# Non-Afro-American / Non-Indo-European



## Chazzwozzer

Is it just me, or do you also think there's a better way to express these two meanings? To tell the truth, I've been thinking of something else I could use instead of the prefix "non-" but... no idea! How do these two expressions sound to natives, anyway?


----------



## cas29

What exactly are you trying to say?
Would a non-Afro-American be any American without an African background?
How would you define a Non-Indo-European?

Your two examples don't make sense to me personally.

Are you trying to find "caucasian"?  (Which can refer equally to white skinned people or darker skinned people from Indian)


----------



## foxfirebrand

Chazzwozzer said:


> Is it just me, or do you also think there's a better way to express these two meanings? To tell the truth, I've been thinking of something else I could use instead of the prefix "non-" but... no idea! How do these two expressions sound to natives, anyway?


First of all, the obsolete _afro-_ has now been dignified by expansion into _African,_ so you're already starting at a disadvantage.

Secondly, _non_ is so-- well, negative.  "Other than" is expressed by the neologistic prefix _other-,_ as in "other-scrupled" for the former judgmental term "immoral."

_Extra-_ means outside of, and _ultra-_ means the same, with overtones of "beyond."  Since that implies an evaluative or hierarchical paradigm, the former preclitic is preferable.

So, as an Extra-African-American person, I urge you to study up on this stuff.  Native-American people are of course also Extra-African, so for clarity's sake they ought to be referred to as Native extra-African-Americans-- unless they were born overseas, through circumstances beyond their control, or what we call _ultracircumstantialities._ 

So that would make me an Other-native-extra-African-American of the Indo-Euro-centrically predisposed sort, otherwise known as a sorry white sonofabitch.
.


----------



## sound shift

As I understand it, Indo-European is a language family and nothing to do with race or appearance.


----------



## panjandrum

For some reason that I haven't understood yet, non-Indo-European sounds OK to me - it characterises a set of languages.  Non-African-American sounds wrong.

And now I know why.

Indo-European is the joining of two sets - the Indo- set and the European set.  Therefore non-Indo-European clearly means a language that is neither Indo- nor European.

African-American is a subset of the American set.  Therefore there is ambiguity as to whether non-African-American means American, but not African-American or everything else in the world other than African-American.

Now, it that clear


----------



## papillon

foxfirebrand said:


> First of all, the obsolete _afro-_ has now been dignified by expansion into _African,_ so you're already starting at a disadvantage.


Yes, African-American is currently the term most widely used, although interestingly, _Afro_ is still used in composit words like _Afro-Caribbean.

_ However, other than that, both non-African-American and non-Indo-European sound OK to me. I don't perceive the word _non_ to carry any negative connotation, but simply as it was perhaps intended, to indicate the lack of a given characteristic.

I can imaging some social study examining the role of race and gender on compensation of, say, corporate executives, using a phrase like ... _on average African-American CEO's earn XX% less/more than their non-African-American couterparts_....I see Panjandrum's point, but I think no ambiguity is created in either case, as context fills in the gaps. 

I think same goes for non-Indo-European. I can imagine someone starting a thread in the Suggestions/Comments forum asking that languages be divided into Indo-European and non-Indo-European forums (not that anyone would do such a thing).


----------



## foxfirebrand

papillon said:


> I can imaging some social study...using a phrase like ... _on average African-American CEO's earn XX% less/more than their non-African-American couterparts_....


I can imagine "some social study" using language like this-- that's what's so corrosively pernicious about the writings of that particular gaggle of academic pettifoggers.

What's wrong with a sentence like "Black corporate bosses earn about as much as their white counterparts?"

The point I'm making is about big sloppy hyphenated and euphemistic terms that only clarify distinctions _they themselves create._  I altered the content about inequity because it wasn't germane to the grammar-- in my exemplary sentences people might as well get paid the same, right?
.


----------



## papillon

Well, African-American vs. Black would be a topic of a separate thread (I believe ther may have been some, though I couldn't locate them).

