[...]"
Moses (Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה, Standard Moshe Tiberian Mōšeh (7 Adar 2368 - 7 Adar 2488 in the Hebrew calendar; 1393 - 1273 BCE); Arabic: موسىٰ, Mūsa; Ge'ez: ሙሴ Musse) was an early Biblical Hebrew religious leader, lawgiver, prophet, and military leader, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. He is also an important prophet in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Bahá'í Faith, Mormonism, Rastafari, Raelism and many other faiths.
According to the book of Exodus, Moses was born to a Hebrew mother who hid him when a Pharaoh ordered all newborn Hebrew boys to be killed, and ended up being adopted into the Egyptian royal family. After killing an Egyptian slave master, he fled and became a shepherd, and was later commanded by God to deliver the Hebrews from slavery. After the Ten Plagues were unleashed on Egypt, he led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, and they wandered in the desert for 40 years. Despite living to 120, he did not enter the Land of Israel, as he disobeyed God when God instructed him on how to bring forth water from a rock in the desert - instead of once, he struck the rock twice, due to doubt."[...]
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[...]When the Israelites came to Sinai, they pitched camp near the mountain.[24] Moses commanded the people not to touch the mountain.[25] Moses received the ten commandments orally (but not yet in tablet form) and other moral laws.[26] Moses then went up with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders to see the God of Israel.[27] Before Moses went up the mountain to receive the tablets, he told the elders to direct any questions that arose to Aaron or Hur.[28]
While Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving instruction on the laws for the Israelite community, the Israelites went to Aaron and asked him to make gods for them. After Aaron had received golden earrings from the people, he made a golden calf and said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt." A "solemnity of the Lord" was proclaimed for the following day, which began in the morning with sacrifices and was followed by revelry. After Moses had persuaded the Lord not to destroy the people of Israel, he went down from the mountain and was met by Joshua. Moses destroyed the calf and rebuked Aaron for the sin he had brought upon the people. Seeing that the people were uncontrollable, Moses went to the entry of the camp and said, "Who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me." All the sons of Levi rallied around Moses, who ordered them to go from gate to gate slaying the idolators."[...]
[...]"The people left Hazeroth and pitched camp in the wilderness of Paran.[32] (Paran is a vaguely defined region in the northern part of the Sinai peninsula, just south of Canaan) Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan as scouts, including most famously Caleb and Joshua. After forty days, they returned to the Israelite camp, bringing back grapes and other produce as samples of the regions fertility. Although all the spies agreed that the land's resources were spectacular, only two of the twelve spies (Joshua and Caleb) were willing to try to conquer it, and are nearly stoned for their unpopular opinion. The people began weeping and wanted to return to Egypt. Moses turned down the opportunity to have the Israelites completely destroyed and a great nation made from his own offspring, and instead he told the people that they would wander the wilderness for forty years until all those twenty years or older who had refused to enter Canaan had died, and that their children would then enter and possess Canaan. Early the next morning, the Israelites said they had sinned and now wanted to take possession of Canaan. Moses told them not to attempt it, but the Israelites chose to disobey Moses and invade Canaan, but were repulsed by the Amalekites and Canaanites.[...]
[...]"The Reubenites, led by Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and two hundred fifty Israelite princes accused Moses and Aaron of raising themselves over the rest of the people. Moses told them to come the next morning with a censer for every man. Dathan and Abiram refused to come when summoned by Moses. Moses went to the place of Dathan and Abiram's tents. After Moses spoke the ground opened up and engulfed Dathan and Abiram's tents, after which it closed again. Fire consumed the two hundred fifty men with the censers. Moses had the censers taken and made into plates to cover the altar. The following day, the Israelites came and accused Moses and Aaron of having killed his fellow Israelites. The people were struck with a plague that killed fourteen thousand seven hundred persons, and was only ended when Aaron went with his censer into the midst of the people.[34] To prevent further murmurings and settle the matter permanently, Moses had the chief prince of the non-Levitic tribes write his name on his staff and had them lay them in the sanctuary. He also had Aaron write his name on his staff and had it placed in the tabernacle. The next day, when Moses went into the tabernacle, Aaron's staff had budded, blossomed, and yielded almonds.[35]"[...]
[...]"After leaving Sinai, the Israelites camped in Kadesh. After more complaints from the Israelites, Moses struck the stone twice, and water gushed forth. However, because Moses and Aaron had not shown the Lord's holiness, they were not permitted to enter the land to be given to the Israelites.[36] This was the second occasion Moses struck a rock to bring forth water; however, it appears that both sites were named Meribah after these two incidents."[...]
[...]"Now ready to enter Canaan, the Israelites abandon the idea of attacking the Canaanites head-on in Hebron, a city in the southern part of Canaan, having been informed by spies that they were too strong, it is decided that they will flank Hebron by going further East, around the Dead Sea. This requires that they pass through Edom, Moab, and Ammon. These three tribes are considered Hebrews by the Israelites as descendants of Lot, and therefore cannot be attacked. However they are also rivals, and are therefore not permissive in allowing the Israelites to openly pass through their territory. So Moses leads his people carefully along the eastern border of Edom, the southernmost of these territories. While the Israelites were making their journey around Edom, they complained about the manna. After many of the people had been bitten by serpents and died, Moses made the brass serpent and mounted it on a pole, and if those who were bitten looked at it, they did not die.[37] This brass serpent remained in existence until the days of King Hezekiah, who destroyed it after persons began treating it as an idol.[38] When they reach Moab, it is revealed that Moab has been attacked and defeated by the Amorites led by a king named Sihon. The Amorites were a non-Hebrew Canannic people that once held power in the fertile crescent. When Moses asks the Amorites for passage and it is refused, Moses attacks the Amorites (as non-Hebrews, the Israelites have no reservations in attacking them), presumably weakened by conflict with the Moabites, and defeats them."[...]
