Glo’al Stops

I think you probably do what I do, in two different ways. On the one hand, when I read words by people I’ve never heard speak, I hear their voices in an accent close to mine most of the time. Ironically, such people might never be able to do the accent I hear their voices in convincingly. In that sense, I think you probably speak like me when I read your words. I also think you probably do this too, when you read my words if you’ve never heard me. If you’re in the States, for example, you might hear my words in an accent I couldn’t convincingly imitate. Maybe not. Perhaps you realise I’m from Southeast England and therefore have a certain kind of accent which might be reflected in the words and spellings I use, although actually that’s not always so. For instance, at least in my childhood I said “couch” for sofa and “lounge” for living room. My mother actually used to say “mad” for angry. I’m aware that the first two are some kind of aspirational thing in that the cognoscenti say the latter and hoi polloi the former, but I’m not sure they come from there. For all I know they may not be American as such but be regional in Britain somewhere, probably the Thames Valley or the Medway towns.

When I was a child, my accent may or may not have been afflicted by speech impediments, in that my pronunciation of certain sounds differed from RP in a way which I suspect others’ didn’t. Specifically, I used a velar semivowel rather than a voiced palatal one for the sound expressed by consonantal Y and a labiodental semivowel for the sound expressed by R. My short E was also more open than it is now and in particular my pronunciation of long I was “oi”. I want to use IPA here but I worry that I’ll leave people baffled. The vowel differences are probably to do with accent at the time, and the drift short E has undergone is probably a general thing. Something I never did but children around me did do was pronounce the voiceless palatal semivowel as “fy”, which I think is quite common, and in fact someone close to me had that addressed by a speech therapist. I recently discovered that the Guarani language uses both velar and labiodental semivowels, so maybe I’d have a good Guarani accent.

Present in my father’s accent right up to the end of his life was TH-fronting: saying “th” as F and V. This is widely associated with the Cockney accent. He also did something which is widely associated with a working class Southeastern English accent: he used an intervocalic glottal stop for T. This particular sound fascinates me. In particular, it’s remarkable that a sound pronounced just behind the teeth should somehow slip all the way to the throat, although almost the reverse happened when the sound written as “GH” turned into an F. Something similar also seems to have happened in Gaidhlig, and it seems in Scottish English and Scots around here, where the TH, far from being fronted, has become an aitch sound.

I’m sorry, I can’t do this because it feels so sloppy. Here’s a chart of the IPA:

Okay, so that’s messy but this is what I’m talking about and I’m not going to fool around with spelling pronunciation vaguenesses any more. The situation is this. I used to say /ɰ/ when other people said /j/ and /ʋ/ when other people had /ɹ/. The latter’s quite common in Southeast England and I’ve also heard it from a Cornish person, but as far as I can tell, the former was just me. The Cockney accent is known for changing /θ/ to /f/ and /ð/ to /v/, and also famous for using /ʔ/ for /VtV/. With me?

Right, so the presence of the intervocalic glottal stop tends to get written as an apostrophe even when transcribing other languages. In English it occurs in Southeast England northward to the former Bedfordshire and also in Scottish English, and while I’m at it, isn’t it weird how both Scottish English and Southeastern English English use /ʌ/? I recently realised that the Gaidhlig GH and DH between back vowels, i.e. the broad allophone, is also a glottal stop in some accents. In other words, the eastern isles of this archipelago are sporadically spotted therewith.

Common use of the glottal stop in that position in English is stereotypically associated with poverty, a low degree of formal institutional education, social deprivation and possibly being White. It’s also associated with Southern England but apparently it’s also used elsewhere nowadays due to the influence of ‘Eastenders’. It comes quite naturally to me to use glottal stops but I’m thoroughly middle class though also exceedingly White. Its history is that my father did it, although I probably didn’t learn to speak much from him, then I did it to fit in at school, so in fact I’m diglossic. However, my paternal grandfather was from the Gorbals, which makes me wonder if his probable glottal stops, and for that matter unrounded short U’s, are actually in an unbroken line from his accent to mine. This probably doesn’t exist, but it reminds me of Hume’s view of cause and effect, that there is no sense in which a cause produces an effect and there’s nothing more than constant conjunction, temporal precedence and contiguity to cause. This is a weird way of thinking about causation to be sure, and not one I accept, but it might reflect my family phonology.

