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Asian languages don't use Latin script, neither does Russia. Although some Turkic languages use Latin script this is relatively recent development not something borne out of recent Roman expansion. So again I ask you where in Asia is Latin script used as a direct result of Ancient Rome?
Dude, can you stop avoiding questions.
You are trying to deflect the fact that you said black Africans south of the sahara had no written languages and no seafaring ships.
EdwardA, answer me this please: IS ETHIOPIA GEOGRAPHICALLY BELOW THE SAHARA? Latitudinally, is Ethiopia below the Sahara?
Just answer me that first, then we can go off topic, and talk about which Asian countries use the latin script or not.
Matter of fact, i will dead your post right now. The Vietnamese use the Latin Script, effectively killing your argument that no Asian countries use the Latin Script.
You are trying to deflect the fact that you said black Africans south of the sahara had no written languages and no seafaring ships.
EdwardA, answer me this please: IS ETHIOPIA GEOGRAPHICALLY BELOW THE SAHARA? Latitudinally, is Ethiopia below the Sahara?
Just answer me that first, then we can go off topic, and talk about which Asian countries use the latin script or not.
Matter of fact, i will dead your post right now. The Vietnamese use the Latin Script, effectively killing your argument that no Asian countries use the Latin Script.
For the umpteenth time wikipedia is FREE.
Parts of Ethiopia are below the Sahara so is Austrailia what's your point?
A written language would have really come in handy then.
Oh wait....once you went south of Ethiopia those didn't exist.
One has to be careful when they speak about so called "Sub Saharan" Africa, because its really a eurocentric term, that truly means nothing. Most of the populations that are currently in West Africa were not there prior to 500BC, which really isn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things. They were in North Africa, the Sahara, the Nile Valley and some even came in from the Middle East.
I base my statements on a few things. For starters the history most groups in W. Africa tell of themselves is that their forefathers migrated from other locations. The second is, eye witness accounts and archaeology. For example, Herodotus (5th century BC historian) recounts a story he was told by Libyans, who claimed they encountered Pygmies or "little men" in present day W. Africa. They make reference to a great river, which most likely would have been the Niger River. You can find the reference to that here link Herodotus also tells a story of a Persian expedition to circumnavigate Africa. During this expedition they too say they encountered Pygmies. You can read about that here link I didn't include the archaeological evidence but if you are interested I can provide that too.
So what is my point? Well the things many people attribute to so called North Africans were done by present day W. and E. Africans. As invaders moved in i.e. Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Romans etc populations pushed south. This doesn't include earlier migrations that took place as a result of the Sahara becoming a desert (it sustained life at one point).
So now, lets get to African Writing. You can listen to this podcast (you need to have a audio program that can play .ram files here link
You should also research the Mande writing scripts, such as found in Komo, Poro etc. They are very ancient. There is also the Begum Script, there is the Adinkra Script found among the Akan and to many other writing systems to name. African writing is also logographic (like Chinese and Japanese) as opposed to the phonogram scripts you find in the west and middle east. Although early on, you did have later developed phonogram scripts before Westerners were even writing as found in Egypt and in Kush.
The difference between Africans and Europeans is, Africans use writing in secret societies to discuss esoteric and spiritual matters, they don't generally use it to leave behind messages for later generations to see. At least not out in the open. Most African scripts are tied to secret societies and only initiates are taught them.
Some of our best information on Benin in its heyday comes from A Description Of Guinea, a travel guide written for Dutch businessmen by Pieter de Marees in 1602. Marees quoted many travelers to West Africa, notably one D.R. (Dierick Ruyters?), who was impressed by the size of Benin City:
"[The city is] very great when you go into it [for] you enter a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in Amsterdam; it goes straight in and never bends." Ruyters went on to report that his lodgings were "at least a quarter of an hour's going from the gate, and yet I could still not see to the end of the street." And the side streets branching from the main one looked just as long: "You cannot see to the end of them because of their great length."
Sixty years later, another Dutch visitor, Olfert Dapper, wrote that the king's palace was a complex of buildings and courtyards that "occupies as much space as the town of Haarlem and is enclosed within walls. There are numerous apartments for the Prince's ministers, and fine galleries most of which are as big as those on the Exchange at Amsterdam.
In effect, Europeans there found an Empire with a complex administrative system. The king, the Oba, exercised a great religious power and also political...