[...]"The Israelites now holding the territory of the Amorites just north of Moab, desire to expand their holdings by acquiring Bashan, a fertile territory north of Ammon famous for its oak trees and cattle. It is led by a king named Og. Later rabbinical legends made Og a survivor of the flood, suggesting the he had sat on the ark and was fed by Noah. The Israelites fight with Og's forces at Edrei, on the southern border of Bashan, where the Israelites are victorious and slay every man, woman, and child of his cities and take the spoil for their bounty."[...]
"Balak, king of Moab, having heard of the Israelites conquests, fears that his territory might be next. Therefore he sends elders of Moab, and of Midian, to Balaam (apparently a powerful and respected prophet), son of Beor (Bible), to induce him to come and curse the Israelites. Balaam's location is unclear. Balaam sends back word that he can only do what God commands, and God has, via a dream, told him not to go. Moab consequently sends higher ranking priests and offers Balaam honours, and so God tells Balaam to go with them. Balaam thus sets out with two servants to go to Balak, but an Angel tries to prevent him. At first the Angel is seen only by the ass Balaam is riding. After Balaam starts punishing the ass for refusing to move, it is miraculously given the power to speak to Balaam, and it complains about Balaam's treatment. At this point, Balaam is allowed to see the angel, who informs him that the ass is the only reason the Angel did not kill Balaam. Balaam immediately repents, but is told to go on."
[...]"Balak meets with Balaam at Kirjath-huzoth, and they go to the high places of Baal, and offer sacrifices at seven altars, leading to Balaam being given a prophecy by God, which Balaam relates to Balak. However, the prophecy blesses Israel; Balak remonstrates, but Balaam reminds him that he can only speak the words put in his mouth, so Balak takes him to another high place at Pisgah, to try again. Building another seven altars here, and making sacrifices on each, Balaam provides another prophecy blessing Israel. Balaam finally gets taken by a now very frustrated Balak to Peor, and, after the seven sacrifices there, decides not to seek enchantments but instead looks on the Israelites from the peak. The spirit of God comes upon Balaam and he delivers a third positive prophecy concerning Israel. Balak's anger rises to the point where he threatens Balaam, but Balaam merely offers a prediction of fate. Balaam then looks on the Kenites, and Amalekites and offers two more predictions of fate. Balak and Balaam then simply go to their respective homes. Later, Balaam informed Balak and the Midianites that, if they wished to overcome the Israelites for a short interval, they needed to seduce the Israelites to engage in idolatry.[39] The Midianites sent beautiful women to the Israelite camp to seduce the young men to partake in idolatry, and the attempt proved successful.[40]"[...]
[...]"Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, put an end to the matter of the Midianite seduction by slaying two of the prominent offenders, but by that time a plague inflicted on the Israelites had already killed about twenty-four thousand persons. Moses was then told that because Phinehas had averted the wrath of God from the Israelites, Phinehas and his descendents were given the pledge of an everlasting priesthood.[41]
After Moses had taken a census of the people, he sent an army to avenge the perceived evil brought on the Israelites by the Midianites. Numbers 31 says Moses instructed the Israelite soldiers to kill every Midianite woman, boy and the non-virgin girl, although virgin girls were shared amongst the soldiers.[42] The Israelites killed Balaam, and the five kings of Midian: Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba.[43]
Moses appointed Joshua, son of Nun, to succeed him as the leader of the Israelites.[44] Moses then died at the age of 120.[45]"[..]
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Death of MosesAfter all this was accomplished Moses was warned that he would not be permitted to lead Israel across the Jordan, but would die on the eastern side (Num. xx. 12).[46] He therefore assembled the tribes and delivered to them a parting address, which forms the Book of Deuteronomy.[46] In this address it is commonly supposed that he recapitulated the Law, reminding them of its most important features.[46] When this was finished, and he had pronounced a blessing on the people, he went up Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, looked over the country spread out before him, and died, at the age of one hundred and twenty.[46] God Himself buried him in an unknown grave (Deut. xxxiv.).[46][4] Moses was thus the human instrument in the creation of the Israelitish nation; he communicated to it all its laws.[46] More meek than any other man (Num. xii. 3), he enjoyed unique privileges, for "there hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut. xxxiv. 10).[46]
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Moses in
StraboThe following excerpt comes from the Roman historian Strabo (c. 24 AD):
“ 34 As for Judaea, its western extremities towards Casius are occupied by the Idumaeans and by the lake. The Idumaeans are Nabataeans, but owing to a sedition they were banished from there, joined the Judeans, and shared in the same customs with them. The greater part of the region near the sea is occupied by Lake Sirbonis and by the country continuous with the lake as far as Jerusalem; for this city is also near the sea; for, as I have already said, it is visible from the seaport of Iopê. This region lies towards the north; and it is inhabited in general, as is each place in particular, by mixed stocks of people from Aegyptian and Arabian and Phoenician tribes; for such are those who occupy Galilee and Hiericus and Philadelphia and Samaria, which last Herod surnamed Sebastê. But though the inhabitants mixed up thus, the most prevalent of the accredited reports in regard to the temple at Jerusalem represents the ancestors of the present Judaeans, as they are called, as Aegyptians.