However, I’m not here to talk about myself except as an example of someone who has been known to produce intervocalic glottal stops. My concern is something else, and something on which I’ve recently come to ponder: the hard left glottal stop. A similar phenomenon occurs with aitch-dropping, but not to lose focus, there seems to be a tendency for SWP and other Trotskyist activists to use intervocalic glottal stops to a greater extent than in the general population. I’ve no idea if any research has been done into this but until the other day I’d generally thought that it was an affectation to make the speaker seem more stereotypically working class. A genuine example of a very similar phenomenon was of a member of the RCP who referred to a comrade as “‘Olly” when her name was Holly. This led me to think they were referring to someone called Oliver. I now think this accent was genuinely affected and specifically directed at me as someone they perceived as bourgeois with a near-RP accent, which was the case at the time, so it’s akin either to inverse snobbery or as a tactic to unsettle me. Little did they know that I was actually diglossic, and they were failing to fake an accent authentically. They were attempting to reproduce a West Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire accent unsuccessfully, because I may be wrong but I don’t think those accents drop aitches at all. Consequently I perceived them as referring to someone called Oliver.

I have a hunch, then, that the accent was fake and adopted for tactical purposes, but I’ve just changed my mind, or rather have acquired doubts, about the fakeness of intervocalic glottal stops in Socialist Worker activists. Owen Jones recently posted a video from the Your Party conference where he interviewed a member of the SWP whose accent as presented definitely did include glottal stops, so my kneejerk reaction was “fake”, but I no longer think this is true. I think something else is going on. Thomas Pynchon once referred to an American military accent as “Southern” and then withdrew that claim as a sign of his lack of experience. He later concluded, and I tend to agree with him, that the US Army accent sounds Southern to Northerners and Northern to Southerners. In other words, there’s a specific US Army accent which kind of averages out the accents of its soldiers. I further suspect this accent confers a sense of cohesion, like the uniform, rituals and general camaraderie of the military, such as it is. Moreover, maybe people adopt this accent in an attempt to fit in and it later becomes second nature to them, the same process, in fact, that I went through when I was at secondary school. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn this process.

It’s just possible, then, that the SWP glottal stop deserves a bit more sympathy than I’ve previously afforded it, because it just may be a kind of institutional accent, conferring membership and emerging without conscious intervention. It might actually not be fake at all much of the time, and when it is, it’s about wanting to fit in to the in-group and oriented in that direction rather than outwards.

The other anecdotal datum from all this is What Sarada Did. Sarada has a near-RP accent and lives in Scotland with me. Previously she lived in the English Midlands, but she’s from West London. A few years ago, she went to a political meeting in London and I saw a video of her in which she used glottal stops. She didn’t seem conscious of this and I think it’s simple unconscious influence from either others around her or being in Central London. If this is so, maybe it’s not fair to blame Trotskyists for talking this way either. It seems she used to use it at school and when talking to her friends. As for our children, one of them has an accent closest to Liz’s and the other’s used to be like mine but is now more Yorkshire.

Glottal stops in English, or at least English English, have historically been frowned upon, but in other languages they’re considered entirely respectable sounds in the standard language. This is true of Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew, Hawaiian and Samoan for example. In Germanic languages other than the ones spoken here or derived from them, glottal stops begin words which are written with initial vowels. I once said to my ex’s mother “Das ist ein Problem” and she thought I’d said “Das ist Dein Problem”. Danish uses something like a glottal stop which they call “stød” where Norwegian and Swedish use tone to distinguish otherwise identical words, although apparently not all Danish does this and it can be a creaky voice instead. The Austronesian languages Hawaiian and Samoan both use glottal stops and Hawaiian in particular is very focussed on having a letter for it, which they call ʻokina – “ʻ”. I have to admit that I don’t really understand their insistence on it in this manner. It’s considered the final letter in the alphabet and affects alphabetisation, but at the start of a word the following vowel is capitalised. The Samoan apostrophe was temporarily dropped in the 1960s CE, then adopted again in 2012, and likewise is considered the last letter in the alphabet. My perception of the Cockney or Scottish English glottal stop is that it’s a written letter which has identical capital and lower case forms and I suppose I’d alphabetise it as if it were a T. Hebrew and Arabic both kind of have the glottal stop, represented as aleph in Hebrew and in a more complicated manner in Arabic, where it’s called “hamza”, as the first letter of the alphabet. Our own letter A is descended from the glottal stop letter. Maltese uses a Q. All of these are fully-fledged letters.

Scots politicises the apostrophe. Words written with apostrophes as if they have missing letters compared to English words only had those introduced in the eighteenth century, and are often non-etymological and they’re therefore deprecated. But not all of them, because some do actually represent missing letters. It’s been referred to as the “apologetic apostrophe”. The glottal stop in Scots is simply represented as a T.

I could say a lot more, and often do, but that’s all I’ve got for you for now, except to say that there can be more than one way to politicise both the glottal stop and the apostrophe. Maybe Cockneys should start proudly using the ʻokina, and maybe Scots could distinguish between the relatively few legitimate apostrophes and their allophone of /t/ by doing the same.

