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This seems to support the ocean-going migration of ancient Egyptians to the Americas, who brought Hebrew slaves and servants with them, perhaps in multiple waves from maybe 2200 BCE to 600 BCE. And who became a principal ancestor of the Native Americans.
Or at least among the ancestors of the Native Americans.
One can imagine an advanced metallurgical civilization analogous in every way to the Book of Mormon story, and just as easily and credible as the Book of Mormon, but basically Egyptian, instead. Albeit with the very same population numbers and agriculture and industry; and schisms and wars and slaughter; and repeated cycles of societal advance and decline; and with temple and road-building and earthworks; etc, etc, etc.
And with not only lots of steel but lots of gold, too, including golden plates for record keeping over centuries and centuries, in multiple editions and compilations and revisions and abridgments, etc.
Does Bro. Stubbs’ work allow us to distinguish between such posits, between the Book of Mormon vs. an analogous Egyptian migration and civilization?
It’s very reasonable and easy on several lines of argument for a person to reject the claim of highly orthodox sectarian 19th-century Protestant Christians and Christianity in America (complete with the KJV) in 600 BCE — or any Christianity at all during the BoM period — but can we just as reasonably reject ancient Egyptian people and religion in the Americas in the period from 2200 BCE to 421 CE? On what logic?
Can we logically even reject the appearance in the ancient Americas of the divine Ra? What evidence would we need either way, to accept or reject?
Does Bro. Stubbs work help us to distinguish and decide any of that?
In addition to Bro. Stubbs linguistic support for such an Egyptian migration and civilization, might there also be support for the Egyptians through both physical and skin-color similarities between Native Americans and Egyptians? How else account for the skin color?
Would DNA support Egyptian over Israelite migrations? Or would it be subject to the exact same problems and qualifications, like dilution and drift and bottlenecks, etc?
What other evidence would we reasonably need to either rule in or rule out the migration of such Egyptians to the Americas? And as the explanation for Egyptian and Semitic correspondence in the UA languages?
Jerry Grover,
I just wrote Brian to the effect that after Gutenberg, the best and only way to get information into the heads of others was by means of print. The internet has changed everything. Making Brian’s work available online is a true game changer. It is the wide distribution of his compelling data that has and will make his voice available to multitudes of people who otherwise would have been left without access to Brian’s work. I’m so glad you have had the vision and the means of making his important work available online. By the way, it’s fantastic that “Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary” will also be available for download.
John,
I noticed you had been accessing the book off of my Academia page. The better location that has links to all the book reviews and videos etc. is my website at http://bmslr.org/exploring-the-explanatory-power-of-semitic-and-egyptian-in-uto-aztecan/ You might want to take a look. One thing, it was unfortunate in Dirk Elzinga’s review that he complained that this book did not go through the standard academic editorial and review process without first checking with the publisher. Since my small company was the publisher, the book was provided to over 20 reviewers for blind review with expertise in historical linguistics, Uto-Aztecan, Semitic languages, or Egyptian. For those that made comments, those comments were forwarded to Brian who then made changes where appropriate. None indicated it was not suitable for publication. The book was professionally edited by an editor with long experience with the Maxwell Institute. The book DID go through a proper academic review prior to publication, more than most academic works to be honest. In addition, because it is available for free on the internet, it is widely available for post-publication peer review in the form of book reviews or blog posts, which we have seen. I did have discussion with some academic publishing houses previous to publication, but they thought that the topic matter was so specialized to a very limited number of buyers that they did not have interest. It was purely a financial issue. As you probably know, the primary place that they sell this type of book is to libraries. There are just not that many that carry anything in Native American languages. I did have a fancy cover design made up, but Brian preferred to go with the simple cover he had in mind. Unlike a normal academic publisher, Brian has all of the copyright rights, so it gives him freedom to disseminate it and modify it as he wishes. I think most persons in academia would enjoy the ability to not have a publisher controlling the content and distribution of their work. In addition to the free internet pdf version, some hard copies were provided free to libraries so as to be available for interlibrary loan. There have been around 45,000 views of the book form universities and people all over the world, with some being complete downloads. I think the distribution far exceeds anything that would be expected had this gone through the generic academic publication house.