35 Moses, namely, was one of the Aegyptian priests, and held a part of Lower Aegypt, as it is called, but he went away from there to Judaea, since he was displeased with the state of affairs there, and was accompanied by many people who worshipped the Divine Being. For he says, and taught, that the Aegyptians were mistaken in representing the Divine Being by the images of beasts and cattle, as were also the Libyans; and that the Greeks were also wrong in modeling gods in human form; for, according to him, God is this one thing alone that encompasses us all and encompasses land and sea — the thing which we call heaven, or universe, or the nature of all that exists. What man, then, if he has sense, could be bold enough to fabricate an image of God resembling any creature amongst us? Nay, people should leave off all image-carving, and, setting apart a sacred precinct and a worthy sanctuary, should worship God without an image; and people who have good dreams should sleep in the sanctuary, not only themselves on their own behalf, but also others for the rest of the people; and those who live self-restrained and righteous lives should always expect some blessing or gift or sign from God, but no other should expect them.
36 Now Moses, saying things of this kind, persuaded not a few thoughtful men and led them away to this place where the settlement of Jerusalem now is; and he easily took possession of the place, since it was not a place that would be looked on with envy, nor yet one for which anyone would make a serious fight; for it is rocky, and, although it itself is well supplied with water, its surrounding territory is barren and waterless, and the part of the territory within a radius of sixty stadia is also rocky beneath the surface. At the same time Moses, instead of using arms, put forward as defense his sacrifices and his Divine Being, being resolved to seek a seat of worship for Him and promising to deliver to the people a kind of worship and a kind of ritual which would not oppress those who adopted them either with expenses or with divine obsessions or with other absurd troubles. Now Moses enjoyed fair repute with these people, and organized no ordinary kind of government, since the peoples all round, one and all, came over to him, because of his dealings with them and of the prospects he held out to them."
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Moses in
TacitusThe Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 100 AD) mentions several possible origins of the Jews that were taught by those of his time.
“ As I am about to relate the last days of a famous city, it seems appropriate to throw some light on its origin. Some say that the Jews were fugitives from the island of Crete, who settled on the nearest coast of Africa about the time when Saturn was driven from his throne by the power of Jupiter. Evidence of this is sought in the name. There is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida; the neighbouring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national name. Others assert that in the reign of Isis the overflowing population of Egypt, led by Hierosolymus and Judas, discharged itself into the neighbouring countries. Many, again, say that they were a race of Ethiopian origin, who in the time of king Cepheus were driven by fear and hatred of their neighbours to seek a new dwelling-place. Others describe them as an Assyrian horde who, not having sufficient territory, took possession of part of Egypt, and founded cities of their own in what is called the Hebrew country, lying on the borders of Syria. Others, again, assign a very distinguished origin to the Jews, alleging that they were the Solymi, a nation celebrated in the poems of Homer, who called the city which they founded Hierosolyma after their own name.
Most writers, however, agree in stating that once a disease, which horribly disfigured the body, broke out over Egypt; that king Bocchoris, seeking a remedy, consulted the oracle of Hammon, and was bidden to cleanse his realm, and to convey into some foreign land this race detested by the gods. The people, who had been collected after diligent search, finding themselves left in a desert, sat for the most part in a stupor of grief, till one of the exiles, Moyses by name, warned them not to look for any relief from God or man, forsaken as they were of both, but to trust to themselves, taking for their heaven-sent leader that man who should first help them to be quit of their present misery. They agreed, and in utter ignorance began to advance at random. Nothing, however, distressed them so much as the scarcity of water, and they had sunk ready to perish in all directions over the plain, when a herd of wild asses was seen to retire from their pasture to a rock shaded by trees. Moyses followed them, and, guided by the appearance of a grassy spot, discovered an abundant spring of water. This furnished relief. After a continuous journey for six days, on the seventh they possessed themselves of a country, from which they expelled the inhabitants, and in which they founded a city and a temple.”
Moses in
The Antiquities of the Jews Main article: Osarseph
Flavius Josephus relates several other incidents in connection with the Biblical account of Moses:
"Before the incident in which Moses slew the Egyptian, Moses had led the Egyptians in a campaign against invading Ethiopians and routed them. While Moses was besieging one of the Ethiopians' cities, Tharbis, the daughter of the Ethiopian king, fell in love with Moses and wished to marry him. He agreed to do so if she would procure the deliverance of the city into his power. She did so immediately, and Moses promptly married her. [30] This marriage is also mentioned in Numbers 12:1 (Cushite meant Ethiopian; Zipporah was Midianite, definitely not Ethiopian). The account of this expedition is also mentioned by Irenaeus[62], and the event would explain why St. Stephen refers to Moses as "mighty in his words and in his deeds" before Moses slayed the Egyptian.[63][64]
Flavius Josephus also gives significantly detailed accounts of the aftermath of Baalam's blessings and the events that lead to the slaying of Zimri.[65]"
[...]"There is also a psychoanalytical interpretation of Moses' life, put forward by Sigmund Freud in his last book, Moses and Monotheism, in 1937. Freud postulated that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman who adhered to the monotheism of Akhenaten. Freud, a committed atheist, also believed that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, producing a collective sense of patricidal guilt that has been at the heart of Judaism ever since. "Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son", he wrote. The possible Egyptian origin of Moses and of his message has received significant scholarly attention.[71] Opponents of this view observe that the religion of the Torah seems different to Atenism in everything except the central feature of devotion to a single god,[72] although this has been countered by a variety of arguments, e.g. pointing out the similarities between the Hymn to Aten and Psalm 104.[73][74] Freud's interpretation of the historical Moses is not a prominent theory among historians, and is considered pseudo-history by most."[...]