Out Of Afrika x 4

In Northeastern Niger, now deep in the desert, there is a life-size rock carving of two giraffes, the largest piece of rock art in the world. Dating from Neolithic times, they and many other carvings strongly suggest that the Sahara region at the time was not a desert at all, but more like the Serengeti. There are many other carvings throughout the Sahara of bovids, including a genus called Pelorovis. Later rock art includes drawings of horses and chariots. All of this indicates that quite recently, perhaps into historical times, the Sahara was not a desert. This is the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, and is considered important to a number of aspects of human history.

The vast desert that now exists all across North Afrika would seem to present a considerable barrier to the exit of humans from the continent. Controversially, we may have evolved on an island in the Gulf of Aden, spread into the Horn of Afrika southward. The earliest known representatives of the genus Homo known date from Ethiopia 2.8 million years ago. Homo habilis is found in East and South Afrika from about 2.3 million years ago although they may not be directly ancestral to us. Homo erectus, on the other hand, is found not only in Afrika but also all the way across Eurasia, including “Java Man”, found in 1891, and “Peking Man”, in 1926. These people must have managed to get out of Afrika somehow. It’s been suggested that they did it by moving along the Nile Valley, but if the whole of North Afrika fluctuated between desert and more humid conditions, their movement is not so unusual. After all, if there used to be giraffes and other typical savannah fauna in the Sahara, why should that not include humans? Moreover, considering that there used to be hippos in the Thames, isn’t it likely that they would’ve got there because there wasn’t a desert in the way?

I feel quite strongly that White people tend to use the Sahara Desert as a way of marking off the more southerly portion of the continent as a kind of “Darkest Africa” (with a C of course) where all the Black people come from. Perhaps we like to imagine there’s always been a line in the sand, as it were, between us and the majority of human genetic diversity found south of it, a view which the Tuareg, for example, do not consider significant. I can’t speak for the Tuareg of course, but those who live in Mali compared to those who live in Libya are considerably darker-skinned but all of them consider themselves as part of the same ethnicity, because they are. However, this is not the main focus of my post today.

The Sahara Pump Hypothesis is generally known as the Sahara Pump Theory, and whereas it certainly rings true to me it is apparently not currently considered rigorous enough to be regarded as one. This raises the Kuhnian view of scientific change in my mind. Thomas Kuhn claimed that the social dynamics of academia were the most significant factor in the acceptance and rejection of theories, so that it was only when the younger people who came up with new theories reached positions of influence that their theories became accepted by the discipline concerned. There may also be other factors. I, for example, believe hominins had an amphibious phase, living in or near beaches, hence my belief that we may have evolved in the Gulf of Aden, which is Elaine Morgan’s belief, not widely accepted by palæontologists, possibly because its emphasis includes the evolution of women rather than focussing solely on men. Hence “Sahara Pump Hypothesis“, even though to an outsider it looks pretty convincing.

There are said to have been a number of phases. The earliest was in the Plio-Pleistocene, a concept used in palæoanthropology to demarcate a period between about five million to twelve thousand years ago which focusses on the evolution and ecology of large vertebrates and the cooling trend which marks this stretch of time, even though it doesn’t work well for more broadly-based palæontology. As far as hominins are concerned, however, there is no firm shift in our history with the onset of the Pleistocene more significant than other events in our story. There are two phases considered here. The first is around 3.2 million years ago, and the other a two hundred millennium period starting about half a million years later. Both of these are well before the start of the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials. One event that happened at this time was that goats spread from Afrika into Eurasia. Another primate than humans, the macaques, also increased their range around then. Geladas, on the other hand, found their range reduced.

Later on there were two waves of Homo erectus migration. The first got all the way to the Far East but the second only reached as far as South Asia. This can be determined by the kind of tools used at the time. There are also signs in the caves, where the likes of stalagmites and stalactites grew during certain periods and halted at others, because water wasn’t entering the systems. Later on, Homo heidelbergensis also managed to spread out of Afrika, and finally Homo sapiens, followed by three more events, one associated with the 8.2 kiloyear event which I’m planning to cover in more detail below, another with the 5.9 kiloyear event and the most recent with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and ensuing Dark Age.

Ice ages generally increase the sizes of hot deserts because a lot of water is locked up in the ice. Consequently, in general during the last few ice ages the Sahara has been both a desert and larger than it is now. The immediate cause of the shrinkage of the desert is increase in the strength of the monsoons in West Afrika, which leads to more water arriving from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the western coast of the Sahara. This is driven by the gradual shifts in the orientation of this planet’s orbit such that we end up closest to the Sun in different seasons. Currently, the Northern summer is when we’re furthest from the Sun, but that very gradually shifts and when the perihelion is in the summer, this triggers more evaporation from the North Atlantic and higher rainfall. Another factor is that the doldrums, the belts of latitude where there is little wind, shift away from the Equator due to warmer temperate regions and this pushes the monsoon region north in the Northern Hemisphere. There are many other factors.