The book reviews and the back-up reference Uto-Aztecan book are now available on http://bmslr.org/exploring-the-explanatory-power-of-semitic-and-egyptian-in-uto-aztecan/
Having read Brian Stubbs, “Answering the Critics in 44 Rebuttal Points” I am reminded of the story of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, with each insisting their part was “something else.” It appears to me that Brian has a clear view of the entire elephant and Rogers and others aren’t getting the whole view. Whether they are limiting their view purposely or by distraction is difficult to ascertain, but one would wish that as scholars they would have dug deeper before making what appears to be easily refutable criticism.
Brian has done an admirable job of taking his critic’s criticism and using it to actually bolster his original thesis. I had to laugh when he mentioned, “Rogers’s and Hansen’s investigations together eliminated one item, maybe two, leaving 1,526 matches ” with the promise that additional matches would be forthcoming. That vindication alone seems noteworthy.
Remembering Roger’s initial criticism, I am still amazed at the belligerence and the outright dishonesty he exhibited by twisting the reviews of positive critics. Surely he had to know that such infantile deception would come back to haunt him. Or was it that his ego was too large to recognize that such dalliance could ever be ascribed to him? Or, finally, could it be that Rogers was eager to get his criticism into print, knowing that few would actually seek out the truth, but would instead, just accept and then promote the first criticism they could latch onto? Could this have been a subtle sabotage effort designed to derail any momentum which Brian might have hoped to foster with this heretofore unaccepted, anti-establishment theory? We may never know, but I have to commend Brian for his comprehensive rebuttal. If I were Rogers, I would be trembling with the slap-down. (And maybe humbled enough to actually dig deeper, next time.)
Hopefully, Brian’s thesis (and further, additional work that he does) will provide others with the opportunity to continue this amazing work for years and years to come. It is long overdue and has been politically too hot a potato for far too long. Kudos to Brian Stubbs for having the courage to face the antagonism of academicians too entrenched in their own prejudices or too anti-Mormon to accept apparent truth when staring them in the face.
I appreciate Brain Stubbs’ decades of work on this fascinating topic. I also appreciate Magnus Hansen’s review of a portion of this work (I have not yet read Rogers’). His is the kind of attention and careful review that we I hope for from experts. Hansen’s post is not too long, and I recommend it for all who are interested in assessing the strength of this idea. I admire Brian Stubbs for his gracious expression of appreciation for Hansen’s review, and for his willingness to engage in a dialogue with Hansen that in turn led to a strengthening of some of his arguments and discarding of one or two. One thing that I would like to see investigated further is the question of how many apparent cognates would be expected by chance alone given the number of languages (Uto-Aztecan and Old World) that are being compared.
In comparing whether two languages are related, which Brian is not proposing, some linguists use the quick and dirty screening method that excluding nursery words (mama, papa) and onomotopoeic words or sound symbolism words (meaning the word comes from the sound of something like “pow”, “zing”, or for symbolism “sniff” or “clang”) which indicates that 10 cognate matches on a list of 100 common words is a 99 percent probability that the languages are related. On the other spectrum, in comparing full vocabularies, depending on the type of comparison (simple syllabic words, etc) one would expect 5 to 8 or so cognates would be expected by chance (Ringe 1992). Of course when looking at more than two languages, the number would be less. The comparative method of historical linguistics uses a variety of complex methods such as sound shifting and grammar, so doesn’t involve these types of probability screening. Brian indicates that the sheer number of cognates is well beyond the number that have been found and accepted by linguists for languages where the relationship has also been accepted.
Forgive me for my lack of understanding, but let me ask a question. My understanding of Hansen’s main critique is that there are (according to him) two ways of establishing a relationship. The first is the “long distance” relationship way, which is not what Stubbs is doing. The second is by showing borrowing. Hansen complains “I wish Rogers had realized that Stubbs’ claim was in fact a proposal of language contact. Because it really is a more problematic claim. It is problematic because there is no accepted method for demonstrating borrowing or contact induced changes, and consequently no method for falsifying them…. So by presenting his hypothesis as a claim of ancient contact and language mixture, Stubbs is in fact making a claim that cannot be methodically falsified.”
Did Stubbs address this? I didn’t see it. Is it methodologically sufficient to show the cognates when you’re talking about borrowing rather than long term genetic relationships?