CriticismsBased on the account of Moses in the Bible, many criticise his laws and the way in which he ruled. Moses prescribed the death penalty for a huge range of offences,[75] Thomas Paine is probably the most famous critic of Moses:
Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses. Here is an order, attributed to 'God' to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and to debauch and **** the daughters.[76]
MosesFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ethnicity and race"In Medieval Europe, all Asian peoples were thought of as descendants of Shem. By the nineteenth century, the term Semitic was confined to the ethnic groups who have historically spoken Semitic languages. These peoples were often considered to be a distinct race. However, some anti-Semitic racial theorists of the time argued that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races. This supposed process was referred to as Semiticization by the race-theorist Arthur de Gobineau. The notion that Semitic identity was a product of racial "confusion" was later taken up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.
Modern science, in contrast, identifies a population's common physical descent through genetic research, and analysis of the Semitic-speaking peoples suggests that they have some common ancestry. Though no significant common mitochondrial results have been yielded, Y-chromosomal links between Semitic-speaking Near-Eastern peoples like Arabs, Assyrians and Jews have proved fruitful, despite differences contributed from other groups (see Y-chromosomal Aaron). Although population genetics is still a young science, it seems to indicate that a significant proportion of these peoples' ancestry comes from a common Near Eastern population to which (despite the differences with the Biblical genealogy) the term "Semitic" has been applied. However, this correlation should rather be attributed to said common Near Eastern origin, as for example Semitic-speaking Near Easterners from the Fertile Crescent are generally closerly related to non-Semitic speaking Near Easterners, such as Iranians, Anatolians, and Caucasians, than to other Semitic-speakers, such as Gulf."
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[...]"Proto-Semitic is the hypothetical proto-language of the Semitic languages. The earliest attestations of a Semitic language are in Akkadian, dating to ca. the 23rd century BC (see Sargon of Akkad). Early inscriptions in the (pre-)Proto-Canaanite alphabet, presumably by speakers of a Semitic language, date to ca. 1800 BC. Proto-Semitic would most probably have been spoken in the 4th millennium BC, roughly contemporaneous to Proto-Indo-European."[...]
Proto-Semitic languageFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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[...]"Semitic languages seem to have developed first in the Middle East, more specifically, Kienast (2001) advocates the Arabian peninsula as the Semitic Urheimat, based on the fact that the Canaanite, Aramaic, and Arab nomadic tribes are recorded to have emerged from there, and the same area of origin is likely for the Akkadians. South Semitic speakers migrated to Africa before the 8th century BC (see Dʿmt), either via Sinai or the Yemen gap. Alternative scenarios make Ethiopia the Proto-Semitic homeland[1]. If the Afro-Asiatic hypothesis is accepted, the question of the Proto-Afro-Asiatic homeland is a related debate."[...]
SemiticFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family (Languages of Africa) with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Hamito-Semitic" (French and European scholars), "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972), "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966).
Afro-Asiatic languagesFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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[...]Proto-Afro-Asiatic is the hypothetical proto-language from which modern Afro-Asiatic languages are descended.[...]
The Middle EastYuri Militarev and V. Shairelman (1988) have suggested that the Afroasiatic homeland was the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. They suggested that Proto-Afroasiatic was the language spoken by the Epi-Paleolithic (i.e. mesolithic) Natufian culture of Palestine and Syria. The Natufian culture is certainly well documented. The earliest sites, in Palestine, have been dated to 10,900 BCE and the culture continued to 7,800 BCE, during which it metamorphosed, between 8,500 and 8,000 BCE into the first fully blown agricultural neolithic Pre-Pottery A culture, found throughout the Levant. This would correspond well with the date given by Igor Diakonoff for the Proto-Afroasiatic parent culture (i.e. approximately 12,000 years ago). The Natufian culture certainly did spread, northwards to Syria and Mesopotamia, and the Belbasi culture of interior Anatolia certainly was of clear Natufian derivation. To the south east, the well studied site of al Beidha, about 4 kilomtres north of Petra, and the rock shelter of Wadi al-Mataha has been extensively studied, and show its extension into the fringes of the arid Arabian sub-continent.