The sea bed off the West Afrikan coast is currently rich in dust from the Sahara and also preserves pollen. Samples at various depths below that sea bed show fluctuations in the levels of dust and pollen types. When there is less dust, there’s also less Ephedra pollen, which prefers drier conditions and more sedge and grass pollen, which need more rain, and this reverses when there’s more. There have in fact been two hundred and thirty periods over the past eight million years when the Sahara was more humid, although when you get to that time scale continental drift becomes significant and Afrika as a whole was in a different position. When there’s more vegetation in the Sahara, it holds on to more water and also reduces the amount of sunlight reflected compared to sand or bare rock, so there’s a feedback effect. In the Sahara during these periods, there were larger lakes and/or more wetlands. These lakes were also linked by a more extensive river network and the rivers which are still there would have carried more water, particularly the Nile and the Niger. The shorelines of these lakes, and in one case, Lake Tchad, a sea, can be plotted using the contours of the land, and are further supported by the presence of rock art only above these levels, piles of fish bones and also the prevalence of fish hooks. Lake Tchad, sometimes referred to today in that prehistoric state as Megalake Chad, had an estimated area of 340 000 square kilometres and a depth of up to a hundred and sixty metres, which is about the size of the Caspian Sea. Other “megalakes” included the Megafezzan, Ahnet and, just barely cut off from the Mediterranean, the Chotta. This last has an interesting history as there was once a French plan to reflood the area by digging a canal from the sea to the basin. The Romans undertook an expedition in search of spices to the Tchad, where they encountered hippopotami. Also in these lakes were turtles, Nile perch and crocodiles. The presence of the rivers would also have eased movement into and out of the area. Just outside Afrika was the famed “Arabia Felix”, the south of the Arabian peninsula which is now uncontroversially desert but back then was perceived by the Romans as a fertile and lush environment where many spices originated. Although this is in the realm of “travellers’ tales”, there certainly would’ve been a time when the Arabian peninsula was like this.

The words for “hippo” in widely separated North Afrikan languages tend to be similar. In Aiki, spoken in Tchad, the word is bùngùr, in Songhoyboro Ciine, spoken in Niger, it’s bàŋà, and in the Nara language of Eritrea it’s àbà. That doesn’t sound that close to me, but there is also a theory which seeks to explain the distribution of the Afro-Asiatic languages in terms of the Sahara Pump. The current spread of these languages looks like this:

By Noahedits – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86724098

Hearing the word “Afro-Asiatic” may make them sound rather more obscure to Europeans than they in fact are. These are in fact what used to be called the Hamitic-Semitic-Kushitic language family, and includes the liturgical languages Ge`ez and Coptic as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese and the Berber tongues, as well as Amharic, an important language of Ethiopia, the significant Hausa language of West Afrika, and Ancient Egyptian. There are 350 surviving Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken by a total of five hundred million people, Arabic being of course the most successful. Usually, when an attempt is made to reconstruct a parental language from a language family, such as Indo-European, it seems to date to some time in the Bronze Age. Not Afro-Asiatic though, I presume partly due to the fact that Ancient Egyptian is so, well, ancient, being over 5 500 years old. The other written language recorded at this time, Sumerian, and also the slightly more recent Elamite, are difficult or impossible to relate to any other known languages because they’re so ancient the chances are their relatives are all long-since extinct. By contrast, Proto-Afro-Asiatic may have been spoken between 18 000 and 12 000 years ago, which is pre-Neolithic, probably in Northeastern Afrika.

These languages occupy a special place in linguistics. Because of Biblical literalism and the importance of the Abrahamic faiths, Europeans used to believe that all languages were descended from Hebrew. After all, if you take Genesis literally, all of the speech quoted in it, including what Eve and Adam said, is in Hebrew, and if the Bible is literally true that implies that the first language was Hebrew. Also, the vast majority of modern scripts derives from Phœnician, even including the South and Southeast Asian ones, some exceptions being the Far Eastern, West Afrikan and Native American forms of writing, so these are the people who invented writing and their languages were some of the first to be written. Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic and Ge`ez are also liturgical, so are considered special within their faith communities.

