face. Nichols has also stated that all of the Altaic pronouns were borrowed. That’s even more idiotic because unlike in the Americas, entire large pronoun paradigms exist in Altaic where they do not exist in Amerind. Paradigms, especially pronoun paradigms, are almost never borrowed, and paradigm evidence is considered excellent evidence of genetic relationship. English good, better, best is the same paradigm as German gut, besser, besten. That’s an odd way to set up comparatives, and the fact that that comparative set lines up perfectly is what is known as a paradigm. That one paradigm right there ought to be enough to prove the relatedness of English and German, even leaving out all other massive evidence for relatedness. Greenberg says that after you decide that languages form a family, then you set about using the comparative method of reconstructing proto-languages, finding sound correspondences and whatnot. The current conservative or reactionary position of the field is that first you reconstruct the proto-languages and then and only then can you prove a language family. That’s absurd. They’re in effect doing everything ass backwards. Incidentally, long ago Edward Sapir agreed with Greenberg that language families were proven first by inspection and only later did reconstruction take place. Sapir also came up with the Amerind hypothesis decades before Greenberg. Sapir is quoted as saying:

Getting down to brass tacks, how are you going to prove Amerind 1st person m and second person n other than genetic relatedness? – Edward Sapir, 1917?

Who was Edward Sapir? Only one of the greatest linguists in history. I can look right there at that pronoun paradigm set and tell you flat out that those three language families are related. It’s not possible that all of those languages borrowed all of those pronouns. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen. It’s beyond the realm of statistical probability. A statement that is outside the realm of statistical probability is considered to be for all intents and purposes nonfactual. Ask anyone Statistics major. Not only has Proto-Altaic been reconstructed at least in a tentative and initial form, but there are regular sound correspondences running through all of the comparative lexicon of the three proto-languages: Proto-Turkic, Proto-Tungusic and Proto-Mongolian. Regular sound correspondences are another thing we look for. It would mean that every time you have VlV in Language A, you have VnV in Language B (V = vowel). We then say that Language A l -> Language B n. Regular sound correspondences are considered to be excellent evidence of genetic relatedness. In fact, an entire etymological dictionary of Altaic has been produced, reconstructing a lot of Proto-Altaic lexicon along with the cognates in the daughter languages. This dictionary runs to over 1,000 pages, and it is a true work of art in the social sciences. The entire etymological dictionary has been rejected out of hand by the Anti-Altaicists. However, they have not directly attacked or tried to prove many of the etymologies wrong. They simply looked at it, said it’s junk, laughed at it and ridiculed it, and moved on. This conservative or even reactionary mood has been the norm in Historic Linguistics for decades now. The field has become very stick in the mud about this. However, in much of the rest of Linguistics, especially Sociolinguistics, Language Acquisition, and Applied Linguistics, the field has reached consensus on many a silly thing that makes little to no sense at all other than that it sounds very Politically Correct. Linguistics being a social science, PC and SJW Cultural Left culture has infected the field in an awful way. You must understand that Cultural Left views did not just appear in a few select social sciences. Instead this ideology swept through the entire social sciences, sparing not a one. In terms of a March Through the Institutions for this ideology, it was akin to a rapid hostile takeover. Cultural Left and SJW views are now mandatory in Linguistics. If you refuse to go along, you will not get hired or get tenured. If your reputation is too bad, you may not be able to publish in academic journals or books. Alas, my field has been poisoned with this Cultural Left toxin or venom like all the rest of them!

I Am Now a Published Author

Here. You can download my first published work above. I was published for the first time this spring in a book called:

Before the Last Voices Are Gone: Endangered Turkic Languages, Volume 1: Theoretical and General Approaches

This is the first volume of a four volume set called:

The Handbook of Endangered Turkic Languages

The first volume alone runs to 512 pages. Articles are in English, Russian and Turkish, variably. It was published out of the International Turkish-Kazakh University in Istanbul, Turkey and the International Turkic Academy in Astana, Kazakhstan. These are two campuses that are part of one joint Turkey-Kazakhstan shared university. I contributed one chapter that runs from pages 311-384 titled:

Mutual Intelligibility among the Turkic Languages

It’s 83 pages long and has ~100 references. It may have taken me 500 hours to write that chapter. Tell that to my enemies who claim I do not work, ok? When all is said and done, I figure I may make 75 cents an hour on this work. But this is how academic publishing works. There’s just no money in it. It’s all a labor of love. In addition, most work is done by professors who have to publish as part of their professorship (publish or perish), so in effect, their professor salary is covering their publishing. That document had to go through two rather grueling peer reviews. I had to make many changes in it to get it to publication. The second peer review had to get past the top Turkologists in the world today, and I am amazed that I made it through review to be honest. Most people publishing in academic books or journals are academics, professors working at universities. There are only a few of us independent scholars out there (I am an independent scholar because I am not at a university). Also most folks have PhD’s, and I only have a Masters, but there are some folks with Masters publishing academically. In general, this is a rather selective game where everyone is hyperspecializing as is the trend nowadays. Although my mentor at the project calls me a Renaissance Man, I wonder if the autodidact/polymath is an endangered species if not extinct. Everyone has to specialize nowadays. For instance, common knowledge in this particular field would be that the only folks who could publish in Turkology would be linguists with a PhD in Linguistics, preferably with a emphasis in Turkology. Beyond that, they may prefer say 5-10 years publishing in the field of Turkology in addition to a professorship in Turkic linguistics. You can see where this is headed. I am not knocking it. I am just pointing out that microspecialization is the game now. What follows is that since I lack the PhD or professorship or any background at all in Turkology, I should not be allowed to be published in this field, or if by some error I am somehow mispublished, all of my work should be promptly ignored as done by a nonspecialist who could not possibly know what he is talking about. Needless to say, I don’t agree with that, and I carry on tilting at windmills like a good deluded Renaissance Man who never got the memo and wouldn’t read it if he did. The odd thing is that I knew nothing about Turkology until I plunged into this mess. I had written a short piece of mutual intelligibility in Turkic, as MI is one of my pet subjects and put it up on Academia on my scholarly papers site, and a professor in Turkey happened to read it. He wrote to me telling me he agreed with me, he wanted me to expand it into a document, and they would publish it for me. So off I went, down the Turkic rabbit hole. If you study the very high IQ types (140+), they tend to go on “crazes” like this. They also lose interest after a bit, drop the craze and move on to some new craze. Dilettantism for the win. I also have an anxiety disorder called OCD which is well controlled. A good side of it though is that you tend to do dive down rabbit holes a lot, and the OCD makes you burrow maniacally into the rabbit hole with the notion that one is going to become the world’s leading expert on whatever rabbit hole you are digging in now. So for one or two years, I went absolutely berserk into Turkic, whereas before I scarcely knew a thing about it. The end result can be read above. The sad result is that either due to the savant stuff or the mental quirk, I also tend to lose interest in my rabbit holes after a bit. I follow them about halfway to China, make several revolutions around the molten core, and after a year or so, come up for air gasping with incipient Black Lung, and next thing you know, I am bored, and it’s onto a new craze. It’s a bit silly, but we all have our crosses to lug, and as eccentricities go, there are many worse things that dabbling, er hobbyism, er dilettantism, er polymathy, er autodidactism, er Renaissance Manism. Most of you will probably not find this very interesting, as it is pretty specialized stuff that is mostly of interest to people in the specialty, linguists and those interested in the subject. It’s not exactly for the general reader. But if you have any interest in these languages, you might enjoy it. I expanded Turkic from 41 to 53 languages, eliminated some languages, turned some into dialects, turned some dialects into full languages, combined languages into a single tongue, created some new languages out of scratch and did quite a bit of work on the history of the languages. I also reworked the classification a bit because I thought it could be done better. Even though this work does not pay much, the pay is in fame if it is at all. My work will either be accepted by the field or rejected outright or somewhere in between. I have already earned the praises of some of the world’s top Turkologists, much to my surprise. If I get fame, well, I get quoted in papers, maybe invited to conferences, and maybe even referenced in Wikipedia. There are groupies in all status fields, and what the heck, there may even be linguist groupies. If not, there are always starry eyed coeds dreaming of professor types to mentor them. I am already working that angle as it is. Writer Game, Scholar Game, there’s Game for everything. Or my work does not go over and maybe the field decides I do not know what I am talking about. Crap shoot, like most of life’s endeavors. Roll em, and wish upon a star…snake eyes! PS. The title of the series, Before the Last Voices Are Gone, was created by me. I think it has a nice little song.