Alan Bomhard (1996) tries to keep Afro-Asiatic in within Nostratic, despite his admission that Proto-Afroasiatic is very different from the other members of the proposed linguistic Nostratic superfamily. As a result he suggests it was probably the first language to have split from the Nostratic speech community. Whatever was the case; by 8,000 BCE the Natufian culture itself had begun to disperse. In Palestine, Natufian developed into the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) culture, first identified by Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978) in her 1950s excavations at Jericho. Kenyon also remarked at the hiatus and seeming abandonment of PPNA sites, and was followed by a limited extent of the PPNB culture that was very different. Rectilinear dwellings in the PPNB, from 7,000 BCE, replaced the round beehive dwellings seen since Natufian times, in the PPNA period. Since the 1960s, however, it has been shown that PPNB developed in an unbroken sequence from the Natufian cultures north of Damascus, forging a link between Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Anatolian cultures of Catal Huyuk, and Halicar, with which it shares some similarity. It has been suggested that this northern part of the range was developing as Proto-Semitic. Certainly, there is evidence that the PPNB culture, spread southwards to sites in Israel, lasting until 6,000 BCE ending with the brief spread of a more arid climate through the region. Christopher Edens (2001) has reported a bladelet tradition in South Western Saudi Arabia, possibly synchronous with the Epi-Paleolithic spread of tools of the Arabian bifacial tradition which lasted from 5,000 - 3,000 BCE characterised by beautifully pressure-flaked arrowheads and knives. They also used scrapers and awls or drills, probably for working leather and making beads. The Bifacial tradition, seems to have been the period during which a hunting and gathering way of life was progressively replaced by a lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism from the north, which has since then characterised the Peninsula. This, it has been suggested, saw the first spread of the Semitic languages throughout Arabia.
Bomhard, following John Kern’s suggestion, proposed that further spread took the Afro-Asiatic languages across the Bab al Mandib in Yemen into Ethiopia and thence into the Horn of Africa and further south. To the north Afro-Asiatic languages are presumed to have crossed with the Neolithic revolution into Egypt, spreading from there into North Africa, and the Sudan, and thence across the Sahara to the area of Lake Chad.
There is thus some evidence in support of this thesis. No evidence has ever been found of a pre-Semitic substratum in Palestine, indicating a long development there. However, more recent work in African archaeology has pointed to weaknesses in the Nostraticists’ argument. Firstly it appears that the Neolithic in Africa did not develop as a result of immigrants from the Middle East speaking a new Afroasiatic language. Rather it developed out of a deep tradition of Egyptian Epi-Paleolithic cultures undergoing a long-process of Neolithicisation, with a full Neolithic tradition emerging with the Badarian (and possibly Tasian), about 5,000 - 4,500 BCE. It is only with the Naqada II and III periods that any evidence of incursions of people from South West Asia can be distinguished. By then agricultural Egyptian Neolithic cultures had a long tradition of their own. Although earlier links can be shown to have existed between Badarian and the Western Desert, and even with Merimde and the Fayyum, there are no clear early links back into Palestine or Syria.
Equally in the Horn of Africa, although Arabian influence has now been extended before the Axumite civilisation, most of the early Epi-paleolithic links seem to have happened in the other direction, from Africa into Arabia, and it is difficult tracing a cultural trajectory sufficiently early enough to have carried the Omotic and Cushitic languages into Africa.
Problems with the Middle Eastern theoryThis archaeology seems to pose insurmountable problems to a theory of a Nostratic-linked Proto-Afroasiatic language in the Middle East. There is also significant linguistic evidence that suggests that this was not the area in which Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages first evolved. Afro-Asiatic linguistic diversity is far greater in Africa than it is in the Middle East. All six of the Afro-Asiatic families are found in the African continent, only one is found in the Middle East. Even in the case of the Middle Eastern Semitic language, the diversity of Semitic languages in Ethiopia, for instance, is greater than that in Arabia, Mesopotamia or the Levant. The suggestion of a Middle Eastern origin of Proto-Afro-Asiatic of Kerns and Bomhard, just represents a later continuation of the dominance in Afro-Asiatic studies by the Semiticists, and the relative depth of the understanding of the archaeology of this region, by comparison to the much less well understood archaeology of Africa and the Sahara.
The spread of Afro-Asiatic languages has recently been linked to the evolution of the Y chromosomal E3b Haplogroup. About 21-25 000 years ago the subbranch E3b arose in East Africa and spread northward into North Africa and West Asia, splitting further into another three haplogroups: haplogroup E3b3 spent the last ice age in the Levant and north-east Africa, E3b2 was present in the Maghreb and today it is the most important haplogroup of the Berbers (having arisen among the ancestral population to the Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews[1]); E3b1 originated in East Africa and after the end of the ice age, it expanded north and west. The spreading of E3b1 is probably connected with the spread of the Afro-Asiatic languages.
African homelands of PAA languages have been suggested. Igor Diakonoff (1988) suggested that the Urheimat of Afro-Asiatic was in the South Eastern Sahara, between Tibesti and Darfur. Martin Bernal (1980) also suggests an African origin. Quoted by Bomhard, he states that “archaeological evidence from the Magreb, the Sudan and east Africa [makes it seem] permissible to postulate at least three branches of Afroasiatic existed by the 8th millennium BCE”. Bomhard concludes, “The implications of Bernal’s views are enormous. Although his views are highly speculative, they are by no means implausible. Should they turn out to be true, it would give substantial weight to the arguments that Afroasiatic is to be viewed as a sister language to Proto-Nostratic rather than a descendent.”
