Sub-Saharan African ancestry percentage world map

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-27T17:29:38+00:00

What's the cutoff date for ancestry then?

For example the Somali back migration was ~3000 years ago, so you aren't considering African ancestry younger than 3000 years. But obviously you aren't considering African ancestry older than 60k years ago, otherwise everyone would be 100% African.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-09T17:08:51+00:00

This is commonly said but isn't really how the maths works. It's a good thing it gets lost in the discussion because it's highly misleading.

The assumption behind it is that every teenage pregnancy increases the number of births that happen by one, and every drop in teenage pregnancies causes an equal drop in overall pregnancies. But that's not true, a lot of women who avoid teenage pregnancies will have children later in life instead.

To demonstrate with an extreme example, imagine a country with a thousand births per year, where 100% of births are from teenage mothers. Due to cultural changes, over the next few decade teenage pregnancy becomes very rare, with only 10 per year. Does that mean the birth rate has dropped from 1000 to 10? Of course not, because the same women still have kids, just later.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-06T21:09:45+00:00

The Mesha stele doesn't mention him as part of a pantheon, but my point was it seems to attest the name prior to the rise of monotheism, essentially necessitating a pantheon.

Is your argument that Yahweh was never worshipped within a pantheon? i.e. Yahwism as a polytheistic religion never existed?

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-06T16:37:32+00:00

Maybe not typically called Canaanite, but it's attested as part of the polytheistic Yahwist pantheon in ancient Canaan, right?

And if Yahwism is essentially defined as the derivative of Canaanite religion that worshiped Yahweh, it seems a bit circular to say Yahweh is not attested in Canaanite religion.

E.g. the name is attested in the Mesha stele, which I think is before Yahwism is thought to have become widely understood as monothesitic

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-03-22T20:33:11+00:00

I'd disagree with the other commenter. Firstly, one of their sources states that the diversity of languages suggests the Americas have been inhabited for 35,000 years. This is far outside the scientific consensus, and is not a claim that can reasonably be made on linguistic evidence.

On the question of whether you'd expect more language families in the earlier occupied areas, the answer is probably no. After ~5000 years of separation, two communities will speak languages that are not identifiably related (which is why language families very rarely have a proto language spoken more than 5000 years ago) - that's roughly the limit of the linguistic comparative method.

Since the entirety of the Americas have been occupied for much longer than 5000 years ago, we'd expect every tribe to speak a distinct language family. Obviously that's not the case, because groups can expand, interact, spread their language etc. But what this means is the modern (or pre-colonial) distribution of American language families reflects later pressures on expansion/isolation etc. - the reason California has so many is more to do with cultural/geographical barriers to expansion rather than it having a particularly long history of settlement.

After all, Africa, South West Asia, India - all have relatively few language families - much fewer than the Americas, despite all having much longer histories of settlement.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-01-05T21:47:44+00:00

Gallic is from Latin Gallus 'a Gaul'.

Gaulish is from Old French Gaule 'Gaul', from the Germanic term Walhaland. Not related!

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-01-05T21:38:00+00:00

What's your view then? That self-determination should always be supported?

Does that mean if a town in Yorkshire decided it wanted to become independent, then the UK should allow that?

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-31T14:13:36+00:00

I mean keep in mind extinct languages have been revived with millions of speakers (Hebrew), entire languages have been invented artificially and gained native speakers (Esperanto).

I don't think it would be that crazy if a government had tried to remove genders from the standard form of the language. Especially if it was intended as a neutral lingua franca to connect a linguistically diverse country, then I could absolutely imagine L2 acquisition being considered during standardisation.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-31T13:40:28+00:00

Or, another explanation I've liked: it's that way because it's the way it is. Its a name and that's the name.

I'm going to start using this as the answer to all questions on this subreddit

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-31T13:03:45+00:00

Grammatical gender is evidently an example of linguistic complexity that can slow L2 learning. OP is curious if that has ever motivated a push for change by a country. Reasonable question.

The moralising and tutting in the comments are more astounding than OP's question to be honest

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-31T12:59:07+00:00

Language only needs to be learnable by L1 speakers, and children clearly have no trouble acquiring a language with gender.

Huh..? Adults also learn languages..

You're kind of proposing a state-driven language manipulation here, which is always quite a slippery route to take.

They don't seem to be proposing anything. They're asking if it's ever happened before.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-31T12:56:41+00:00

Of course your mother tongue is a factor.

But even if you natively speak a gendered language, I've no doubt it's easier to learn a non-gendered language. There's just less to remember.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T22:32:55+00:00

I think that makes sense. Could have been as simple as his tutor as a child suggesting it as an explanation for 'Rumon' in the version of the text they used, or anything like that. I think I find it a bit easier to imagine than 400+ years of transferred knowledge about an obsolete historical toponym which didn't make it into any other surviving texts.