Glaciers Are Sexist

Glaciers, Gender, and Science

A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research

  1. Mark Carey
  2. M Jackson
  3. Alessandro Antonello
  4. Jaclyn Rushing

Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. Email: carey{at}uoregon.edu

Abstract

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers.

feminist glaciology, feminist political ecology, feminist postcolonial science studies, folk glaciology, glacier impacts, glaciers and society

No, seriously, this is not a joke. See here. Apparently, according to science, glaciers are sexist. Who knew? I would say they are also racist. I mean come on, they are lily White! Ever seen a Black glacier? Ever seen a MexicanT glacier? Me either. So glaciers exist in a de facto Jim Crow/apartheid segregated environment in which Black and Mexicant glaciers are excluded from existing via pure glacier racism. Future strategies to combat this injustice may include busing (busing glaciers from one place to the other via glacier buses to relive glacier-caused inequity, forced integration by the creation of alternate forms of glaciers such as Black glaciers and Mexicant glaciers in order to increase much needed glacier diversity, and affirmative action by promoting more diverse glaciers in the literature which is dominated by boring and oppressive descriptions of “dead White glaciers.” The Cultural Left has been bordering on self parody for some time now but recently they have gone so full retard that you literally cannot tell the difference between actual Cultural Left stuff and their enemies sarcastic attempts to make fun of them.

A Brief Rundown on the Academia Website

Who joins the Academia.edu website? Contrary to popular myth, the site is not just for working and emeritus academics Sort of helps if you are going to a university or better yet graduated from one. Grad student? The site awaits. Got a Masters? Better yet. Got a PhD? Now you’re talking. Postdoc? Academia was made for you. Yes, many actual working or emeritus academics are on the site. The site is used by them to publish work of theirs that they are ok with putting in the public domain for free. But it can also be used by independent scholars, which is what I am in addition to holding a graduate degree in the Humanities. There are quite a few independent scholars out there. In some cases, some of the best and most cutting edge work in the field is being done by them. Independent scholars and better yet people with graduate degrees can also and often do publish in academic journals, write academic books and sit on review boards for academic journals. Actually, I am an independent scholar, and I actually sit on a review board for an academic journal published in the Near East. In addition some excellent work is published in academic journals by people who are actually working in the field outside of academia. For instance, in a lot of chemistry and engineering journals, scientists working in the private sector publish most of the information. Their research is of course funded by their corporate employer. In addition to publishing work by academics and scholars, there are many impromptu peer review sessions on there. On the right side of the homepage it says Sessions. There will be a few sessions up there that Academia thinks I may be interested in listed. Some folks who have written a paper that is not yet published put it out on the site for impromptu peer review. They invite other scholars to participate in the session or you just ask to join. The debate can get pretty ferocious at times. I just came from a session on the laryngeal theory of Proto Indo European or PIE. This is one of the oldest long-standing problems in PIE Historical Linguistics. They were going at it like wildcats in there, and some of the people in the session were tearing into the rather arrogant and narcissistic academic who wrote the paper.

