Page "Carl Meinhof" Paragraph 8

In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen Der Hamiten ( The Languages of the Hamites.

) He used the term Hamitic.

Meinhof's system of classification of the Hamitic languages was based on a belief that " speakers of Hamitic became largely coterminous with cattle herding peoples with essentially Caucasian origins, intrinsically different from and superior to the ' Negroes of Africa '.

" However, in the case of the so-called Nilo-Hamitic languages ( a concept he introduced ), it was based on the typological feature of gender and a " fallacious theory of language mixture.

" Meinhof did this in spite of earlier work by scholars such as Lepsius and Johnston demonstrating that the languages which he would later dub " Nilo-Hamitic " were in fact Nilotic languages with numerous similarities in vocabulary with other Nilotic languages.