I like your version,  but of course you've changed the meaning of the term non-African-American. Presumably the study was comparing the earnings of Blacks to those of _everyone else_. While the majority of those may, in fact, be white, that's not 100% true.
So technically, at least, your phrase would be
"Black corporate bosses earn about as much as their _non-black_ counterparts?". Hmm, still doesn't sound too good.


----------



## Montaigne

Sound shift's right, Indo-European refers to a linguistic category that includes a wide roster of languages with a common origin i.e. the idioms spoken by the Aryas and their offsprings from Sanskrit to modern English, via Greek, Latin, German and Slavic idioms ...
"Non Indo-European" applies to languages only, when they belong to different linguistic families such as Altaic, Mayalo-Polynesian, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Semitic.....and is correct within this limited usage.
Now Afro-American or as stated by Foxfirebrand (whom I am a great fan of)
African-American, though seemingly characterizing some form of ethnicity is in fact a social and political concept aiming to establish the homogeneity and therefore solidarity of the so-called group.
"Non African-American" then has no positive defined equivalent, contrary to linguistic groups of which Indo-European is a precisely determinated element among an ensemble of similarly determinated elements.
If you call someone a stranger you give no reference tool or methodology to search for identification, whereas if you call him a foreigner at least his citizenship can be an object of search.


----------



## papillon

Montaigne said:


> African-American, though seemingly characterizing some form of ethnicity is in fact a social and political concept aiming to establish the homogeneity and therefore solidarity of the so-called group. "Non African-American" then has no positive defined equivalent, contrary to linguistic groups of which Indo-European is a precisely determinated element among an ensemble of similarly determinated elements.


You are making, to say mildly, a leap of logic. If I understand correctly, by saying that the term is a "political concept aiming to establish the homogeneity" you are _aiming_ to discredit this term. Then, your logic goes, since the term "African-American" itself is ..well... meaningless, then, by inference, _non-African-American_ is too.

Regardless of what you or I think about the term _African-American_, I hope you'll agree with me that there are millions of people who self-identify as African-American. They do so *without* _"aiming to establish the homogeneity and therefore solidarity of the so-called confused: ) group"_.


----------



## foxfirebrand

papillon said:


> "Black corporate bosses earn about as much as their _non-black_ counterparts?". Hmm, still doesn't sound too good.


Well, being as how they earn the same, the social "scientist's" mania for creating distinctions is obviated-- so "most corporate bosses earn about the same" is possible.  Except of course when you consider the market system.  _There's _the arbiter of salary disparities in the world, the one as unseen by academic theorists.

To get to the crux of this in plain language, as I see it-- I think one can overdo the craving for precise terminology, and start stringing too much stuff together in the effort to reduce a complex array of attributes _into a single noun._ 

I know language is artificial, and we can make up anything we want, collectively speaking-- our word structures define "what's out there" every bit as much as they describe it.  Become too embroiled in the linguistic facet of a multifaceted world, and you start feeling there's nothing really "out there" unless someone has _named_ it.

Then along comes Panjandrum and sees the ambiguity created by the quest for too much exactitude and clarity-- is there really a prototypic "non-Afro-American" walking around _out there?_  Does that phrase really define a class of people I can't come up with peskily-defined exceptions to and exemptions from?

The Medieval Scholastics had the same seriousness and zeal about their correctitude, and faith in the strides they were making in the history of ideas-- when they crafted their own hyphenation-chains of distinctions without differences, and ended up mired in disquisitions about angels dancing on pinheads.

I guess it's the illogic of zeroing in on a clearly distinct category by naming it with exclusionary terms like "non"-- that strikes me as a system of illogic whose _reductio_ is a term like "I'm a Non-Whatever-You-May-Say."

Without this stubborn insistence on clotting our sentences up with aggregate nouns, we can talk about Indo-European modes of syntax _and those of other languages._ 

Calling people white or black is a convention that serves well enough when we're making distinctions about skin color and/or ancestry-- replacement of the monosyllables with hyphenated clusters _adds nothing to that._  If there are exceptions to a statement that describes whites vis-a-vis whites, they can be laid out in clear subordinate phrases and clauses, themselves replete with healthy monosyllables.