Historical Linguistics Mired in Stick in the Mud Conservatism

Historical Linguistics is one of the more brutal subfields in Linguistics, probably because you can hardly prove much of anything. It involves looking at languages and arranging them into families and then arranging them in the families in a proper fashion. So an essential aspect of Historical Linguistics is the discovery of new language families and the elaboration of existing ones. The former is pretty much over in this field because this silly discipline has decided that there will be no more large or old language families discovered. Nonsensically, this has resulted in an utterly idiotic proliferation of insipid “isolates” which are languages that cannot be proven to be related to others. But actually, long-rangers have already stacked most all of the world’s languages into decent families and in their view there are no isolates left. In addition, there are all sorts of idiotic small families with a couple to separate members, and said family is not related to anything else. I guess nothing’s related to anything then! The bizarre fact is that this preposterous fake science takes great pride in this silly nihilism. Obviously every language is related to every other language ultimately because surely language arose only once in mankind’s history. Nevertheless, Linguistics insists that this obvious fact is not proven, so I guess it’s not even a fact. Instead the dead solid truth is that somehow there scores of isolates and silly small language families that have no relations. Surely that is a false conclusion. The only way it could be true is if language arose scores of times all the way down to a few thousand years ago. There were scores of bands of humans who had no language whatsoever except grunts and sign language, and they all independently developed language scores of times in the last ~50,000 years. It was an incredible case of parallel development, the most amazing the world has ever seen. Because this is the only  way that Linguistics’ crazy conclusion could be true. So Linguistics is now stating essentially is that this is what happened – language being independently developed all over the world down to the last several thousand years. Dumb, huh? Historical Linguistics also involves the reconstruction of dead languages or earlier aspects of existing languages. The dead languages have left no record and are often 7-10,000 years old. The earlier phases of existing tongues also have often left no record. So it is unprovable guesswork guessing at what ancient languages looked like, with no real way to prove if anyone is right or wrong because the languages no longer exist. On top of that, the field has become mired in stick in the mud conservatism such that I doubt if any new ancient language families are going to proven in my lifetime. The conservatives keep moving the goalposts, and no evidence is ever good enough. Linguistics is ecstatic about this because endlessly moving the goalposts so you can never prove anything anymore means that Linguistics is now really groovy and scientific and this cures their physics envy. Really it’s just another fake science in the social sciences, although a lot of the more basic work is indeed factually and empirically based. So the field encompasses a lot of excellent empirical based work. In addition, there are a number of preposterous leftwing shibboleths that everyone in the field has agreed are settled truth. Linguistics has adopted these silly ideas because they are leftwing and PC, and the field is at the heart of SJW Central Command. Mixed in with these silly politically based agreed upon facts (for which there is typically no evidence whatsoever) there is this prideful stubbornness and ultra-conservative attitude in Historical Linguistics because the way to be all sciency is to deny forever more any new language families. Because that cures our physics envy and makes us feel all sciency. Actually many of the long-rangers have gathered excellent evidence for their work, all of which is rejected. For instance, Altaic now has a 1,000 page etymological dictionary of all things and there are many reconstructed forms and a great deal of commonality in basic morphology, core vocabulary, pronouns and language structure. We also have quite a few actual paradigms which are impossible to derive in unrelated languages. The long-rangers churn out many papers and here is where the real science is. They are doing dramatic work and proving  a lot of new things. On the other hand, the fake science folks on the other end chant over and over in Gregorian fashion, “You didn’t prove it. You didn’t prove it. You didn’t prove it.” No matter what evidence is assembled and presented, the response is always this autistic nihilism of “You didn’t prove it.” The arguments of many of the deniers have been destroyed already. The deniers now take the preposterous position that there has been mass borrowing of personal pronouns in Asia and the Americas in particular. Such mass borrowing of personal pronouns would have had to have taken place on a scale almost never seen on Earth. In fact, personal pronouns are borrowed only very rarely. In Altaic we have pronoun paradigms cascading down through person and number, all lined up like the Marines in perfect formation. This is waved away with “You didn’t prove it.” In fact, the standard line in Linguistics as voiced with complete seriousness by one of the top linguists in the field is that the stunning pronoun paradigms in Altaic were all borrowings. That statement is insipid on its face. It doesn’t even qualify as theory because it’s not even possible. They might as well say, “Bats flew out my butt” as there  was mass borrowing of entire pronoun paradigms. In addition, Altaic has a huge amount of core vocabulary in common including forms that match in say Turkish and say Evenki. Apparently the Evenki and the Ottomans borrowed from each other. How? Bats flew out my butt. Typically and for many decades now, all of these cognates in core vocabulary are said to be borrowings. There are specialists who spent most of their careers ferreting out these “borrowings” most of which are actual cognates. These men frittered away a lot of their careers on a theory that is obviously false. For the only way Altaic could not be true is if this vast amount of borrowing actually took place. The level of borrowing of core vocabulary postulated for Altaic is on a scale that is far beyond the language borrowing we have seen anywhere else on Earth. In other words, it didn’t happen. Bats flew out my butt. Once again it fails even the hypothesis stage because hypotheses are supposed to be plausible and anti-Altaic fails that those grounds alone. Being a Historical Linguistics conservative is the hip and cool thing to be in Linguistics, and the peer pressure in the field is worse than an eighth grade playground. If you take a liberal position that says that some ancient language family like Altaic exists, the peer pressure on you as a fraud, idiot, kook, crank and loser is unbelievable. I am amazed that there are any liberals left promoting daring new ideas on ancient language families.

Sokal on the Cultural Left

I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. -Alan Sokal

Sokal of course is the professor who was the author of the Sokal Hoax in which Sokal wrote a fake article that made absolutely no sense whatsoever and submitted it to a Cultural Left deconstructionist type journal. Incredibly, the journal published it. Later Sokal admitted that he had written the article as a prank to show that decontructionists in modern academia ultimately are not saying anything that either makes sense or has any substance at all.

By this hoax he showed the modern academic obsession with postmodern deconstructionism to be essentially pure nonsense and abstruse blathering on and on about nothing.

Ultimately the postmodern deconstructionist Cultural Left university crowd is writing a lot of very fancy articles full of thousand dollar words that are very hard to understand but which reveals at its core puzzling statements that seemed nearly opaque to anything resembling comprehension.

I read (or at least look at them since there’s no point in bothering to read them) quite a few papers like this on the academia site on a regular basis. In certain fields in the social sciences, most if not all papers being written are coming from this ludicrous and even disturbing point of view which is something like PC on steroids.

Above Sokal pens something above that would not look out of place in the Alt Left. In fact, it goes along well with our views.

Just Wrote for 24 Hours Straight

I just spent 24 hours pretty much doing nothing but writing. Well to be precise, I was writing and reading – reading stuff to research for my writing, but it was all for the same project.

And I couldn’t be happier. I was happy as a clam the whole time. It wasn’t even work really. It was more like going on vacation or going off somewhere fun for the weekend. It’s pretty much of a joke to even call this work. It would be like having a job where you got paid for doing nothing but having fun.

Of course it was stressful in a sense (but I enjoy that sort of stress) because the sort of work I was doing was sort of like academic research that might go into a journal or an academic publication, something along those lines. So it’s scientific writing in a sense. One thing about doing scientific writing or any sort of scientific research is that you’re wrong.You’re wrong all of the time. And you’re always figuring out how you were wrong and going back and changing stuff. Eventually after however many revisions, you probably have something down that is more or less correct at least for now.

There is also a lot of reorganization going on for flow and structure and at the sentence level for typos and better structured and flowing sentences. Redundant material needs to be removed, all the time. You are always finding different parts of the paper that finally start matching up to each other, and you spent a lot of time marrying them.

Furthermore, your source material is often simply wrong or even unscientific.

I have to deal with nationalism a lot in my work, and nationalism is hardly ever rational, scientific or even correct. It’s just wrong, usually a good part of the time. Nationalist narrative for most any nationalist group tends to be an endless series of lies with a fair amount of correct material thrown in. But the correct material gets exaggerated or extended. Ethnic nationalist ideology boils down to

Our group is 10

Nationalist discourse is not only not rational or logical, it’s usually not even correct. Why not just read fairy tales instead?

Given that nationalist discourse is usually just an endless pack of lies, exhaltations and condemnations, it’s hard to see how any rational person could be taken in by it. But you will find in Europe that in any country you study, most any person you meet is some sort of an ethnic nationalist retard. This includes PhD students, full PhD professors, celebrities, noted scholars, etc. That these folks are said to be scientists is particularly shocking because they are so full of shit. However, they are social scientists, and most social scientists are not even practicing science anyway.

