Re: Khoisan is very old

"Richard Wordingham" <jrw0602@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Mar 29, 11:18 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

And the unity of the Khoisan phylum is increasingly doubtful as
information on these little-known languages becomes available as they
die out.

Starostin did a lexicostatistical comparison of the claimed members of
the Khoisan phylum - http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/khoilex.pdf . His
conclusion was that the split between N. and S. Khoisan on one hand
and C. Khoisan on the other was 'some time around the 6th millennium
B.C.'. The lexical similarities are around the 20% level for the 100-
word list. The entites compared were Proto-North Khoisan; Proto-Taa
and Proto-!wi for South Khoisan; and Proto-Khoekhoe and Proto-'Non-
Khoekhoe' for Central Khoisan.

He admits that the case for connecting Sandawe and Hadza to the others
is weak - the correspondences, though in the region of 8% to 12%, are
not compelling. If the match is genuine, he gives a date of split of
'around the 8th or 9th millennium B.C.'

I don't know what error bars should be drawn round these dates.

Is there any linguistic evidence at all for Sandawe and Hadza being indigenous to the area where they're now found?

Currently, in the area under consideration (Northern Tanzania) languages from the following families are natively spoken, in approximate order of number of speakers:

Central Bantu (dozens of languages)
Eastern Nilotic (mostly Maasai)
Southern Cushitic (mostly Iraqw)
Western Nilotic (Luo)
Indo-Aryan (mostly Gujarati)
Semitic (Omani Arabic)
Sandawe
Southern Nilotic (Dotooga and several others)
Germanic (mostly Indian English)
Mixed Bantu-Cushitic (Mbugu)
Hadza

Of these, Germanic, Indo-Aryan, and Semitic arrived in historical times, so can be neglected. Eastern and Western Nilotic are also comparatively recent arrivals (last millenium), and Central Bantu has probably been there only a couple of millenia at most(?)

As for the other four families (Southern Cushitic, Sandawe, Southern Nilotic, and Hadza), we have no evidence whatever as to when they arrived, though it's likely that they were in Tanzania pre-Bantu, possibly pre-agriculture. AFAIK, speakers of Otiek (Southern Nilotic) and Hadza (isolate) are the only people thereabouts living almost exclusively by hunter-gathering in recent historical times.

Other Nilotic and Cushitic languages are further north (Sudan, Ethiopia, etc). Though this doesn't prove that the Tanzanian languages moved down from the north, nevertheless the alternative, that Tanzania was the homeland of Nilo-Saharan and/or Afroasiatic, isn't likely to get many backers.

Though Sandawe and Hadza are isolates, the fact that all other click languages (except Dahalo and Damin) are way off to the south-west might suggest:

(a) S and H migrated from down there; or
(b) All the other click languages moved south from Tanzania; or
(c) The whole of southern and eastern Africa was once one big Sprachbund, and the clicks are the only remaining sign of this; or
(d) None of the above -- clicks evolved independently in two or more places.

As for (c): Phonetic diffusion across such an enormous area inhabited by small-scale pre-agricultural tribes (maybe a thousand different languages, each spoken by a few hundred people) does seem rather unlikely. However, almost the whole of Australia is just such a phonetic diffusion area, so (c) can't be dismissed out of hand.

ISTM that there's no way of picking between (a), (b), (c), and (d), and probably never will be.

John.

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