This is especially true of ambiguous exclusionary phrases like "non-Afro-American" which as you demonstrate, invite the objection "there are non one things that are also non the other."  Ordinary people, the ones who keep language alive and determine how it is used,  are going to take that phrase as a burro-gobbledygook way of saying "white."  If you're talking about whites and blacks, and a third kind of human needs to be included-- mention them by name, in whatever context is called for. 

To put it more simply, for your example of "afro-American execs," you don't necessarily define a coherent category of people simply by adding a "non"-- especially when you are parsing things like salaries statistically, and by ethnic group.

Your group is being compared to "everyone not included," but it could be that the salary of some "others" (whites) compares one way, and that of some other "others" (people with Turkmenistani-American and Basque separatist parents) differently.  Some "non" X earn less than X, some earn more-- so the statistical hypothesis about X vis-a-vis _everybody non-X_ is specious on the face of it.

And the hell of it is, this important fact is _obscured_ by the seemingly reasonable sleight of language involved in creating an exclusionary phrase like "non-Afro-American."

Or, if you live in southern Florida, "non-Afro-Cuban-American."
.


----------



## Chazzwozzer

I've come across Non-Indo-European here and Non-Afro-American here.


> Jeff Samardzija, non-Afro-American receiver at Notre Dame…


Cas29, like I said in my first post, I was looking for something else that could be used instead of "non-" since these two expressions sounded kind of strange to me, but I was not sure, that's why I asked here, you see.



panjandrum said:


> African-American is a subset of the American set. Therefore there is ambiguity as to whether non-African-American means American, but not African-American or everything else in the world other than African-American.


What if "African" is not paired with "American" by a hyphen such as "Non-African Americans", does it refer to Americans but not African-Americans now?


----------



## dec-sev

What was so undignified in *afro*- that it had to be  *dignified by expansion into African*?
What about the word *white*? Should it be dignified as well?


----------



## Montaigne

Papillon,
I'm not at all aiming to discredit "African-American" as a term of designation
which many people certainly find appropriate, I'm simply saying this neologism has been created with a view to give a historical sociopolitical dimension that would bring widely shared common legitimacy to a group otherwise and formerly described as "colored" then "black", a reference poor in meaning, therefore unable to convey such  notions of common origin, common history, common cultural background, common interests and common means of action.
From an "agitprop" standpoint I'd say it's brilliant ! As was the use of the (at that time) neologism "proletarian" by the Komintern ( Пролетарии всех
сртан .....) giving people with otherwise no links or sense of self description
a NAME for their situations and fates, hence a reason to unite.
But in a way you might be right, and I'm not far from seeing "African-American" as getting in the way of being "American", since enhancing differences and calling for equality could well be a paradoxical dead-end.


----------



## curly

Chazzwozzer said:


> What if "African" is not paired with "American" by a hyphen such as "Non-African Americans", does it refer to Americans but not African-Americans now?


 

Wouldn't it be easier to say that african-americans earn about as much as european-americans?


----------



## psicutrinius

So, a dwarf should be called "a vertically handicapped person"?

Why not call a spade a spade and say "a black" and "a non - white"?. These are objective facts, and if they are offensive words to somebody, this somebody should think twice about whether HE (or SHE) has a problem.


----------



## curly

Just because it's true, it doesn't mean it's not offensive. People don't choose what they are offended by. There are many perfectly reasonable words that are true, but due to mis-use have become offensive. 
I personally think that depnding on the situation short words can be really offensive and sometimes can show familiarity.

Hey-ho it's funny old world.


----------



## Montaigne

African-american, European-american !!
Inflation of something-american !
So no one is plainly american and the democratic utensil of the country was not a pot but a sieve.


----------



## Montaigne

Curly,
Some people definitely choose what they are offended by.
Which explains demonstrations, terrorism and wars.