The period during which Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken is pre-Holocene and during one of the more humid Saharan ages. There are a number of theories about where it originated, including one popular among Egyptologists that it was along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. This of course places it outside of Afrika already, and therefore presumes that it spread into the continent. It’s associated with the idea that languages spread with agriculture. The idea that it originated in the Horn of Afrika is based on the greater diversity found there, since more diverse languages tend to be found near their origins. An English example is the wide range of English accents found in this country in a relatively small area compared to the relative uniformity of North America and Australasia. The other two theories, which could involve the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, are that it originated in North Afrika and that it started in the southern Sahara and northern Sahel. DNA evidence among speakers of these languages suggests either the Horn of Afrika followed by an early spread into Asia followed by a return to the original region from Arabia, or the Middle East, the problem there being that the DNA in question arose by mutation after the spread had already happened. Also, linguistic and genetic histories can be completely different. One of the subgroups, though, is very high in both Tchad and Semitic language speakers, over ninety percent in fact, suggesting that both have an intermediate origin, perhaps over a very wide area of North Afrika, also known as the Sahara!

Hence I prefer to think of the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages to be somewhere in the Green Sahara in the late Palæolithic. Whereas I don’t want to set too much store in the idea that ancient mythologies are inerrantly reliable sources, the Tanakh puts the origin of the whole human race in the Garden of Eden in Western Asia. If this is related to the idea of an Afro-Asiatic homeland it could mean that the Levantine theory is the correct one. However, if it isn’t, it kind of means that the Garden of Eden might in fact be the Sahara in a more humid phase, and that the stories told in Genesis relate to this area. Is it possible that the perception that land would become more hostile to growing crops because of what Christians think of as the Fall is actually due to the increasing harshness of the climate in that region. However, the clemency of the climate probably shouldn’t be overstressed since it still wasn’t exactly like France or some other “perfect” location. Placing the original land in North Afrika would also mean there was a movement of the people similar to the Exodus, but at a much earlier date which had nothing to do with the Ancient Egyptians.

The Afro-Asiatic languages as a group are largely uncontroversial except for the Omotic languages, which may not be related but simply have borrowed a lot of features from nearby languages which were genuinely Afro-Asiatic. These are written in the Ge`ez script like Amharic, or sometimes Latin, and are found in Ethiopia. They’re agglutinative – they inflect by adding separate morphemes to the stem – and also tonal, like most Afrikan languages spoken south of the Sahara. They’re the least like the other members of the family, and share vocabulary related to honey but not to bovids (“unto a land flowing with milk and honey” – “אֶל-אֶרֶץ זָבַת חָלָב וּדְבָשׁ”), suggesting that any split which may have occurred preceded pastoralism. If they are related, they’re closest to Cushitic, which is of course the group spoken in Kush, as mentioned in the Tanakh.

Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Maltese are all clearly closely related to each other, as anyone with a smattering of any of them can tell. Maltese is unusual as a Semitic language spoken in Europe today, and used to have a wider range as Siculo-Arabic, spoken in Sicily until the thirteenth Christian century. Uniquely for a Semitic language, it’s written using Latin script and has borrowed a lot of Italian vocabulary, but is still thoroughly Semitic in grammar. As well as being spoken all across the Maghreb and into the Middle East and being used as a liturgical and technical language over an even wider region, Arabic was, as I’m sure you know, spoken in Iberia and Arabic words have even made their way into French as a result. The importance of Arabic cannot be overestimated. Hebrew is of course the language of the Bible and Israel, and I’ve talked about it copiously elsewhere. Aramaic is still spoken as well, and is also used here and there in the Bible. It was the language of Jesus and its script was adopted all across Asia, even forming the basis of the cursive Mongolian script. It’s still spoken today and has an uninterrupted history of three millennia.

The Berber languages are spoken in the Sahara and have their own script, called Tamazight, which I learned a couple of years ago and used to write a long plan I mentioned which I didn’t want anyone else to read at the time. Berber language and culture has been adversely affected by Arab hegemony in the Maghreb because the countries involved pursued Arabisation on independence from France, not enabling the Berbers to have much influence. As can be seen from the map, whereas the Berber-speaking communities in the northeast of the continent are fairly scattered, they form a pretty continuous area over most of Mali, much of southern Algeria and some of Niger.

The Berber language Tawellemmet, the largest Tuareg language, is spoken in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, and overlaps in territory with the not very closely related Hausa. Hausa is important. It’s a Chadic language spoken by a total of 75 million people, often as a second language, and due to the rapid growth in the population of Nigeria this is likely to be a considerable underestimate. It’s used as an auxiliary language in the country. It’s spoken in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, Tchad, Ghana and Cameroun. Some of Hausa is tonal, some not, depending on the dialect. Nowadays Hausa is written in Latin script although it previously used Arabic, like many other Afrikan languages such as Kiswahili and even Afrikaans. It also has at least three other scripts. It has implosive as well as plosive consonants, pronounced with an influx of air rather than an egress from the lungs. There are a couple of dozen ways to pluralise nouns.

