Paranilotic is a group of languages proposed by
Carl Meinhof
Carl Friedrich Michael Meinhof (23 July 1857 – 11 February 1944) was a German linguist and one of the first linguists to study African languages.
Early years and career
Meinhof was born in Barzwitz near Rügenwalde in the Province of Po ...
.
Karl Lepsius had established the
Nilotic languages
The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples.
Etymology
The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa.
Dem ...
as a family, with Western, Eastern, and Southern branches. Meinhof proposed that only Western were truly Nilotic, and that Eastern and Southern, which he called Nilo-Hamitic, were a mixture of (Western) Nilotic and
Hamitic languages (in particular, modern
Cushitic
The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As o ...
), based on racial and other non-linguistic considerations.
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on ...
reverted to Lepsius's classification, as part of an attempt to remove racial classifications from African linguistics. However, Tucker and Bryan's (1956, 1966) influential surveys resurrected Meinhof's proposal under the name ''Paranilotic'', and that name is still sometimes found, especially in non-linguistic works. Modern linguistics has discarded the concept of Paranilotic, seeing Nilotic more or less as Lepsius had, with three distinct branches.
[Bernd Heine & Derek Nurse, 2000. ''African Languages: An Introduction'', p 53.]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Paranilotic Languages
Nilotic languages