----------



## curly

I don't follow your argument. Do you believe that people choose how to feel? I think that certainly people control their reactions to what they feel but not how they actually feel.
What do you think?


----------



## foxfirebrand

Montaigne said:


> Curly,
> Some people definitely choose what they are offended by.
> Which explains demonstrations, terrorism and wars.


This is especially true of the past 20 years or so-- young people going to universities are actively encouraged to assemble their own profile of grievances, and define not themselves but the sub-group of victims whose injustices (and of course by implication enemies) they share.

Speaking of melting pot, it turns out the "non-Afro-American receiver at Notre Dame" (I won't even begin to explore the offensiveness of _that_ gem)-- is a Serbian-American.  Talk about Balkanization!
.


----------



## ireney

curly said:


> Wouldn't it be easier to say that african-americans earn about as much as european-americans?




And what about the Asian-Americans then (I don't know if that's a legitimate term mind you)?

Mind you the African-American is not strictly geographical anyway, since, if it was, the children of any i.e. white (Indo-European, Caucasian take your pick) Africans who have immigrated to the USA would have to be called so.


----------



## curly

ireney said:


> And what about the Asian-Americans then (I don't know if that's a legitimate term mind you)?
> 
> Mind you the African-American is not strictly geographical anyway, since, if it was, the children of any i.e. white (Indo-European, Caucasian take your pick) Africans who have immigrated to the USA would have to be called so.


I thin k i have heard the term asian-americans though i can't be certain.

 I would have thought in that case that the person would be called european-african-american for accuracy, although i suppose it all gets very messy when we think this far back. Also i wonder if there is any point considering people are really talking about "black" people anyway. 

If colour is all that people are reffering to then black suits fine, doesn't it?

If one is talking about descent then African american or whatever.

But it's all off-topic. I think my view could be said to be, LAbel people as they like to be labeled(or indeed don't label them at all).


----------



## psicutrinius

OK so let's say a black is someone who doesn't need suntan, because he-she is tanned beyond whatever the sun can do?. Otherwise, how do you explain the hue?.

Any WHITE Zimbabwean fleeing the mess it is now, especially if he has been born there (and even more if he is several generations born-and-bred there) going into the US would be what? a "Indo european-caucasian-stock afro-American"? (once he has settled and sworn the Constitution, of course, otherwise the "American" part does not apply).

More: Would he not be right if feeling discriminated for the "afro" being denied him, and therefore feeling that the "tanned-beyond-anything-suntan-can-do" are discriminating him?


----------



## papillon

OK, just to recap, we all seem to agree that the term non-Indo-European is OK Otherwise speak now or forever....


curly said:


> Wouldn't it be easier to say that african-americans earn about as much as european-americans?


Regardless of how irritated one might feel with what they perceive to be a  politically correct overkill, designation as _non-African-American_ doesn't mean white. I understand if someone may choose to interpet it that way, but US is a very diverse country and whites don't even form a majority in certain areas/ fields of enterprise/ insitutions. The University of Caifornia (Berkeley) is ~ 30% Asian, and jails in California have a significant Latino population. Therefore, in those contexts, _non-African-American_ differs significantly from _white_. 
There is nothing ambiguous about the term either. If one strongly dislikes this term because it is cumbersome, and, perhaps, overly awkward -- I am with you, let's have another, better one. But the meaning itself is very specific. Thing is, the word DOESN'T need to define any coherent ethnicity/group of people. Non-African-Americans don't need to have anything in common, and they don't need to meet each other for brunch on Sunday morning. The ONLY thing they share, is that they're not African-American. It's a term of exclusion (please don't read anything into this word, I am speaking semantically).

Consider the word extra-terrestrial. _Anything_ (or anyone ) not of this planet is extra-terrestrial. Anyone who is not African-American is non-African-American. I have a hard time accepting as genuine the confusion with the term, when someone claims to not understand which part of the word is being negated by the _non_ particle. Other than an excercise in semantics, is anyone _really_ that confused?