You should also research the Mande writing scripts, such as found in Komo, Poro etc. They are very ancient. There is also the Begum Script, there is the Adinkra Script found among the Akan and to many other writing systems to name. African writing is also logographic (like Chinese and Japanese) as opposed to the phonogram scripts you find in the west and middle east. Although early on, you did have later developed phonogram scripts before Westerners were even writing as found in Egypt and in Kush.
Most of the writing developed in west Africa was developed after Europen contact.
For example:
Kisimi Kamara developed Mende writing in 1921.
also:
Quote:
Five indigenous phonetic scripts were developed for the Mande language groups spoken in Liberia, Sierra Leone and southwestern Mali. The oldest of these is Vai, which was invented around 1832 by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Liberia.
The difference between Africans and Europeans is, Africans use writing in secret societies to discuss esoteric and spiritual matters, they don't generally use it to leave behind messages for later generations to see. At least not out in the open. Most African scripts are tied to secret societies and only initiates are taught them...
If these writings were secret then how has it been proven that they existed in ancient times? Where is the evidence for these writings in ancient times? Who has documented their existence in ancient times?
From what I've read on Adinkra is that it's more of a symbolism script. It's used to symbolize ideas or concepts. It's not the type of writing used to document history. Like if you wanted to know what was going on in the Akan world in the 1600's you can't look up their adinkra records for that information.
To be fair and to try and stabilize this "white vs black" theme of many of the threads on here, I would say that colonialism was not necessarily a bad thing for Africa. The period of European colonialism was just a continuation of what humans have been doing since the Ancient Egyptians, where you have certain groups of people in certain territories, trying to control other peoples and their territories. Race has nothing to do with this, it's just a thing about power.
It was not like black people were just minding their own business, and the evil white man came and took over their land. As the map that Motion showed retorts, there were empires on the African continent before the French and British Empires. Heck, there were empires on the African continent even before there was a political entity called Britain or France.
For example, the 19th century Zulu Kingdom in South Africa was an empire. It was an empire ran by the famous Shaka Zulu, and it was an empire feared and hated by the countries that it conquered. The Zulu empire wasn't different from the British empire in that it used its military force to dominate other territories.
But during the 1870s the Zulu-Anglo war occurred, and the British won. The British were just the most powerful empire at the time. If the Zulus had won the war, and they would have controlled their part of South Africa efficiently from the 1870s to the present day, I wouldn't think South Africa's political structure would be any different than what it is now.
I think you need to learn about African history more. European colonization destabilized the continent and left it in terrible shape. Contrast that to what was going on to Africa prior to colonization and I think you will find it hard to try and sustain your argument.
EdwardA, answer me this please: IS ETHIOPIA GEOGRAPHICALLY BELOW THE SAHARA? Latitudinally, is Ethiopia below the Sahara?
.
Jeez. Caracas and Bangkok are latitudinally below the Sahara, too, but that doesn't make them Sub-Saharan. Most of Ethiopia lies east of the eastern-most meridian of the Sahara Desert. which is situated where the Sudan/Eritrea border meets the Red Sea.
Educated Ethiopians and Bantus do not consider themselves to be anthropologically related, because Ethiopians developed in a region east of the Sahara, isolated from the Bantus ans strongly influenced by Asiatic ancestry and probably of Asiatic origin. Everybody (except some posters to this thread) agree with that.
"Wilson et al. (2001), an autosomal DNA study based on cluster analysis that looked at a combined sample of Amhara and Oromo examining a single enzyme variants: drug metabolizing enzyme (DME) loci, found that 62% of Ethiopeans fall into the same cluster of Ashkenazi Jews, Norwegians and Armenians based on that gene. Only 24% of Ethiopians cluster with Bantus and Afro-Caribbeans, 8% with Papua New Guineans, and 6% with Chinese" http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v29/n3/full/ng761.html via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopi...enetic_studies
Please stop disseminating opinionated generalizations for which no basis exists.
Ethioipian culture is largely Asian by influence if not ultimate origin, and one of the typically Asiatic attributes of their culture is that they possess a literate history based on a written language. Due to long isolation, this is one of many significant differences, that they do not share with the people of Sub-Saharan Africa, which for the purposes of this discussion, means south of and isolated by the Sahara, not east of it. Ethiopians are not "isolated" by the geographical barrier of the Sahara, because they can easily communicate around the desert, by sea, which they have done for many millennia, greatly to their cultural and intellectual advantage..
Last edited by jtur88; 09-06-2013 at 02:34 PM..
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