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From: Peter Bromfield <peter@ren.er.usgs.gov>
Subject: Re: Languages: Hard, Harder, Hardest
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Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 13:11:38 GMT
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Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
> 
> Peter Bromfield <peter@ren.er.usgs.gov> wrote:
> 
> >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
> >>
> >> Peter Bromfield <peter> wrote:
> >>
> >> [on the difficulty of Arab:]
> >>[cut]
> >> I very much doubt this is a question of race.  `ayin and Haa are
> >> common sounds in some languages of the Caucasus (the speakers of which
> >> are caucasians, linguistically as well as racially).  The Arabs
> >> themselves are of course caucasians racially.
> 
> >In northern Iraq and Syria yes, but the further south you go no. In fact
> >most Arab historians say that The Arabs originated in the center of
> >Arabia, not in the Caucasus.
> 
> I was referring to "caucasian" in the racial sense, which has nothing
> to do with the Caucasus, really.  The "caucasian" (white) race is the
> human race that developed in the area of Europe, North Africa, Near
> and Middle East and parts of Central Asia.  The Caucasus is a part of
> that vast area, as is Arabia.

Don't tell a Saudi that! 

[cut]
> Ethiopians _are_ Arabs: they emigrated from South Arabia relatively
> recently (in historical times).  The original inhabitants of the
> African Horn, the Cushites (Somali, Oromo, etc.), speak Afro-Asiatic
> languages, so they presumably were "caucasians" originally as well.

It is very controversial classifying these people as caucasians. I guess
you know that many native tribes in Southern Sudan and Ethiopia are
known to be the darkest people on the planet, some look purple when the
sun hits their skin. Dress these people up in western clothing and then
all of a sudden they aren't 'caucasians' anymore. For this reason I
think that these people are 'negros' not caucasians.

> Whether they too came from Arabia is debatable (Egypt would be my
> guess).  That the Cushites are dark(er) skinned is, as Colin McEvedy
> says in his "Penguin Atlas of African History", "because they have
> always lived further south: natural selection will have operated in
> favour of darker pigmentation and the presence of black neighbours
> made the genes for this readily available".

I don't think white people can become black by themselves.

>  Of course most of the
> speakers of Ethiopian South Arabic (Tigrinya, Amharic, etc.) are
> _racially_ Cushites.
> 
> Modern Arabs are indeed racially mixed: in North Africa they have
> mixed with Berbers,

Also Mandigoes and Tuareg. The Berbers themselves claim that they are of
black African descent.

>in Egypt with Copts, in the Sudan and Chad with
> Nilo-Saharans, in the Near East with other Semites, with Persians and
> Turks, and in Arabia itself, centuries of imported East African slaves
> have contributed a negroid element.  I don't think it makes much sense
> to assign languages to races (that was my whole point), but on the
> whole the vast majority of Arabs (Arab speakers), with the exception
> of the Shuwa Arabs of Sudan and Chad, can be said to be "white".

It's hard to tell for sure, because the Arab world doesn't classify
people by race the way we do. From what I have seen and from talking to
Arabs, I have to disagree. I think most Arabs are 'black'.  They are
only classified as white here in the U.S. because the U.S. wants to
maintain white supremacy.

-Peter

> 
> The variation among the Japanese and Chinese is probaly just as great,
> if not greater: Japanese are a mixture of Ainu, Altaic and [probably]
> Austronesian; Chinese are a mixture of Sino-Tibetan and Altaic in the
> North, and Sino-Tibetan and Thai-Austronesian in the South.
> 
> ==
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal                     ~ ~
> Amsterdam                   _____________  ~ ~
> mcv@pi.net                 |_____________|||
> 
> ========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