As for _why_ a hypothetical sociological study may choose to break people into such categories is probably beyond the topic of this thread. But consider this: "Black corporate bosses earn about as much as their white counterparts" (this is from an earlier post). Well, maybe they do. Or maybe they don't. How would you know if someone didn't compile the data? Maybe, as Foxfirebrand suggested, market forces serve as an equalizer. Or maybe the racism in big corporations is stronger than market forces. Anecdotal evidence, say along the lines of " my buddies Mike and Bob are making a lot of money, and they are both black".. is hardly a substitute for statistical evidence.
Perhaps the most obvious example is in clinical studies of new drugs. In many instances certain genetic markers make African-Americans predisposed to  diseases ranging from sicklle-cell anemia and diabetes to certain types of cancer. Additionally, in many instances, African-Americans show a different response to drugs.


----------



## Maja

foxfirebrand said:


> Speaking of melting pot, it turns out the "non-Afro-American receiver at Notre Dame" (I won't even begin to explore the offensiveness of _that_ gem)-- is a Serbian-American.  Talk about Balkanization!


Excuse me?


----------



## .   1

foxfirebrand said:


> Speaking of melting pot, it turns out the "non-Afro-American receiver at Notre Dame" (I won't even begin to explore the offensiveness of _that_ gem)-- is a Serbian-American. Talk about Balkanization!.


Could you imaging the outcry at the term 'non-white quarterback'.
There is no way to sugar coat bigotted views.  Why is the ethnicity of the person being questioned?  What difference does it make?

Labels demean everybody but they demean the labeller far more than the labelled.

.,,


----------



## .   1

curly said:


> People don't choose what they are offended by.


People have to choose what they are offended by.
I was offended by being called a 'kid' when I was young but now I am chuffed at the term.
I was once insulted by intimations that I was fat. I would love to be able to be referred to as being a little portly.
I have felt embarrassed by my lack of life experiences now I find them to be funny.
I can remember being insulted by words like bookworm and jock but they seem to have lost their sting.

Be sure you are sure of your sources
your senses make sensible sense
hear opinions expressed so exact here 
you know that you knew what was meant.

.,,


----------



## cuchuflete

papillon said:


> OK, just to recap, we all seem to agree that the term non-Indo-European is OK Otherwise speak now or forever....



"WE all seem to agree"?   Not a hope!  YOU may prefer to lump Ugaritic and Chinese together, for heaven-only-knows what reason.  I think it's silly.  

If I were doing a research project, and all members of the population to be sampled and studied were either of Indo-European and another group, which including no trace of Indo-Europeans or Indo-European attributes, I might use such arcane terms.  Otherwise, I find non-Indo-European pretty useless outside of linguistics.


----------



## modus.irrealis

cuchuflete said:


> Otherwise, I find non-Indo-European pretty useless outside of linguistics.



Does the term "Indo-European" have any usefulness outside of linguistics?


----------



## papillon

cuchuflete said:


> Otherwise, I find non-Indo-European pretty useless outside of linguistics.


I find the term "Fourier transform" pretty useless outside of mathematics.


----------



## cuchuflete

modus.irrealis said:


> Does the term "Indo-European" have any usefulness outside of linguistics?



There are some people who seem to think so...



> Results *1* - *10* of about *23,500* for * "indo-european culture"
> *





> Results *1* - *10* of about *4,730* for * "indo-european literature"*.





> Results *1* - *10* of about *37,300* for * "indo-european people"*.


----------



## modus.irrealis

cuchuflete said:


> There are some people who seem to think so...



There are many people who think many things, including that "non-Indo-European" is useful outside of linguistics. It doesn't change the fact that "Indo-European" is a term about languages and using it to describe people doesn't make a lot of sense (unless you mean people who speak Indo-European languages, but then it's a linguistic comment anyway).


----------



## .   1

modus.irrealis said:


> There are many people who think many things, including that "non-Indo-European" is useful outside of linguistics. It doesn't change the fact that "Indo-European" is a term about languages and using it to describe people doesn't make a lot of sense (unless you mean people who speak Indo-European languages, but then it's a linguistic comment anyway).