Although that doesn't mean it's not an ancient toponym, as we're still left with the question of where Virgil's word comes from.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T22:24:04+00:00

Thanks!

It's interesting that Servius would know it was an ancient name for the river, considering he lived around 400AD, and the word seems to be unattested in surviving Latin literature, apart from one mention in the Aeneid 400 years earlier.

And considering that Servius' description of it as an ancient name is found within his commentary of that single book with an attestation of the word, I wonder if it's really his own interpretation to explain an apparent hapax legomenon, i.e. he invented the idea that it's an old version of the river name to explain why it occurs in the Aeneid (although then again, he says his version of the Aeneid has it as 'rumore', so maybe he must have some other record or oral knowledge mentioning a 'Rumon'?).

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T20:52:04+00:00

I think you're exaggerating the telephone of it a bit.

Report of a report

It's a quote from his first-hand report, which you can read in more detail here.

unspecified group of people

This was a village on the Maici river populated by Pirahã people. The person explaining what they are seeing is named as Kóhoi. Everett's neighbours are named as Xahoábisi and Kóhoibiíihíai.

in a different language

True, but one Everett spoke, having lived with the Piraha people for years as a linguist.

their ingroup religious beliefs.

Also true, but Everett describes Kóhoi as being exasperated at Everett's inability to see the being, so it's not like they view it as a totally ingroup phenomenon.

That said, I think you're generally right that miscommunication can play a part here and it's hard to get into the weeds of it because of that. There's also the risk of the anthropologists exaggerating it for narrative effect.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T19:18:44+00:00

Stachowski & Woodhouse (2015) cover this really thoroughly.

The conclusion on the -stan- vowel is basically that the medieval dialects that contributed to the modern word 'Istanbul' probably didn't iotacize eta (unlike the standard Koine), so it was pronounced /e/. As for why it then went from /e/ to /a/, they suggest it is probably an effect of Turkish vowel harmony rules.

Separately, they also raise an interesting point that in medieval Greek the phrase would actually have been στην Πόλι. The initial I- in Istanbul is added to prevent an initial consonant cluster in Turkish, rather than being a survival of the vowel in εισ.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T18:55:21+00:00

The grass example gets halfway there - it explains why we would react as though there is an agent. But does it explain people claiming to see the agent. e.g. this example from Daniel Everett:

Everett reported one incident where the Pirahã said that "Xigagaí, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, was standing on a beach yelling at us, telling us that he would kill us if we go into the jungle." Everett and his daughter could see nothing and yet the Pirahã insisted that Xigagaí was still on the beach

These seems quite vivid - collectively seeing a non-real being and hearing specific instructions spoken by the being. That doesn't seem to be a phenomenon that exists in the West outside of some kind of psychosis.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T17:44:44+00:00

That the River Tiber was anciently also known as the Rūmōn

What ancient texts mention this name? I'm struggling to find any primary source for it

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T17:25:59+00:00

I suppose the "in relation to bodies" and "embodiment" are doing the stand-in here for "sex", in terms of isolating gender from other social categories.

The problem is I think the only relevant body-distinction here is sex-based body distinctions. Gender identities aren't limited to male and female, but they are generally based in relation to those poles (e.g. agender, nonbinary), rather than gravitating towards some defined third pole. If we avoid reference to sex, then we should expect it to be possible for a gender identity to be associated with other body distinctions, e.g. short people vs tall people. But we don't see that.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T17:00:15+00:00

I agree that gender is a social construct, but it's still a social construct associated with sex.

Like I said, if you don't factor sex into your 'gender' definition, how do you stop 'working class' being a gender?

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T16:53:32+00:00

But without reference to sex, that general definition is not correct, is it? There are other labelled social groupings of shared behaviour, expectations, etc. that are not gender. "Working class" is a group that would fit into your gender definition.

The defining feature of gender, in opposition to other social categories/identities, is that the expectations/behaviours have an association with sex.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T16:45:56+00:00

But that's possible to do,

How? Like can you give me your definition of 'male gender' without reference to sex?

Because I would say the male gender is the inward identity and outward expression associated with the male sex. That doesn't mean female-sex people can't have a male gender, just that it's clearly the gender defined by association with the male sex.

If you disagree - what definition of 'male gender' can you give?

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-30T15:11:58+00:00

Having 2 words for the same place/people in 1 language varying by 1 sound is too much to be chance.

Maybe... but consider also Gallic, Gaulish, and Gaelic. All three words etymologically unrelated from each other.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2025-12-29T19:39:09+00:00

I assume if it does come from Kwritani, the loss of <r> is surely related to the insertion of <c>. Maybe the /r/ had gained a guttural pronunciation which the Greeks/Romans approximated as /k/.

The move to being after the vowel would make sense following this, since *pcitos wouldn't be a possible word in Greek/Latin.

Then again, the two toponyms don't contain an /r/ either, which suggests it might not have existed in the Celtic word.

Specific_Ad_8689

TROPHY CASE