Despite this caveat, Bomhard tries to resuscitate the Middle Eastern origin by approvingly quoting at length from Kerns. “If we assume that the speakers of pre-Indo-European remained in the vicinity of the Caucasus to a fairly late period (say 7,500 BCE), with the Afroasiatic already extending through Palestine and into Egypt and eventually the rest of North Africa, but with its Semitic branch still in Northern Mesopotamia, high on the upper slopes of the fertile crescent, we have an explanation for the similarity in vocabulary. That this similarity existed to a late period is suggested by the shared words for field, bull, cow, sheep and goat, animals that were domesticated first in the Fertile Crescent. In addition, shared words for star, and seven suggest a common veneration for that number and perhaps a shared ideology…. If true, it suggests an association that is social as well as geographical”.
Proto-Afro-AsiaticFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Original homeland (Urheimat)
No agreement exists on where Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers lived (i.e. the Afro-Asiatic Urheimat), though the language is generally believed to have originated in Northeast Africa[2][3]. Some scholars (such as Igor Diakonoff and Lionel Bender) have proposed Ethiopia, because it includes the majority of the diversity of the Afro-Asiatic language family and has very diverse groups in close geographic proximity, often considered a telltale sign for a linguistic geographic origin. Other researchers (such as Christopher Ehret) have put forward the western Red Sea coast and the Sahara. A minority (such as Alexander Militarev) suggest a linguistic homeland in the Levant (specifically, he identifies Afro-Asiatic with the Natufian culture), with Semitic being the only branch to stay put.[4]
The Semitic languages form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily extant outside of Africa. Some scholars believe that, in historical or near-historical times, Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Ethiopia and Eritrea, while others, such as A. Murtonen, dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia[1]. A third view, based upon similarities between Semitic and ancient Egyptian, is that the two languages developed from a common ancestral tongue along the Nile, crossing the Sinai with the dry phase from 6,000-5,800 BCE, at the end of the pre-pottery neolithic (PPNB) phase in the Levant [2]. Hunter-gatherers of the el-Harif mesolithic culture, crossing the Sinai and from Northern Egypt, and adopting animal domestication but not agriculture could then have created what Juris Yarins calls the Syro-Arabian nomadic pastoralism complex, spreading south along the shore of the Red Sea, and north eastwards around the edge of the "fertile crescent". In the Levant this development appears as the Minhata, and later Yarmoukian culture, which came from the same semi-arid zone as did the later Ghassulian and Semitic Amorites cultures[3][4].
Tonal languages appear in the Omotic, Chadic, and South and East Cushitic branches of Afro-Asiatic, according to Ehret (1996). The Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian branches do not use tones phonemically. Given the diversity that exists within the Afro-Asiatic group, and the lack of common vocabulary for agricultural items, it is suggested that the languages dispersed before the commencement of the Neolithic. The finding of a common vocabulary for pottery containers, however, suggests that this technology was known.
For example Proto-Semitic *k'ad-ah- "vessel", found in Arabic kadah "drinking bowl, cup, goblet, glass, tumble"; Sabaean m-kdh(m,n) "cup; Ethiopic / Geez kadho "vessel, gourd", ma-kdeht "jar, jug, bucket"; Lowland East Cushitic *k'adad- "vessel, gourd; Oromo k'odaa "vessel, gourd; Egyptian qd "pot"; Lowland East Kushitic *k'od- "receptical"; Oromo k'odaa "receptical"; West Chadic *k'wad- "calabash"; Dangla koda "pot" gives Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k'ud-/*k'od- "Vessel, pot"[5].
Ehret [6] suggests that early Afro-Asiatic languages were involved in the domestication of Ethiopian food crops, but this is disputed by others who suggest these words were found only in the Cushitic and possibly Omotic families, and common cognates for agriculture are not present. Given that wavy line pottery is found widely in the Sahara from 8,000 BCE[7], and that the neolithic agriculture technologies arrived 5000 BCE[8], this sets a possible context for Proto-Afro-Asiatic dispersal. As it is known that the Ethiopian farmers moved into the highlands from the direction of Nubian Sudan, and attempts to translate the Meroitic script found in this area show significant Afro-Asiatic characteristics, linguist Lionel Bender suggests that it was out of this area of the Southern Nile that was the centre for dispersion of the Afro-Asiatic languages occurred[9]. The dates of pottery and agriculture sets approximate early and late dates for this linguistic dispersal. Climatically this was a period of a "wet Sahara" phase with large rivers and lakes. The dispersal of Afro-Asiatic may thus have been a response to the recent operation of the "Sahara pump"[10][11].
Afro-Asiatic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by its design. [1]
History of the alphabetFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Proto-GreekThe Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including the Mycenaean language, the classical Greek dialects Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, Doric and North-Western Greek, and ultimately the Koine and Modern Greek. Some scholars would include the fragmentary Ancient Macedonian language, either as descended from an earlier "Proto-Hellenic" language, or by definition including it among the descendants of Proto-Greek as a Hellenic language and/or a Greek dialect.
Proto-Greek would have been spoken in the late 3rd millennium BC, most probably in the Balkans. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants, speaking the predecessor of the Mycenaean language, entered the Greek peninsula either around the 21st century BC, or in the 17th century BC at the latest. They were separated from the Dorian Greeks, who entered the peninsula roughly one millennium later (see Dorian invasion, Greek Dark Ages), speaking a dialect that had in some respects remained more archaic.