The language spoken and words chosen are probably the most revealing thing about a culture and people in general.
Non-Afro-American relates to ethnicity and therefore directly to people.
Indo-European relates to language and is only indirectly related to people.

.,,


----------



## ireney

I don't think there's a term that everyone will be happy with.

Take for instance "Caucasian" (which thoroughly confused me the first time I heard it in a movie since that -very dead- character was not from a country in/near Caucasus and these are the only ones we refer to with this name). It is better in some aspects than Indo-European (which by the way I agree should be used only for language or at least for language and for the hypothetical people who spoke that language way back then). In other aspects it is not. 

As far as I know Latinos (is this the right term?) are not included in the "Caucasian" group. At least, they are not the way it is used (in other words in the group of "white" people). However, the anthropological term "Caucasian" refers to a group to which those Latinos of European descend "belong" to.

Take the terms "white" and "black". Experiment with photoshop or any other similar program if you wish (you know how you can take a "drop"/sample of coulour and ask it to use it to fill in another space?). See how many "white" people are pale enough to "deserve" the appelation and how many "black" people are dark enough to be called "black".


----------



## Outsider

Chazzwozzer said:


> Is it just me, or do you also think there's a better way to express these two meanings? To tell the truth, I've been thinking of something else I could use instead of the prefix "non-" but... no idea! How do these two expressions sound to natives, anyway?


What exactly was it that you wished to _say_ with those two words, Chazzwozzer?


----------



## cuchuflete

modus.irrealis said:


> There are many people who think many things, including that "non-Indo-European" is useful outside of linguistics. It doesn't change the fact that "Indo-European" is a term about languages and using it to describe people doesn't make a lot of sense (unless you mean people who speak Indo-European languages, but then it's a linguistic comment anyway).


  So nice that we fully agree... could it be the non-Indo-European full moon, which, coincidentally is also the Indo-European region full moon?  

I have always thought that Indo-European was strictly a linguistic term, but it seems that there are others who use it (mistakenly?) as an extension to the speaker, or to some attribute of the speaker.  I don't see much sense in that, because I'm persuaded that there are apt to be much more precise descriptive words for such people and attributes.


----------



## Chazzwozzer

Outsider said:


> What exactly was it that you wished to _say_ with those two words, Chazzwozzer?


*Non-Afro-American or Non-African-American=>*Any Americans whose ancestors were not indigenous to Africa.
*
Non-Indo-European=>*Any language families other than Indo-European


----------



## .   1

Chazzwozzer said:


> *Non-Afro-American or Non-African-American=>*Any Americans whose ancestors were not indigenous to Africa.
> 
> *Non-Indo-European=>*Any language families other than Indo-European


It is possible that you will have to use a sentence to describy what you want to describe.
Once you enter the realms of non-descriptives you can rapidly spiral down to non-sense.

.,,


----------



## curly

. said:


> People have to choose what they are offended by.
> I was offended by being called a 'kid' when I was young but now I am chuffed at the term.
> I was once insulted by intimations that I was fat. I would love to be able to be referred to as being a little portly.
> I have felt embarrassed by my lack of life experiences now I find them to be funny.
> I can remember being insulted by words like bookworm and jock but they seem to have lost their sting.
> 
> Be sure you are sure of your sources
> your senses make sensible sense
> hear opinions expressed so exact here
> you know that you knew what was meant.
> 
> .,,


I'm not saying that people always feel the same way. Did you one day choose not to be insulted by the word bookworm? or did you have some experience that changed your mind? And did you ever choose to be offended by something? or just chosen not to let things bother you, which, i think, is a different thing.


----------



## Chaska Ñawi

And returning to the topic at hand, the first post of the thread is:



> Is it just me, or do you also think there's a better way to express these two meanings? To tell the truth, I've been thinking of something else I could use instead of the prefix "non-" but... no idea! How do these two expressions sound to natives, anyway?