Related closely to Hausa are the other Chadic languages, spoken of course in Tchad but also Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Cameroun. There are about a gross of these, whose speakers are thought to be descended from the people who dwelt on the shores of Lake Tchad when it was a sea in the mid-Holocene seven thousand years ago. Although Hausa is by far the most widely spoken, another eight languages have at least 200 000 speakers, which is more than Gàidhlig by far. They’re all tonal and lack consonant clusters, and suffix agglutinatively. Ngas is the second most widely-spoken Chadic language, found on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.

The southernmost Afro-Asiatic languages are the Kushitic ones spoken in the Rift Valley in Tanzania, including Iraqw which is currently expanding through absorbing nearby groups. Along this southern border of the family’s native area there are many Niger-Congo languages spoken too, which don’t mix with the Afro-Asiatic ones. For instance, in the Jos Plateau, there is a language completely surrounded by Ngas which is not under threat.

It would be a bit of an omission not to mention Ancient Egyptian. This is not entirely extinct because of being adopted by the Coptic church early in the Christian Era. By this point it was written in a modified Greek alphabet with a line over some letters for a certain vowel and the use of several demotic characters to represent sounds not in Greek. It must surely be the oldest surviving language in the world, being at least five and a half thousand years old. Very early on, it adopted signs standing for individual sounds in its hieroglyphics, although a wide range of different signs were used representing several consonants together, whole concepts, gender and status. The number of signs used actually increased as time went by and as technology changed the appearance of signs standing for tools also altered to make them more like the contemporary instruments. Although like most other Semitic languages Egyptian didn’t write vowels, some of them can be worked out from the fact that Coptic, using as it does the Greek alphabet, does. Hieroglyphics became hieratics when written on papyrus and were slightly more sketchy, and eventually the cursive demotic, which is basically a handwritten script like many others but retaining many of the conceptual features of hieroglyphics. Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have a lot in common with other Semitic and Afro-Asiatic languages.

Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from Coptic, Arabic or Hebrew, most Afro-Asiatic languages are tonal. Their scripts tend to relegate vowels to a secondary importance relative to consonants, which reflects the fact that they use a “root and pattern” system, where the consonants carry the basic meaning of the words and the vowels inflect it. This happens with English strong verbs and mutation plurals so it isn’t as foreign as might at first appear. They usually have two genders, feminine and masculine, which include human beings, and the genders of each noun tend to remain the same in most of the languages. They also usually distinguish gender in second person pronouns as well as third, though not in first. One of the mysterious things about them is that they share many grammatical features with today’s Celtic languages, which are completely unrelated, and nobody knows why.

I realise I’ve gone off on one regarding language here, but to finish I want to return to the basic thought that the Sahara is not always a desert. If human influence on the climate is sufficiently weak, at some time, probably about thirteen millennia from now, the Sahara will once again cease to be a desert for thousands of years, the megalakes and river network will return and vegetation will once again cover the region. During the Roman period, the focus and concept of Europe was in some ways subservient to the idea of a Mediterranean region which consisted of that sea and its hinterland. This also erodes the concept of Afrika as a separate set of regions, and removes the geographical barrier which White Europeans are so keen on as a way of separating the “Blacks” from the “Whites”. It’s a mere accident of time and geography that we happen to be living at this point where they are separate. Not only is it thought that darker-skinned people than currently inhabit the region lived all the way up to the Mediterranean, including Ancient Egypt to some extent, but the Western Hunter-Gatherer population was not fair-skinned and nor were Caucasians in general up until a few thousand years ago. The presence of hippos in the Thames and straight-tusked elephants in the Thames Valley brings home the point that Europe, Britain included, and Afrika are geographically continuous, and if they were connected back then, how much more connected are they in this age of globalism?

Startling Semitic-Celtic Parallels And Overinterpretation

Some time ago in the 1980s I think, I made one of my many attempts to learn Gàidhlig and noticed something rather strange. I already had some knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic from when I was younger, and it suddenly struck me that the Celtic language shared some remarkable unusual features with the other two. From what I can recall, these included verb-subject-object word order, two genders – feminine and masculine – and something I can only vaguely remember about how prepositions and pronouns work. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed to be more than a coincidence because three always counts to my mind as more than chance allows, but it was difficult to think of a way of how it could’ve happened. I eventually settled on a rather vague conclusion that maybe Semitic language speakers had travelled north from the Maghreb into Iberia, which Q-Celtic languages are sometimes claimed to originate, and that they then influenced the ancestor of the Irish language in some way. However, this doesn’t work particularly well as it fails to explain how Welsh and Cornish also have these features. After a while, I just put it down to coincidence and my tendency to see patterns where none exist other than the ones my mind has imposed upon them.