Why Most Social Sciences and Social Scientists are Pitiful, Laughable and Absurd

It seems cruel to say that most social sciences are jokes and most social scientists are clowns, but that’s really the sad and painful, even heartbreaking, truth.

Generally speaking, most social scientists are not even practicing science anyway. They just say they are. I do not know what they are practicing. Maybe politics, ideology or propaganda. Most social scientists are ideologues of some sort or another. It’s pretty hard to find a rational. And what is stunning about these social scientist retards is that they are always going on and on about,

“Our science has proved this! Our science has proved that! You’re anti-scientific!”

They are always accusing their ideological opponents of not practicing science. This is usually done by taking apart their opponents’ work in petty ways with a fine tooth comb and searching for any error that they might find.

All scholarship has errors or at least is saying things that are either false now or will be proven false later. And your typical scholar doesn’t know everything. He usually doesn’t even know everything about his own field, though your typical social scientist retard always claims he does. Because it’s pretty much impossible to even get a grasp on the totality of facts even in your own petty subfield, everyone’s scholarship is wrong in some way or another simply because it’s impossible to know everything about the subject.

So you have laughable nonscientists who claim to be practicing science screaming at their opponents that the opponents are not practicing science and therefore the opponents’ conclusions are wrong.

Pretty much two sets of morons, each practicing nonscience but calling it science, screaming at each other, claiming to be upholding science and screaming at their opponents for being incompetent, unreliable or unscientific. If one error is found in an opponent’s paper, this means we need to throw out the whole thing. You often hear people say about even widely published scholars,

“This guy is unreliable. I doubt if you will find even one factual sentence in anything he writes, even a 500-page book.”

In this way, they completely dismiss their opponents and often even refuse to read their work, effectively boycotting them.

Everyone who has not hyperspecialized is called a dilettante because you can only be a scholar on one idiotic hyperspecialized microfield. Beyond that, it’s assumed that you know nothing, and everything you say is wrong. The Renaissance Man is dead, buried long ago and no longer even mourned. Instead, absurdly, his death is celebrated as a victory for science and truth! The words dilettante and amateur get thrown around a lot at even widely published ideological opponents.

Everyone on one side of the debate will line up on one side and robotically recite all of the charges of his side, rarely if ever questioning even one of them because if you do, you are now not with us, the good guys, you are with our ideological opponents who are if not evil (and often they are called evil) are at least utterly incompetent and not even worthy of being read.

So there is profound ideological conformity on both sides. You have two groups of antiscientific ideological fucktards screaming at each other and accusing the other one of not practicing science, when honestly, probably neither side is practicing science, so any such charge is hypocritical.

Petty feuds are everywhere. Scholar A will not speak to scholar B and hates his guts. A good number of scholars probably hate each other, but they run around all the time pretending that they don’t because hatred is “unscientific.”

Unanswered emails are common, and so are unanswered phone calls are probably too, but I have not experienced that yet. Many scholars get a huge head, use the excuse of being busy all the time to ignore their emails and screen all their phone calls. There are quite a few scholars who simply cannot be reached ever for any reason short of finding out their office hours and showing up. Screening out all your calls and emails is the sign of an open mind, it is not?</sarcasm>.

Worst of all is that every field has a list of things that have been “proven as facts” in that field. In the real sciences, these facts have actually been proven so at least they are facts and at least true for now, I will grant them that. But then even in the real sciences, these sets of facts become set in stone and the question is considered to be conclusively answered for all of time, when really science doesn’t conclude much of anything for all of time, and pretty much everything is supposedly up for grabs, but that’s not really the way it works.

The reigning paradigm gets set in stone in a way, and everyone in the field rigorously or even ferociously defends the paradigm as if it is the proven set of facts for all of time instead just temporary facts as all science is.

Scholars, often in frightening lockstep unison, condemn all attacks on whatever the reigning paradigm is, and the reigning paradigm is often demonstrably and even laughably false anyway, but once a paradigm gets set, the fake open-minded scientist becomes as closed-minded as any religious fanatic.

New data challenging any reigning paradigm (the paradigms are treated nearly the same as revealed works are treated in religions) is viciously attacked or simply dismissed altogether. It is quite common for papers or data attacking a dominant paradigm to be viciously attacked all around the field, with many reviews showing how the conclusion is wrong. Yet few if any of the critics even try to work out the data or even test it out to see if the conclusion even true. They just yell,

“The conclusion is false!”

often without even examining the data in question. Persons challenging paradigms are called antiscientific and are accused of practicing pseudoscience, a word which pretty much has no meaning because scientists change the definition every month or so. Ideally it means conclusions that do not even follow the scientific method at all, but generally it is just means all of the arguments attacking whatever the stupid paradigm of the moment is. Pseudoscience is just the “paradigm-attacking stuff I don’t like.”

As I said, every field has paradigms. Physics envy and all that, but at least the real sciences have paradigms that are by now proved pretty well. But are they the end of the debate as science says every paradigm is? Well of course not! Nevertheless even in the real sciences, paradigms are defended with near-religious faith and a great deal of emotion.

The social sciences of course are so much worse because they aren’t even sciences in the first place! Every social science has a “set of facts” that everyone in the field has to believe. These are the paradigms of that particular field, and they are defended with all of the ferocity that an SJW defends their politics.You are not even allowed to work in that field if you reject one or more paradigms. It is said that that person “doesn’t even accept the basic facts of our field” and hence must be ignored.

There really is no alternative to accepting those paradigms. You might be able to do so quietly, but don’t try to publish anything attacking any of their often-moronic paradigms or you will be sorry.

Moronic is a harsh word. but it’s necessary when discussing social science paradigms. Many social science paradigms are simply (usually PC) “facts” that are accepted by everyone mostly because they are politically correct and not because they are grounded in any facts. Usually there is a grain of truth in there somewhere, but still the paradigms are more about ideology than science. If you examine a lot of these paradigms, they fall apart, often immediately and obviously, and really any commonsense Joe on the street would laugh and say,

“Of course that’s not true!”

The social scientists then yell that the man on the street knows nothing compared to the anointed scientists of the field. Social science often appropriates the real sciences, usually for political and emotional reasons. If any man on the street rejects whatever the latest stupid PC paradigm is, the social scientists will appropriate real science and argue, for instance, that no way does the man on the street know more about astronomy than astronomers.

But we aren’t talking about real sciences. We are talking about the PC fake sciences called social sciences. So you can see that social scientists throw themselves in with the real scientists and marry their field to the real scientists’ one whenever it is convenient for them.

Nevertheless, social scientists spend a good amount of time engaging in sheer nihilism. Since social sciences typically involve humans, the excuse is made that humans are endlessly variable, and there is no way to control for all of these variables, hence apparently no non-physical scientific conclusions can be made about humans at all! If you try to formulate one, social scientists will jump up and yell about the exceptions. Yet of course exceptions prove the rule even in the real sciences, say in medicine.