The evolution of Proto-Greek should be considered with the background of an early Palaeo-Balkan sprachbund that makes it difficult to delineate exact boundaries between individual languages. The characteristically Greek representation of word-initial laryngeals by prothetic vowels is shared by the Armenian language, which also shares other phonological and morphological peculiarities of Greek. The close relatedness of Armenian and Greek sheds light on the paraphyletic nature of the Centum-Satem isogloss.
Close similarities between Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit suggest that both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian were still quite similar to either late Proto-Indo-European, which would place the latter somewhere in the late 4th millennium BC, or a post-PIE Graeco-Aryan proto-language. Graeco-Aryan has little support among linguists, since both geographical and temporal distribution of Greek and Indo-Iranian fit well with the Kurgan hypothesis of Proto-Indo-European.
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PhonologyGreek is a Centum language, which would place a possible Graeco-Aryan protolanguage before Satemization, making it identical to late PIE. Proto-Greek does appear to have been affected by the general trend of palatalization characteristic of the Satem group, evidenced for example by the (post-Mycenaean) change of labiovelars into dentals before e (e.g. kwe > te "and"), but the Satemizing influence appears to have reached Greek only after it had lost the palatovelars (i.e. after it had already become a Centum language).
The primary sound changes separating Proto-Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language included
* Aspiration of /s/ -> /h/ intervocalically
* De-voicing of voiced aspirates.
* Dissimilation of aspirates (Grassmann's law), possibly post-Mycenaean.
* word-initial y- (not Hy-) is strengthened to dy- (later ζ-)
The loss of prevocalic *s is was not completed entirely, famously evidenced by sus "sow", dasus "dense"; sun "with" is another example, contaminated with PIE *kom (Latin cum, Proto-Greek *kon) to Homeric / Old Attic ksun.
Sound changes between Proto-Greek and Mycenaean include:
* Loss of final stop consonants; final /m/ -> /n/.
* Syllabic /m/ and /n/ -> /am/, /an/ before resonants; otherwise /a/.
* Vocalization of laryngeals between vowels and initially before consonants to /e/, /a/, /o/ from h₁, h₂, h₃ respectively.
* The sequence CRHC (C = consonant, R = resonant, H = laryngeal) becomes CRēC, CRāC, CRōC from H = h₁, h₂, h₃ respectively.
* The sequence CRHV (C = consonant, R = resonant, H = laryngeal, V = vowel) becomes CaRV.
* loss of s in consonant clusters, with supplementary lengthening, esmi -> ēmi
* creation of secondary s from clusters, ntia -> nsa. Assibilation ti -> si only in southern dialects.
These sound changes are already complete in Mycenaean. For changes affecting most or all later dialects see Ancient Greek.
Proto-Greek languageFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Greeks
The Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες, IPA: [ˈelines]) are a nation and ethnic group who have populated Greece and the area of the Aegean Sea for over 3,500 years.[13] Today they are primarily found in the Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe, the Greek islands, Cyprus, and throughout the world as part of the Greek diaspora.
Ancient Greek colonies and communities were established throughout the Mediterranean, including Magna Graecia, Marseille and Barcelona, but Greek people have always concentrated around the Aegean coasts, where the Greek language has been spoken since antiquity. The Mycenaeans were the first historical people to arrive in the area now referred to as 'Greece'. According to Thucydides, the name of Hellas spread from a valley in Thessaly to all Greek-speaking peoples through Homer's works."
GreeksFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Mycenaean Greeks
The Mycenaean proto-Greeks were probably the first historical people to arrive in the area now referred to as 'Greece' (the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula) in the 16th century BC and the first that can be considered 'Greek' as an ethnic identity taking into account the Linear B syllabary (used for writing Mycenaean) as the earliest attested form of Greek. There are clear elements of cultural continuity through the Greek Dark Ages (1200 BC - 800 BC), until the advent of Classical Greece (800 BC onwards) and the rise of the Polis and in particular Athens. For example, in Homer's epic poems the Odyssey the Iliad - the latter describes the epic Trojan War - it is quite clear that he views the Greeks of Prehistory as the forefathers of the early classical civilization he inhabited, the likes of Achilles and Odysseus were viewed by Athenians, as well as others, as prime-examples of the ideal citizen of a Polis.
These elements of self-identification on its own clearly constitutes cultural continuity, but there are other elements as well that solidify this idea, the first being that Mycenaean Architecture, echoing influence from other civilizations around the basin, as well as the Mycenaeans' own particular style, owing as much as to limitations of the geography of the area (see: Geography of Greece), that would eventually lead to the formation of Classical Greek Architecture and Hellenistic Architecture, for example, the ruins of the columns at Knossos echoing a very archaic version of the Doric style of architecture so widely used in the Classical period.
Religion is another factor, with the Mycenaeans own pantheon of gods mirroring in many ways the pantheon of that of the Classical Greeks, this influence defined not only culture but part of Classical Greece's value system as well as their art. There is also clear linguistic continuity between the Proto-Greek language and the various dialects of Classical Greece. In particular, the Greek language written in the Linear B script is clearly an archaic form of the latter Koine Greek language.
These elements combined together do not amount to say, the same cultural output and continuity that Modern Greeks feel with Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods of Greek History, but they nevertheless constitute the beginnings of the Greek identity, and the foundation, albeit in comparison to 5th century Athens a basic one, of Greece's Pagan religion, language, architecture and art.