Personally I have an intense dislike of euphemisms, so the above expressions ring all sorts of alarm bells for me.


----------



## beclija

> The language spoken and words chosen are probably the most revealing thing about a culture and people in general.


Still doesn't make sense. The languages do indeed have related words, but these may (and often do) relate to quite different concepts. Besides, English is typologically closer to Chinese than to Sanskrit, even though the latter is Indo-European and the former isn't. Equally, Sanskrit is closer to Hebrew than to English except for what they share in the lexicon.


> Personally I have an intense dislike of euphemisms, so the above expressions ring all sorts of alarm bells for me.


What precisely is euphemistic about "non-Indo-European" (in its proper, linguistic sense of course, everything else is bullshit in my humble opinion)? It is not a coherent group, no more than "non-Uralic" or "non-Inuit". But there are contexts where it is useful: You want to claim that a certain linguistic feature, previously thought to be very stable, is in fact subject to influences from language contact more than anyone thought: "Feature X is an areal feature shared by most if not all non-Indo-European languages of Europe and Western Siberia, while absent in Indo-Aryan." - Makes perfect sense to me.


----------



## Montaigne

English closer to Chinese than to Sanskrit, Sanskrit closer to Hebrew than to English ??????
Please explain.


----------



## beclija

> English closer to Chinese than to Sanskrit, Sanskrit closer to Hebrew than to English ??????
> Please explain.


(Modern) English and Chinese tend to have many short words (predominantly monosyllabic) rather than fewer complex ones - take "I will go" which is one word in Sanskrit, Spanish or Russian. English has very reduced inflections (the -s in "he says" is the only one left in the present tense, for example), so in this respect it is also closer to Chinese (which has none) than to the rich system of Sanskrit (or even Old English). As a consequence of not marking most words, English and Chinese have rather strict word order to tell apart the relations. Both make much use of composition for word-formation, which is present, but not as central in Sanskrit and absent in (Biblical) Hebrew (if I am not mistaken, it is gaining some ground in Modern Hebrew, presumably due to the fact that in its revival, it was a second language to speakers of predominantly European languages). Both Sanskrit and Hebrew have rich inflections and word-formation based on affixes and stem-changes (the systems work quite differently, but none the less). And, if again we take Biblical Hebrew, both were used predominantly or exclusively as a sacred language for millenia, which means that both have an elaborate vocabulary for philosophical and theological demonstrations, but are of limited use in most day to day situations.


----------



## Montaigne

beclija,
Any theoretical basis or supporting facts for this astounding description ?


----------



## beclija

What precisely do you find so astounding. I am not speaking of related words, let alone common origin, I'm just saying something about the workings of the systems, the grammars. Of course English and Sanskrit are historically related, that is not in question. What do you mean by "theoretical basis" - it's just a description, take any book about language typology, or any beginner's grammar of the languages in question.

Of course there are huge differences for example in the sound system of Chinese (tones, no consonant clusters, etc), but here Hebrew fits in rather well with Sankrit and English, so again, typologically speaking, there is nothing that sets Indo-European languages apart. And the pitch accent system of Swedish and Japanese can be very sensibly compared (not that of Chinese, though). So maybe you are right that Chinese was a bad example, but it doesn't change the point, there are dozens of non-Indo-European that could be used in its place. I'd quite like to stick to Hebrew-Sanskrit, though

Note that I was commenting on the remark "The language spoken and words chosen are probably the most revealing thing about a culture and people in general." I understood it to be meant as an argument for why it makes sense to use "Indo-European" in a non-linguistic context, and I disagree. The point I am trying to make is that even if we agree on the idea that there is a close correlation between language and "culture and people in general", there is none with genetically (in the linguistic sense) remotely related language _families_. Though I doubt that there is anything more than what is obvious behind this story, it should be mentioned that linguists who seriously investigated the connection argued on grounds of typological similarity or detailed analysis of particular central concepts. The only reasons I can imagine to take genetic relatedness as a starting point is that one either doesn't know anything about typology, or is starting from some nineteenth century ideas about race.