So the social scientist frequently answers most of the major questions someone might have about the field with either a regimented and evangelical recitation of whatever the typically unproven paradigms are, or for many questions, the social scientists simply utilizes nihilism and says that this is a question that cannot be answered by our field.

What’s a question that can’t be answered? Well, just about anything is! So when presented with a set of questions about what the field has proven about this or that, the social scientist simply spends a lot of time stating,

“There is no way to test that. There is no way to design such a test ever. But what about the exceptions – because of exceptions, we can never prove anything about anyone. All conclusions are based on averages and how do you know the average is even correct?  Maybe it is totally wrong!

Because you can never test out all humans on this question or that, everything disliked is thrown out by attacking sample size or method. And even if you could test out every human on Earth on this question or that, any conclusion that overthrew any paradigm would be tossed out anyway by attacking method.

Also it really doesn’t matter how rigorously you design your experiments and how carefully you your average out your conclusions because they will just attack study design anyway if it attacks a paradigm. The person being attacked then asks in exasperation,

“Well then how to we design such a study to test out this question?”

9

Of course, asking sociologists or politicians to correctly answer any scientific question is a dubious endeavor, as most conclusions there are simply arrived via arbitrary, often nonsensical, hypocritical, ridiculous and ferociously antiscientific methods which are then explained away as “politics.” Well you know politics is mostly just people lying about one thing or another for ideological reasons, so the “political” conclusions arrived at are usually laughable because there is no science going on whatsoever. Instead there’s just emotionalism and bullshit.

Saying this question or that cannot be answered by our field (who ought to be the ones at least testing it out) is really just a big dodge.

As you can see, the field typically says that the question incredibly has no answer or they say even more wildly that it is a question that cannot even be tested in their first place! Of course, philosophically speaking, there are no questions that lack answers, so this is just another one of their lies. Sure, there are questions that don’t have answers yet that have been determined by humans, but I assure you that there is some scientific answer to the question, but it’s often one that is difficult for humans to figure out, so humans just throw up their hands and say,

“There is no way to determine this one way or other,”

which is something social scientists say a lot.

Emotions run wild in the social sciences. While scientists are supposed to be emotionally constrained at least in their published statements, social scientists seem to be a lot less controlled, and language in debates is often excessively harsh for proper scientific debate, but as no one is practicing science anyway, who cares!

As you can see, most social sciences are absurd endeavors because they don’t even bother to answer most of the important questions in the field which will be defended with,

“We don’t know. We can’t figure that out. There is no way to determine that,”

to half the questions in the field.

Still, I would argue that it’s possible to do some adequate scientific work in most social sciences, even if most of your colleagues accuse you of trying to answer unanswerable questions. Sure there are no hard facts as in physics or math, but there are a lot of things that are “more or less true” where some sort of a vague answer to the question seems to be the best explanation of the facts.

Abstract of an Upcoming Publication of Mine

The following is an abstract of a long paper that will be published in one of three or four books of the series The Handbook of Endangered Turkic Languages which will be published in late September by the Turkish-Kazakh Joint University in Ankara, Turkey. The article is 88 pages along and is one of the most important articles in the series. I will also be the official English editor for all of the English articles in the series which total ~500 pages.

Mutual Intelligibility Among the Turkic Languages

By Robert Lindsay

Abstract: The Turkic family of languages with all important related dialects was analyzed on the basis of mutual intelligibility, with the following goals: (1) To determine the extent to which various Turkic lects can understand each other. (2) To ascertain whether various Turkic lects are better characterized as full languages in the own right in need of ISO codes from SIL or rather as dialects of another language. (3) The history of various Turkic lects was analyzed in an attempt to write a proper history of the important lects. (4) An attempt was made at classifying the Turkic languages in terms of subfamilies, sub-sub families, etc. The results were: (1) Rough intelligibility figures for various Turkic lects, related lects and Turkish itself were determined. Surprisingly, it was not difficult to arrive at these rough estimates. (2) The Turkic family was expanded from Ethnologue‘s 41 languages to 53 languages. (3) Full and detailed histories for many Turkic lects were written up in a coherent, easy to understand way, a task sorely needed in Turkic as histories of Turkic lects are often confused, inaccurate, controversial, and incomplete. (4) A new classification of Turkic is proposed that rejects and rewrites some of the better-known classifications.

New Papers on Academia.Edu

This site is sort of fun. This is where I get to pretend to be an academic or a professor. It is mostly for those associated with Academia, students, grad students and professors, but there are also some independent scholars such as me on there. I have a number of students, grad students and even professors following my work on there, and that is a bit mind-blowing. I am also having scholarly discussions with professors who treat me like some sort of a colleague. Just another role to play in life. Here are my papers. There are 20 papers in all.

Linguistics

A Look At the Catalan Language Expands Macro-Catalan from 1 language to 2 languages on the basis of mutual intelligibility. 15 pages. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family Mutual intelligibility of languages in the Slavic family are examined based on the degree of mutual intelligibility. Mutual Intelligibility Among the Turkic Languages Mutual intelligibility of languages in the Slavic family are examined based on the degree of mutual intelligibility. Scientific Studies of Intelligibility in Scandinavian Languages Mutual intelligibility of languages in the Slavic family are examined based on the degree of mutual intelligibility. I also deal with the dialect versus language question. Some Scientific Intelligibility Studies It is often said, nonsensically, that intelligibility between various different lects cannot possibly be measured due to a variety of red herrings and silly straw men. This paper gives the lie to that notion. 11 pages. Mutual Intelligibility As a Scientific Concept For Dividing Language from Dialect Mutual intelligibility is not a mushy soft science concept but is actually a rigorous scientific method. How To Divide Languages from Dialects – Structure or Intelligibility? Argues for mutual intelligibility as the best way of dividing languages from dialects, but to some extent structural differences and mutual intelligibility differences merge together in a notion of “differentness.”

Anthropology

Black Males and Testosterone Evolution and Perspectives Africans (Negroids) seem to have specifically evolved high testosterone, aggression and body strength in tandem with agriculture and polygamy. 5 pages. US Hispanic Racial Dynamics How White, Amerindian and Black are US Hispanics? A look at the evidence. Blacks Couldn’t Even Build a Boat to Madagascar This oft-stated notion is shown to be a myth. Blacks went to Madagascar somehow prehistorically, then their descendants apparently forgot how to make the trip again. 4 pages. Get Small Or Die Explains the development of small and compact humans in the tropics. 7 pages.

Anthropological Linguistics

The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Early Descendants: Proto-Languages and Homelands 27 pages. Where is the PIE Homeland? 5 pages.