Classical and HellenisticHerodotus states that the Athenians declared, before the battle of Plataea, that they would not go over to Mardonius, because in the first place, they were bound to avenge the burning of the Acropolis; and, secondly, they would not betray their fellow Greeks, to whom they were bound by:
* A common language (ομόγλωσσον homoglosson – the use of one of the dialects of the Greek language),
* Common blood (όμαιμον homaimon – descent from Hellen, son of Deucalion),
* Common shrines, statues and sacrifices (practice of the ancient Greek religion – compare the Christian Greek and Demotic term ομόθρησκον omothriskon), and
* Common habits and customs.
As Thucydides observes that the name of Hellas spread from a valley in Thessaly to the Greek-speaking peoples after the formation of the text of Homer (the Panellenes of Il. 2.530 are the troops of Thessaly, contrasting with the Achaeans), not long before his own time. This places the idea in the Archaic period, when Greeks discovered that the world was wider, wealthier, and more cultured than they had imagined.
Homer's Trojan War is, indeed, a conflict among Greeks: the Trojans speak Greek (although most modern historians believe they were more likely an Anatolian people, based mostly on later translations of the story by late writers), bear Greek names, and worship the Greek gods; and Priam is descended from Zeus (see Alaksandu). The Carians are the only people Homer considers barbarophonoi.
Hellen, son of Deucalion, combined into one group the smaller tribes that participated in the Delphic Amphictyon, such as the Aeolians, the Achaeans, and the Dorians.As early as the 5th century BC, Isocrates, after speaking of common origin and worship, says: "the name Hellenes suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, and... the title Hellenes is applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood". Panegyric 4.50. After the 4th century BC and Alexander the Great's conquest of the East, Greek became the lingua franca of the East Mediterranean region and was widely spoken by educated non-Greeks.
After the creation of the Byzantine Empire, Greek culture changed from Hellenic (Greek pagan) to Eastern Roman (Greek Christian culture), and the word "Hellene" became associated with the pagan past. Distinctions of nationality still existed in the empire, but became secondary to religious considerations as the renewed empire used Christianity to maintain its cohesion. However, the Byzantine Empire was dominated by the Greek element to such an extent that Emperor Heraclius (575 CE - 641 CE) decided to make Greek the official language. From then on, the Roman and Greek cultures were virtually fused in the East. By that time, the Latin West had began referring to Byzantium as "Empire of the Greeks" (Imperium Graecorum).
Greek nationalism re-emerged in the 11th century within specific circles and became more forceful after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and the establishment of a number of Greek kingdoms (such as the Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus). When the empire was revived in 1261, it became essentially a Greek national state. Adherence to Greek Orthodox rites and the Greek language, became the defining characteristic of the Greek people.
Greeks in the Ottoman EmpireUnder the Ottoman Empire, religion was the defining characteristic of "national" groups (milletler), so "Greeks" (Rumlar) were defined by the Ottomans as members of the Greek Orthodox Church, regardless of their language or ethnic origin. Conversely, those who adopted Islam during that period were considered 'Turks', regardless of their language or origin. Yet, the Greeks themselves upheld the autocephalous concept whereby they maintained their unique ethno-religious identity and consistently distinguished themselves from other non-Greek Orthodox Christian populations. However, some Greeks such as Alexander Ypsilanti, expected non-Greek populations such as the Moldavians and the Wallachians to rise for Greek independence because they were Greek Orthodox Christians. However, both the Moldavians and the Wallachians were cognizant of their non-Greek identities and refused to contribute.
GreeksFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew: אברם נועם חומסקי Yiddish: אברם נועם כאמסקי) (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman and Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth-most cited scholar in any time period.[1][2][3]
Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known—especially internationally—for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments.
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Contributions to linguisticsSyntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75) in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said. He has always acknowledged his debt to Panini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar.
The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.
More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters", Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some[specify] researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, instead advocating emergentist or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.
He also theorizes that unlimited extension of a language such as English is possible only by the recursive device of embedding sentences in sentences.
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Generative grammarThe Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages.[12] The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed Universal Grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. He argues that the linguistic data to which children have access radically underdetermine the rich linguistic knowledge which they attain by adulthood (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument).
Chomsky's theories are still popular, particularly in the United States, but they have never been free from controversy. Criticism has come from a number of different directions. Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized both on general methodological grounds, and because it has (some argue) led to an overemphasis on the study of English. As of now, hundreds of different languages have received at least some attention in the generative grammar literature,[13][14][15][16][17] but some critics nonetheless perceive this overemphasis, and a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on an overly small sample of languages. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. More radical critics have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar in order to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and combinatory categorical grammar as broadly Chomskian and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.
Cultural anthropologist and linguist Daniel Everett of Illinois State University has proposed that the language of the Pirahã people of the northwestern rainforest of Brazil resists Chomsky's theories of generative grammar. Everett asserts that the Pirahã language does not have any evidence of recursion, one of the key properties of generative grammar. Additionally, it is claimed that the Pirahan have no fixed words for colors or numbers, speak in single phonemes, and often speak in prosody.[18] However, Everett's claims have themselves been criticized. David Pesetsky of MIT, Andrew Nevins of Harvard, and Cilene Rodrigues of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil have argued in a joint paper that all of Everett's major claims contain serious deficiencies.[19] The dispute continues, pending further field research and analysis.[20]
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Chomsky hierarchyChomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).
Noam ChomskyFrom Wikipedia, the free encyc