Collin: A common thread among the objections to Stubbs 2015 is that predictable outcomes in borrowing are basically irrelevant because they are not systematic, which is your point. This claim cannot be taken at face value, because thousands of studies of “nativization” of speech sounds are based on facts that show borrowing not to be random, or even a “fairly random” process. The phonological habitual behavior of the recipient language actually does predict the realizations for loanwords based on the perceived speech sounds of the donor language.
It has long been observed that language borrowing involves a process,“nativization,” which may be described as bringing the phonological content of forms of the donor language into systematic alignment with the phonological disposition of the recipient language. There is a huge literature on this with thousands of articles treating the predictability of the phonological passage from donor to recipient language. The only possible explanation for this long-observed consistency is to be found in the assessment of the phonological content of the donor and the inherent and rigid phonological laws that govern the phonological production of the receiving language. In this regard, “perception and production cannot be separated in the study of nativization in loanwords, but must be always seen in their synergetic interaction.”
“The structural constraints that play a role in a given language perception are the same ones active in production. In both perception and production, these constraints are ranked high. In perception, however, they interact not with faithfulness constraints, as they do in production, but with ‘cue constraints.’ Cue constraints evaluate the relation between the input of the perception process (the auditory-phonetic form) and the output of the perception process (the phonological surface form). The result is that the satisfaction of these structural constraints in perception typically leads to processes different from those that occur in production” (Calabrese, Andrea, and Leo Wetzels. (2009:9). Loan phonology: Issues and controversies Loan Phonology Issues and Controversies. John Benjamins Pub. Co.)
As suggested above, the perceptual “cue constraints” involve an assessment of how what is heard might be implemented into what can be said, as constrained by the speech habits — the behavior patterns — of the receiving language.
If you would like to see an example of such predictability of Polynesian borrowing of English words, you can follow the following link. It’s short and easy to follow.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSbZD8d__ljC8gPLvfIj_dD3XwfJr6QAYWALFK9oM1SaCzdaHlEKt80PTKg6CugCV3iI90EzK5982BE/pub
So please, let’s all stop with the claim that “Stubbs is in fact making a claim that cannot be methodically falsified.”
This is a false theory whose only consequence is to ignore Stubbs’s claims, which deserve better. “It is a poor kind of theory [which] merely supposes the facts to be inexplicable. The sole legitimate function of a theory [Uto-Aztecan contains loanwords from Near Eastern languages] is its explaining the observed facts” C.S. Peirce. It’s a lazy excuse not to look at the facts.
Thank you for the response.
Thank you, Dr. Robertson, for your substantive response.
I just got through reading every word of Stubbs’s article. I am so glad it has been published. It is good that he responded to Rogers and Hansen, but I think his total command of method, languages, skill of argumentation reveals a mind of an exceptional capacity of intellect. Beyond that, forty years of intense work shines through. The data that he presents cover the waterfront. Admittedly, what he wrote is hardly available to the layperson, or to the majority of linguists I know, for that matter. I’d be very interested to know, however, how anyone qualified to evaluate these data could refute it. I mean refute the data, ad hominems excluded. I’ll probably be back.
Dr. Robertson,
As far as availability, although perhaps you were referring to intellectual capability availability, since I paid for completion, peer review, editing and publication of his original work, I have a dedicated web page that has Brian’s original work available for free download, as well as links to book reviews, and videos of his presentations. I will shortly have his updated Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary available for free download there as well to give all scholars access to that exhaustive book. Brian does have a smaller book for sale (Changes in Language from Nephi to Now) written for the lay person. I also have a link to Amazon there where people can find the book if they would like to purchase it. Btw, I make no profit from the website, I actually bear all the expense from my own funds. Anyway, here is the link to the webpage for those that might be interested. http://bmslr.org/exploring-the-explanatory-power-of-semitic-and-egyptian-in-uto-aztecan/
Jerry, I have heard that there is a new edition of “Changes in Language from Nephi to Now” coming out soon. Is that your understanding as well?
It is already out. The first edition has sold out. There are some additions and he changed the order of things in the second edition to make it a little easier on the lay reader. If you order off Amazon now you will be getting the second edition. You can go to the link on my website to get you there as well.
I was blessed to take Nahuatl from Dr. Gabriel S. Estrada at California State University Long Beach. He included the Codex Borgia in our studies. It was all deep waters for me, but fascinating!
Tlazohcamati, Br. Stubbs!