Intelligence

Flynn Effect in North Africans/Turks Migrated To West Europe Examines Flynn Effect IQ rises in North Africans and Turks who have migrated to Western Europe, showing up in the second generation. 5 pages. Secular Rise in Black IQ and Head Size Evidence For a Eugenic Effect US Blacks have been breeding eugenically for 100 years now, selecting preferentially for more Caucasoid and progressive features and for higher IQ’s. At the same time, Black head size has increased dramatically and Black IQ’s have gone up tremendously. All of these phenomena are related. 13 pages.

Psychiatry

Problems in the Diagnosis of OCD Differential diagnosis and other confusing issues in the diagnosis of OCD. Threat Assessment in OCD Are OCD’ers dangerous to themselves or others and if so, to what extent? Also differentiating OCD from similar yet dangerous conditions.

Forensic Psychiatry

Most Child Molesters Are Not Pedophiles 90-9

Sexology

Is Sexual Attraction to Minors “Normal” Among Adult Males? Sexual attraction to minor females, albeit at a lower level than to mature females, may be nearly universal among heterosexual males.

Epidemiology

Final Katrina Death Toll at 4,081 Final toll is much higher than usually given because I counted indirect deaths via elevated mortality rates after the storm. 14 pages. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.

Very Nice New Piece on Race in Mexico

Here.

The site is actually named after me, which has me shaking my head in amazement.

The piece, and the site itself, was inspired by my site, in particular my pieces on race in Mexico and on the major and minor races of man.

Most Mexicans are mestizos, but there are large minorities of more or less pure Europeans and Indians. He describes most of the significant White groups in Mexico and puts Whites at ~1

Although most Whites have Spanish roots, there are also significant French, Portuguese, German, Italians and Irish minorities. I met a young woman who is Mexican-American, but she is mostly Portuguese. The village she was born in in Mexico is made up of primarily Portuguese people! There are also quite a few Jews in Mexico.

More or less pure Indians make up ~1

Mestizos make up ~6

There are what he calls 3 occult roots in Mexico: Blacks, Asians and Arabs.

The first root, the Blacks, has its basis in African slaves who were brought to the east coast of Mexico. This affair did not last long as a slave who married a free Mexican had children who were free. So, slavery quickly went out and the Blacks disappeared via mixed breeding as slaves quickly took free, non-Black Mexicans as spouses.

The result was that pure Blacks nearly disappeared and the remainder are mostly mulattos, zambos (Indian-Black) and triracials. In addition, your average Mexican mestizo now is ~4-

The next root is Asians. In the early days, quite a few Filipinos came to Mexico when it was part of Spain via the colony of the Philippines. By this time, they are heavily mixed with other races in Mexico. In the early 20th Century, many Chinese came to Mexico. Unfortunately, most were tossed out in the 1930’s in a wave of nativism, but in Mexico city and Mexicali, there are still quite a few Chinese and part-Chinese, as the Chinese also married heavily into the mix.

The last root is Arabs. Most of these Arabs are Christians from Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. They came in response to anti-Christian attacks waged by the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1. Since they came from the Ottoman Empire, many Mexicans referred to them as “Turks.” Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man, is Lebanese, as is Salma Hayek.

All three of these occult roots each make up ~

There have been various studies of Mexico’s admixture, but they tend to come up with quite different results. I agree with the the author that the best studies show Mexico’s genome to be 5

Most self-identified Mexican Indians have some White in them, in addition to a bit of Black. Percentages range from

The author notes that Mexican-Americans have traditionally been a lot Whiter than Mexicans, because they tend to come from the Whiter regions of Northern Mexico. Southwest Mexicans have usually tested out at 6

A photo on his site of Chicano gangbangers shows that they are mostly White, something we have always known here.

Towards the end he makes up a list of racial categories of Mexicans, following my lead in this piece, even adopting my formulae and marking scheme.

He lists five major races in Mexico – Whites, Indians, Mestizos, Blacks and Asians.

No major disagreement there.

I have been regarded as a mad splitter in my piece above. One critic said that if Lindsay doesn’t stop soon, he’s going to have as many races as there are languages. This criticism, in addition to endless bashing by race deniers, hurt my feelings, as a result, I have made few new updates to my races of man post.

However, the author is much worse of a splitter than I have ever been, splitting off all sorts of groups that I probably would not have split off. Hence, his scheme is better seen as a view towards Mexican ethnies or ethnic groups than races per se. For instance, he divides Mexican mestizos and Mexican Whites into quite a few different races, on what basis I am not sure. Are they ethnies? Quite possibly. Races? Dunno about that.

In my scheme, I actually adopted a conservative scheme in which I tried not to split off new races unless I couldn’t help it. I wanted some significant genetic distance between a group or ethny before I would split them off. Hence, I lumped most Europeans into a single race because there isn’t much genetic distance between them. I am wondering if the author has any genetic data to back up splitting many of these groups into different races, because I only split based on hard genetic data.

At the end, I think we have two different schemes here. One is dividing races based on hard genetics and the other is splitting racers and also ethnies on the basis of partly genetics but also subjective factors. On the other hand, there probably is not much genetic data on the various different Mexican mestizos and Whites.

All in all, a very commendable piece, the fruit of long research. By the way, the photos are excellent. Make sure to check them out.