At this point I’m going to veer off into probability to illustrate why three things in common is my threshold for statistical significance. It’s common to plump for one in twenty as the point at which something is considered significant, and scientific experiments often use this. In recent years I’ve seen rather too many dubious-looking scientific papers which seem to go for a much lower limit and I now wonder if there has been a new development in statistical theory which justifies this, or whether it’s more to do with “publish or perish”. Anyway, probabilities multiply, so if you flip a fair coin three times and it comes up heads every time the probability of that outcome is one in two times one in two times one in two. 2³ is eight, still below the point when one decides something is significant, but the probability of something happening is not always one in two. For fair dice, you’d only need to throw a six twice for it to become significant: one in thirty-six is six squared. Taking this the other way, the mean probability for three events to multiply up to one in twenty is of course the cube root of twenty, which is just over one in 2.7. However, this reasoning is faulty because we see patterns as opposed to the absence of patterns, so given the large number of other grammatical features one could pluck out of Celtic and Semitic languages, the ones that don’t fit might be ignored and the calculation then becomes extremely complicated because one then has to consider how to delineate specific grammatical features and how to count them, then work out what the chances are that two sets of languages share three grammatical features based on this and the number of possible options. For instance, with syntax the options, assuming a largely fixed word order which doesn’t always happen, are SVO, SOV, OVS, VSO, VOS and OSV, which is one in six. However, other features are quite arbitrary. There are languages out there with more than two dozen grammatical genders, for example. It’s possible to imagine a language whose every noun has a different gender.

Another pattern which definitely is meaningful which can be plucked out of Celtic languages as they are today is the fact that they and Romance languages, more specifically Italic languages, which are Romance languages plus Latin and its closest contemporary relatives, are closer to one another than they are to other branches of the Indo-European language family. Some of these features are the result of parallel evolution. For instance, all of the surviving six Celtic languages have two grammatical genders consisting of feminine and masculine, and this is also true of all Western Romance languages (though not of Romanian, which still has neuter). Besides this, other Indo-European languages tend to use an ending like “-est” to express the superlative of adjectives, but Italic and Celtic tend to use something like “-issimum” – “best” versus “bellissimo” for example. There are a number of other similarities which may be preserved ancient features lost from the other languages, features acquired because they were neighbours or features acquired in their common ancestral language. These are, though, easy to account for because Italic and Celtic just are obviously related, were spoken near each other and so on. The idea of a parallel between Celtic and Semitic is much harder to explain, which is why it might not exist at all.

Recently, I discovered that my personal will o’ the wisp is not in fact just mine. Professional linguists have noticed this too, and there are even theories about how it might have happened and a number of other features in common. VSO and inflected prepositions are just two of several parallels. I should explain that in Gàidhlig and its relatives, prepositions vary according to who they refer to, so for example “agam” means “at me” and “agat” “at thee”. The origin of these is easy to account for, that the words have simply been run together over the millennia, but few other languages do this. Arabic and Hebrew, on the other hand, do. The languages also do things with these prepositions which other languages don’t. They express possession and obligation with them. “The hair on her” – “am falt oirre” is “her hair” and “I need/want/must have a knife” is “tha bhuam sgian” – “there is from me (a) knife”. That “(a)” indicates something else they have in common: they all have a word for “the” but none for “a”. It’s unusual for a language to have a way of expressing definiteness without indefiniteness. Interestingly, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, both spoken in these isles, also had a way to say “the” but not one to say “a(n)”, and this may be a clue as to how these apparent coincidences happened. Breton, however, does have an indefinite article. Likewise, all the languages repeat the pronoun at the end of a relative clause – “the chair which I sat on it” and not “the chair (which) I sat on”. There’s also the way the word for “and” is used, or rather, a word for “and”: “agus” in Gàidhlig (there’s another word, “is”) and “wa” in Arabic (“ve” in today’s Hebrew). In English, “and” is a simple coördinating conjunction like “or” and “but”, but in the other languages it can also be used as a subordinating one. It can also mean “when” or “as”. This is also unusual. “Agus”/”ve” can also be used to mean “but” or “although”, and in fact as I understand it, the Arabic “wa” is the only option to express “but”. Besides this, there’s what’s known as the construct state genitive in English descriptions of Hebrew grammar. Arabic doesn’t say “the man’s house” but “man the house”, or “taigh an duine” in Gàidhlig – “the house man”. This is in spite of the fact that the language in question has a genitive form for the noun in question. This makes approximately eight features found in Celtic and Semitic languages but only rarely in others.