----------



## Montaigne

The only reasons I can imagine to take genetic relatedness as a starting point is that you either don't know anything about typology, or you are starting from some nineteenth century ideas about race.[/QUOTE]


Well, well, well Mister, you suppose I don't agree with your pseudo scientific
wild imaginings and you're damn right, and this makes me a retarded ignoramus.
Not any serious linguist will lend credit to your woolly theory.
Typological similarity reminds me of this German firm which had brandnamed their TV sets "Saba" (after the Queen symbol of beauty and perfection) and was surprised not to make any sale in Japan. In japanese "saba" means mackerel which who would like to watch TV on ?


----------



## beclija

I am sorry, I don't get it. I'm talking of typology, you are talking of language genetics, maybe that's why. And no, if you care to actually look at some typology, you will find that my "wild imaginings" are correct. You may still decide that that is not enough to claim Chinese and English "more similar than either is to Sanskrit" and that my comparsion was partly polemic, choosing the facts selectively to make a point, and probably you are right about that. But the facts stand. To ask again, what exactly is so astounding?

By the way, no reason to get offended. First of all, it wasn't even your remark I commented on, if I am not mistaken. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with not knowing much about language typology. In fact, I think, most people don't know much about it. And what precisely to you want to say with the TV sets example? That is, if anything, a cultural thing: the biblical figure of the queen of Saba has been accostumed into all European cultures by ways of Christianity, and has little if anything to do with language (it's a Hebrew anecdote originally, and that one isn't Indo-European at all). And it's no more than an unfortunate coincidence (for the producer) that the word means something unpleasent in Japanese, the same might just as easily have happened with any Indo-European language.


> Not any serious linguist will lend credit to your woolly theory.


In fact, it's not my "woolly theory", rather it has been invented by rather respected linguists. Take Otto Jespersen. He was (although a Dane himself) one of the most respected linguists to write on English grammar in the first half of the twentieth century, and he took the history of English as a demonstration of what later came to be referred as "Jespersen's Cycle": The hypothesis that languages cyclically switch from the analytical type (represented by Chinese), to the agglutinating type (represented by Turkish) by ways of demoting independent words as affixes, to the syncretic type (represented by Sanskrit, Hebrew and Latin) by merging different affixes into complex arbitrary expression, and back to the analytic type by phonetically levelling the affixes, leading to the need to express relations structurally that had previously been expressed by ways of endings etc. The history of English was his prime example for the last step. He might be wrong, but already the fact that he could use English to demonstrate his theory should show that it is (again, purely typologically speaking) pretty close to Chinese.


----------



## ireney

a) typology is a different thing from language groups (I don't remember the term right now). Furthermore I can't see how typology can counteract those who talk about a Indo-European "genetic" group. I can't even see how the two are related.

b) typology is a rather complicated matter of which I don't know all that much. Since I don't know much any opinion I make on similarities etc can be easily wrong. That said, I think that the similarities beclija noted are a bit superficial.


----------



## beclija

As I said, someone argued that it should make sense to talk about Indo-European in a non-linguistic sense (which you criticized as well, if I remember right) because "the language spoken and words chosen are probably the most revealing thing about a culture and people in general." 

I simply wanted to say that even if you adhere to some variety of Sapir's/Whorf's theory of linguistic relativism, you should keep in mind that it is typology and not "genetics" these scholars and there followers had in mind. Of course, Indo-European and non-Indo-European are valid and important terms within historical linguistics, but not otherwhise, not even in some branches of linguistics that might (or might not) be relevant to "culture and people in general".

(edit: Typology often tends to be fairly superficial, in my opinion, and for good reasons: if you want to do large-scale comparisons, you can't avoid relying on data from poorly described languages, which automatically limits the depth of your analysis. But as a matter of fact, if you stick to the old tripartition (which might turn out not to have any real significance) of analytic, agglutinating and synthetic, English and Chinese would fall into the same category (although English is admittedly a boarderline case) and Hebrew and Sanskrit in another.)


----------