Chairman Mao Revisionism

Repost from the old site. All Westerners agree that Mao was even worse than Stalin, so it was time to do a particularly evil and hateful troll, the pro-Chairman Mao troll. Mao never starved 23-35 million or whatever to death during the Great Leap Forward, though there were 15 million dead through overprocurement and mass stupidity. The 23-35 million figures are derived by Western scholars by outrageously adding in the “deaths” of people who never even got born in the first place! Yes, during the GLF, many women were malnourished and did not give birth, and this effect lasted for a few years even after the famine. A decline in the birth rate due to eggs and sperms not participating in fertilization is incredibly called murder! At the same time, there was a wildly declining death rate every year before the GLF, and then a few years after, the death rate started drastically plummeting once again, so all that happened in the GLF was a wildly declining death rate went up (in one year quite a bit) for a few years, then began plummeting again. It is also said that during the GLF, Mao heard about the famine deaths and refused to do anything about them. I do not know enough about the episode to take a position on that one way or another. Clearly, there was a serious lack of democracy within the party, and this led to the problems. The GLF disaster happened like this: First there was the China-Soviet split, which was actually a pretty stupid development, and was evidence of Mao’s excessive radicalism. Problems were based on Khrushchev’s notion of peaceful cooperation with the non-Communist world versus Mao’s idea that the non-Communist world was an enemy that had to be confronted. As a result of this stupidity on Mao’s part, the USSR left China, taking all of their advisors and aid with them. The advisors and aid had been essential in building up China from 1949-1958, and now all of this was crashing to a halt. Now China would have to build herself up all by herself with no help from anyone. As Stalin did in the 1930’s, Mao decided to industrialize the Chinese state on the backs of the peasants. There is no other way. You have to feed all those urban workers somehow or other. Mao set wildly unrealistic demands for the rural harvests, and the local party leaders bought into the nonsense. There were natural disasters, yet the local leaders reported harvests vastly in excess of what actually occurred. Hence, there was vast overprovisioning and famine resulted in the countryside. There are some problems with the 15 million figure, but that is the figure that the Chinese census came up with. Most of the deaths were due to disease. Travelers in China, even to the worst-hit regions, did not report any obvious signs of famine, however, they did report that rations were very tight. Interviews with Chinese later indicate that there was a famine in China during this period, even in the cities, that people were reduced to eating grass in the fields, and that people did indeed die, mostly of disease. The anti-Mao types claim that Mao knew about the starvation but said basically, the Hell with them, let them starve. I do not know enough about the situation to comment on this, but due to the lack of democracy in the party, apparently there were delays in telling the top leadership what was really going on in the countryside, and instead they were told what they wanted to hear. The West looks at this most complex series of events and sees only mass murder, but what do you see? 140 million minimum have been killed in India alone as a consequence of not following the Chinese model in 1949, and 4 million more die every single year, and no one even says a peep but Lindsay the evil Commie mass murder lover. Chairman Mao broke Stalin’s record of doubling life expectancy in the shortest period of time, from 32 in 1949 (which the US loved) to 65 in 1976, a mere 27 year period, whereas Stalin took 40 years. And this, the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time, was done by the worst murderer of all time, Chairman Mao. It was 1949-1953 and 700,000 landlords were being tried all of China. They were dirty, horrible and awful criminals almost all guilty of theft, rape, extortion and murder. They raped the girls and women and killed the men and the peasant was dead at 32, his life hovering between life and death the whole way, but the West just loved it that way, and the kind folks that enforced this evil went to Taiwan and swore to reinstall the system that always killed way more than Mao, to the terror of the Chinese people, who rallied around the man who saved their lives, Mao. The people put the despicable criminals on trial, and the people killed the warlord mass murderers themselves. It was Chmielnicki and Desallines and Nat Turner all over again. The party was supposed to intervene but they never did, and for this they are now condemned. Even then, Mao rued the excesses while he praised the notion of revolutionary terror. The GPCR (Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) came for 10 years and went and many great and wonderful things happened along with many horrible and insane things, and it was all mixed up. The UN said the Barefoot Doctor Campaign during the GPCR was one of the greatest public health campaigns ever undertaken. The Western liars now say that 30 million people were killed during the GPCR! Unbelievable! There were 1 million excess deaths in the GPCR, but it was also a time of wildly exploding life expectancy and a rapid decline in the death rate, so it was all mixed up. Most of the deaths were said to be suicides as people were nearly hounded to their deaths. I guess it’s better than a bullet in the head. There were also about 29,000 executed during the GPCR. Keep in mind that during the GPCR China saw increases in life expectancy that were the greatest such achievements that mankind has ever achieved. A new book by a fellow named Jung Chiang has stated that Mao killed 80 million people! Wow! How did he manage that? And at the same time, produce the quickest doubling of life expectancy in a nation in the history of mankind. You don’t set records of doubling life expectancy by killing tens of millions of people. Forget it. This book has been panned by just about every single China scholar alive, but it’s still being quoted reverentially by the West. No one knows how many Mao killed. Forgetting about the Leap, because there were no intentional deaths there, there were 1.7 million excess deaths in which the regime either persecuted people into taking their own lives or the regime actually executed people. No one knows about any deaths beyond the 1.7 million. Surely there were executions from 1953-1965, but no one knows how many. There was a Gulag system from 1949-1976, and surely folks died there, but no one knows how many. Obviously the true number of deaths is over 1.7 million, but until the CCP opens its archives, we will never know the true numbers. The CCP has never opened its archives, and God knows if they ever will.