And there’s more. The surviving Celtic languages are unusual among Indo-European languages in having these features, and are in general quite aberrant compared to the others. That said, there are branches of the family which have unusual features for it, such as Armenian, which has grammar more like other languages than Indo-European in that it hangs successive suffixes off the ends of words per idea as opposed to having combined ideas in each suffix (in English we have, for example, a final S for genitive (possessive) and plural and don’t need anything extra). Even so, were it not for the known history and the fact that so much Celtic vocabulary is clearly similar to that of other European languages, nobody would guess Celtic languages were Indo-European. In fact, the very features which they share with Semitic languages are the ones which make them unique in the Indo-European family.

They are also emphatically not related to each other, or at least so distantly related that there are languages native to Kenya and Tanzania which are closer to Hebrew and Arabic and a dead language spoken in present day China which is closer to Welsh (and in fact English) than they are to each other. Semitic languages are part of a family now referred to as “Afro-Asiatic”, which also includes Tamazight, a Berber language, and Ancient Egyptian, spoken five thousand years ago and still nowhere near the speech of the Kurgans at the time which are ancestral to Celtic, Germanic and the like. There are, however, a few theories about how this has happened.

One apparently anomalous circumstance which can be seen from the New Testament is that Paul wrote a letter to the Galatians. These lived in Anatolia, the Asian portion of present-day Turkey, and they spoke a Celtic language. This language was clearly in close proximity to the Semitic lingua franca of that region at the time, Aramaic, as well as various others such as Assyrian. It’s therefore been suggested that the whole of the Celtic branch was influenced by this local connection, all the way across to Ireland in the end. To me, this seems a little far-fetched, but it is true that there’s a concentration of a particular set of genes which marks the Irish, and incidentally myself, as possible wanderers from the Indo-European ancestral land who went as far as possible at the time. This may make the so-called Celts the ultimate invaders in a way and contradicts the common mystical, matriarchal and peaceful image some people seem to have of them. This migration also forms part of another theory, that farming, having been invented in the Fertile Crescent where Semitic languages were spoken, then spread culturally across Europe to these islands and took linguistic features with it. Either of these ideas being true could be expected to imply that all Celtic languages, not just the modern survivors here and in Brittany, had these features in common.

Significantly, the speakers of Celtic languages were probably the first Indo-European speakers to arrive in Great Britain and Ireland. Prior to that, clearly there were other people living here who had their own spoken but unwritten languages. It’s possible that traces of these may survive in place names. It used to be thought that the Picts spoke a non-IE language, possibly related to Basque, but this has now been refuted. The features Irish, Welsh and the rest have in common with Hebrew and Arabic are also apparently shared with Tamazight and other languages of the Maghreb, although to me that’s hearsay – I haven’t checked them out. Consequently, one rather outré theory, is that before the Celts got here the folk of Albion and the Emerald Isle spoke a Semitic language, and Celtic was influenced by this when it got here. However, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to suppose this to be so other than the connection.

Leaving those theories aside, I would bring up the issue of linguistic universals, and particularly implicational universals. Some features are common to all spoken languages. For example, every known spoken language has a vowel like /a/ as in “father” in it, every language which distinguishes questions tonally involves changing the pitch of the voice towards the end of the sentence, and every language has at least some plural pronouns. There’s a particular set of implicational universals around SOV languages which they tend to have in common, such as being exclusively suffixing, to the extent that it used to be thought that there was a so-called “Altaic” language family including Turkish and Mongolian, and some would even include Japanese and Korean in that, but they’ve turned out not to be closely related but have sometimes grown more alike through contact, but they also have many of these implicational universals, suggesting to me some kind of possible “standard” human spoken language with those grammatical features. I would tentatively suggest, and I may well be wrong, that the features Celtic and Semitic languages share are in fact similarly implicational universals. Both of them have an unusual syntax and this may lead them both down the same path.

But there’s an extra layer to this which intrigues me. There used to be a famous Hebrew teacher who introduced the subject as “Gentlemen, this is the language God spoke” (yes, this is extremely sexist but it was a long time ago), and similarly Arabic is considered a particularly sacred language almost designed by God to write the Qur’an. Hence the features mentioned are used in two very important sacred texts, and if I’m going to go all religious and mystical on you, just maybe the Celtic and Semitic languages have a special place in spiritual practices, and this is about that. But leaving that aside, it still seems to me that the most likely explanation for the things they have in common is simply that they are a particular “type” of language, just as Japanese and Turkish are, without needing to have any genetic relationship.

They’re also both really annoying!

The issue of overinterpretation will have to be held over until tomorrow, sorry.