Bridging the gap between perception and reality regarding life and travel in Africa. We want to know why you haven't been to Africa, and to hear from all those who have. Comments and questions encouraged.
Day 53: Lagos, Nigeria.
Who ever thinks about taking a vacation and even considers Africa? There are some beautiful places in Africa, and they don’t all have to be the beach-type either. We don’t even consider African countries as a vacation spot. Why is that? Why don’t we want to go see the peace in the communities like Lagos? Why don’t we want to see how people are content with their lives? Such happiness and satisfaction we in the Western-developed nations cannot even achieve at any point in our entire lives. Isn’t that ironic?
National Geographic: Return to Uganda,1980.
With her Canadian husband, a Ugandan woman goes home after seven years.
Photography by Sarah Leen.
World’s languages traced back to single African mother tongue: scientists.
New Zealand researchers have traced every human language — from English to Mandarin — back to an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
Scientists say they have traced the world’s 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single “mother tongue,” an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures.
The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.
Before Atkinson came up with the evidence for a single African origin of language, some scientists had argued that language evolved independently in different parts of the world.
Atkinson found that the first populations migrating from Africa laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures by taking their single language with them. “It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of,” Atkinson said, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Atkinson traced the number distinct sounds, or phonemes — consonants, vowels and tones — in 504 world languages, finding compelling evidence that they can be traced back to a long-forgotten dialect spoken by our Stone Age ancestors, according to the Daily Mail.
Atkinson also hypothesized that languages with the most sounds would be the oldest, while those spoken by smaller breakaway groups would utilize fewer sounds as variation and complexity diminished.
The study found that some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, or sounds, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13, the Times reported. English has about 45 phonemes.
The phoneme pattern mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity as humans spread across the globe from sub-Saharan Africa around 70,000 years ago.
Source: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business-tech/science/110415/language-science-linguistics-mother-tongue-english-chinese-mandarin-africa
MY PEEPS.
well, my paternal side.The Beja are a non-Arab, Hamitic people,living in the area from southeastern Egypt through northeastern Sudan into Eritrea.
Many scholars believe the Beja to be derived from early Egyptians because of their language and physical features. They are the indigenous people of this area, and we first know of them in historical references in the Sixth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. Over the centuries, they had contact and some influence from Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks.
The Beja speak Beja or To Bedawie, an Afro-Asiatic language usually classified as Cushitic, but sometimes seen as an independent branch. A significant number also speak Tigre or Arabic, which are both Afro-Asiatic languages as well, but of the Semitic branch.
Most of them live in the Sudanese states of Red Sea around Port Sudan, River Nile, Al Qadarifand Kassala, as well as in Northern Red Sea, Gash-Barka, and Anseba Regions in Eritrea, and in southeastern Egypt. There are smaller populations of other Beja ethnic groups in Egypt’s Western Desert as well as Yemen.
The Bejas contain smaller tribes, such as the Bisharin, Hedareb, Hadendowa (or Hadendoa), the Amarar (or Amar’ar), Beni-Amer, Hallenga and Hamran, some of them partly mixed with Bedouins and Berbers. The European colonial masters and the explorers became fascinated with the Bejas which they often described in eulogistic terms.