Cultural Anthropology and Physics Envy

Repost from the old site. A Christmas Day New York Times article by George Johnson, A Question of Blame When Societies Fall, has elicited quite a bit of comment in the blogosphere. The article concerns Jared Diamond, anthropologist and popular author of two recent books on cultures, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The first deals with why societies succeed, and the second deals with why societies fail. First of all, I have read neither book, but I did read parts of Collapse, specifically the chapter on the Rwanda genocide. Diamond placed the blame for the genocide on a logical Malthusian theory that population had outstripped food supply which resulted in massacre to reduce the human population so there would once again be enough food and land to go around. It seemed reasonable at the time, and it still does now. Other than that, I have not read a lot of Diamond. He did some good work on the Proto Indo-European homeland though, which he logically places in the Southern Ukraine. The article discusses how the politically correct have rendered cultural anthropology into something pretty silly these days. This state of affairs was a culmination of a series of events in the history of anthropological theory over the past century. In the first half of the 1900’s, there was still a trend in anthropology, the Great Chain of Being, to see European culture as the pinnacle and to judge all cultures in relation to how far they had climbed up the European ladder. At the same time, Franz Boas and Margaret Mead were working at cross-purposes to the implied White Supremacism of the Great Chain of Being. racist voodoo doll for the PC crowd to stick pins in. Sigh. Steve Sailer weighs in, defending Diamond, and GNXP tosses out a nearly incomprehensible post about Johnson’s piece. In GNXP‘s post and in the long and equally difficult comments section, GNXP authors and commenters thrash away at cultural anthropology. For examples of the sort of stuff that gets their goat, see these links here, here , GNXP comments thread Robert F. G. Spier, who had done his PhD dissertation on the tribe wanted to know what the tribe had thought of his work. I told him they had not even read it, and to tell the truth, many tribal members were hostile to him, as they were to all anthropologists. He was crushed, but he said, cynically, that he understood. Just to show you what we are up against. Now, with all the hostility these Indians have towards the well-meaning anthros of the past, you can see how we need to tread carefully around our informants. Our rep is bad enough as it is. It’s painfully important to show love and compassion towards the people that we study. In the course of my work, I read through all of the anthropological data assembled by the anthros of the past. There was a ton of great info in there. When I presented my findings to to top Indians in order to turn the work into a book – an ethnography of the tribe, the whole project was cruelly shot down. The elders had created a myth whereby they had outsmarted the evil White anthros by telling them a pack of lies, thereby getting back at them and thwarting their whole wicked Whitey project. All the anthropological work was contaminated. Even if it were not all lies, we could not tell where the lies began and the truth ended. Not one word could be written. The project was shelved; I was crushed, angry, embittered and cynical, yet with my background in psychology, I sadly understood the defenses working behind the Indians’ views. At this point, my project became a scientific one. Was it actually true that the Indians had told the anthros a pack of lies to get one over on the evil White man? I worked on this question for months (while doing many other things). I read a lot more material and talked to anthropologists all over the country. I read and re-read the materials and compared them to each other. My hypothesis was: No, the Indians had not lied to the anthros. This hypothesis had to be rejected. There were clearly cases of lying, but they were easily spotted and isolated. I fleshed out most of them and just accepted the rest as the best truth we could find. The various ethnologies by anthros trotting through every couple decades lined up extremely well. The few questions that the Indians questioned so ferociously – “Did the Indians eat rattlesnakes, gopher snakes and skunks?” was one – were identified as painfully obvious cases of psychological defenses. Nowadays, the Indians think eating skunks is terrible, as skunks stink. The meat doesn’t stink, but it is oily yet edible. The aboriginal Indians may well have eaten skunks, but probably not often. We need to consider that aboriginal Indians probably readily ate any decent-tasting small animal that they could easily capture and kill. Skunks are easy to kill, and the meat is ok enough to eat if you are hungry. Modern Indians recoil at the idea of eating gopher snakes and rattlesnakes, as one lives in the dirt and “tastes dirty”, and the other is poisonous. I concluded that both snakes were eaten, and that gopher snakes do not taste dirty, as this is illogical thinking based on the notion that if something lives in the dirt it must taste like the dirt. There were other empirical questions: What was the religion of the Indians? Nowadays, the local Indians were passionate Christians, and believed in something called the Great Spirit, the Great Creator, or the Creator. But was that an aboriginal belief? Once again, the question lingered over months of intensive research, hypothesis-testing and scientific back and forths. I finally concluded that the aboriginal Indians were animists for whom the world, and everything in it, was alive with electric energy. The rocks, the trees, everything…a life force flowed through it all. The Indians used various magical items to tap into this magical world of spirits. Curiously, animism is not incompatible with modern science. As particle physics says that we are all part of everything else, and any two particles in contact will tend to spin together for the rest of their existence, there is a spinning and buzzing subatomic tapestry that links us all together as one. My body does not end where yours begins, and I am still connected to my ex-girlfriend Tracy from 1978, if she is still alive, as our particles continue to spin in tandem. When an Indian died, a ceremony was held to see the spirit off to the Land of the Dead, which lay to the West. This ceremony was observed by Edward Curtis in 1878, 28 years after major contact, so it was probably aboriginal. The aboriginal Indian God was described to me by a fellow anthropologist, Sylvia Broadbent, as a Deus Obtusa, or Lazy God . It was not important at all in their lives, but it did create the world, after which it did not do much of anything, except perhaps every once in a while when it got off its ass to yawn and intervene trivially in our affairs a bit before heading back to the cosmic bong hits. I believe that the Great Creator belief of the Plains diffused out as a general “Indian” belief in God, and rapidly Christianizing Indians all over the US picked up on it and adapted it for their own. The reason for this diffusion was the Christianization of the Indians and their exposure to the omniscient and omnipresent God of Christianity. In order to adopt this new Christian God to the Indian World, the Great Creator concept was adopted via cultural diffusion from Plains tribes. At this point, most US Indians are passionate Christians, and most will insist that they always believed in a “Great Creator”. If you dispute this, you ask for a fight. The truth, I believe, is as described above. Along the same lines, some of the Indian stories I was working with were the characteristic myths of the California Indians, dealing with various animal Gods. These myths explained how various things came to be, how the Earth was created, how fire was discovered, etc. The myths date back to a time before there were people, when various animals, in the form of “Animal Gods”, and not the animals themselves as we now know them, roamed the Earth. This was the time of Stinkbug, Turtle, Coyote, Mountain Lion, Bear, Bobcat, Duck, and many other “Animal Gods”. I talked to a high-ranking Karuk Indian and asked him whether he actually believed all this stuff. He got very angry (as Indians often do when you challenge their beliefs) and insisted it was all literally true. Then I set off on a quest to see to what extent the California Indians had actually believed in these animal myths aboriginally. After a while, the best response I found came from a brilliant linguist named Sydney Lamb at Rice University, who told me that the aboriginal Indians didn’t really believe any of that stuff. Instead, those stories were more like the Saturday morning cartoons, or fairy tales you tell to little kids. What is curious is how stories that were aboriginally seen as “Saturday cartoons” have now been adopted as literal truth by much more scientific-minded modern Indians, and that these modern Indians also insist that this literal belief was also held aboriginally. There were other questions. The existence of a Yokuts tribe called the Dalinchi. The local elders passionately insisted that this was not a tribe, but was merely the name of a village, and got angry when I suggested otherwise. Looking through old mission records, a linguist friend of mine found Yokuts Indians who gave their tribe as Dalinchi. They probably would not have done so if that was only a village name. The existence of a Yokuts tribe called Dumna was questioned, and locals stated that it did not exist, in part because cynically, the locals wished to claim Dumna land as their own, mostly so they could build a casino on it. There was a lot of anthropological work on the Dumna, especially a great book by Frank Latta, but most crucially once again, my linguist professor friend found old mission records where Indians gave their tribe as Dumna. The local Indians asked me to draw a map of tribal boundaries. Between other work, I spent a few months on this, poring over all sorts of maps, new and old, and old ethnologies and reports. I eventually mapped out a tentative boundary for the tribe. As with most California tribes in this area, it didn’t go very far, and it didn’t go down to the San Joaquin River where they wanted me to draw the line. Close? Yes, but not to the river. Why did they want me to draw the line to the river? So they could build a casino there! The tribe got angry at my conclusions as I had discovered the “wrong facts”, and for a bit it seemed my job was on the line. I insisted that I was a scientist, and scientifically, I could not compromise by scientific ethics for a political agenda. They seemed to accept the basic morality of my stubborn stand, and backed down. The various empirical questions that I dealt with in the course of my work as a cultural anthropologist are bolded above. I do resent GNXP and to a much lesser extent Sailer (who is mostly just guilty of ignorance and thinking in the same way one “skims” a book) saying that cultural anthropology is not a science, that the scientific method is not used, that we make no hypotheses, nor do we test them, nor we do we make tentative conclusions that we continually readjust in the face of new evidence. I defy any of the arrogant hard science types in Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Africa, Americas, Amerindians, Anthropology, Anti-Racism, Blacks, California, Christianity, Civil Rights, Crime, Cultural, Culture, Europe, Europeans, Genetics, History, Intelligence, Left, Linguistics, North America, Pacific, Polynesia, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, Scholarship, Science, Ukraine, USA, Useless Western Left, West, Whites3 Comments on Cultural Anthropology and Physics Envy

The Out of India Model for Indo-European

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

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

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

Journeys in Asian Prehistory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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