The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Comment: I'm going with delete. Missvain (talk) 19:37, 26 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Cushitic peoples[edit]

Cushitic peoples (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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The topic is not notable. The phrase "Cushitic peoples" occurs relatively rarely in academic literature, and generally as a shorthand for 'groups that speak Cushitic languages'; it almost never occurs as the subject of a book or academic article. There are further problems with this specific page, but the core justification for deletion is the topic's unnotability. I propose (following discussion on the article's talk page) to turn this into a redirect page for Cushitic languages. Pathawi (talk) 07:55, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is my first time nominating an article for deletion, so my apologies if I'm doing this wrong. I wanted to give a little more context for the page. There is sometimes a presumption that the existence of a language implies the existence of a people; the history of English alone should be enough to put the lie to that—English-speaking Jamaicans, New Zealanders, South Africans, & Alaskans are not 'the Anglophone people'. Even before we get to Wikipedia sourcing issues, language-based ethnicities cannot be assumed to exist without specific evidence. In the case of this article, the existence of a Cushitic language family is understood to imply the existence of "Cushitic peoples" as some kind of meaningful macroethnicity. The page is by & large the work of a very dedicated sock puppeteer. This editor's numerous accounts have regularly used bogus citations, relying either on creative misreadings or on total fabrication. As it stands, this page should be considered to be largely misinformation. It does not appear that the subject is otherwise notable: Searching for 'Cushitic peoples' in Google Scholar, I find the term used as a shorthand, in the way described above, but almost never as a name for a macro-ethnicity. The ethnic collective is never the subject of an article or monograph.

Before beginning the AfD process, I started a conversation on the article's Talk page. Every participant supports deletion of this page, without exception. I posted on the pages of every non-sockpuppet editor who has made anything larger than a spelling or punctuation edit to this page within the past year to notify them of the conversation. None has spoken up to defend the page. The proposal that has emerged from the Talk page is that Cushitic peoples should become a redirect to Cushitic languages. If there is anyone who is interested in the archæogenetic material, then an additional new page such as Archaeogenetics of the Horn of Africa would be appropriate, & interested editors could weed thru the sources employed in the current version of Cushitic peoples. Pathawi (talk) 08:14, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete and redirect to Cushitic languages. Pathawi's reasons are all valid. Beyond that, the mere existence of this page enables it to support claims on other pages where linguistic relationships are mistakenly taken as proof of ethnic relationships. Hopefully we can dry this up out by removing this page. LandLing 09:06, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: It appears that this is not a question of the notability of the topic, but rather a debate over the methodologies used in the sources. If a methodology used in a source appears questionable, it's entirely appropriate to cite sources that disagree with the methodologies used in other sources. However, the function of the deletion page is not to eliminate articles that presents scholarship based on methodologies or reasoning that you don't agree with. It's apparent that those criticizing the article's "lack of notability" are not familiar with the subject, and did not read the sources. As I stated below, Wikipedia isn't a collection of knowledge that everyone thinks is valid. It's an assemblage of knowledge that is notable enough to appear in reliable sources. Deletion is a drastic measure that negates enormous amounts of effort. It shouldn't be used unless an article is genuinely based on spurious or malicious content. If it's just badly assembled, then the solution is to edit it. In the present case, it appears that your concern would be alleviated by simply inserting the word "speaking" in between "Cushitic" and "peoples." I personally don't think that's an accurate representation of some of the sources, but Wikipedians are free to have honest disagreements, and they can be amicably and productively sorted in the talk page. That can't happen when content is removed rather than improved.O.M. Nash (talk) 02:16, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: That is not correct & does not reflect anything in the original proposal for deletion nor my follow-up explanatory comment. I don't know why you think this is all about Christopher Ehret. The fundamental problem is a lack of notable sources. The "enormous amount of effort" on this particular page is largely from sockpuppets who have deliberately miscited sources. The complaints against this article aren't what you want the complaints to be: They're what the complainant says they are. Pathawi (talk) 08:33, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Hello Pathawi. My apologies for leveling what appeared to be ad-hominem criticism. Perhaps a bit of my frustration over taking the draconian step of proposing deletion of an article based on reliable sources came through. In my assessment, what appears to be happening is the following:

1. The term "Cushitic" has a different meaning in other disciplines than it does in linguistics.
2. The phrase "Cushitic peoples" is used in the scholarship of other disciplines in ways that might draw critique in the field of linguistics.
3. Nevertheless, there is at least one historical linguist who is using the phrase "Cushitic peoples" in the same sense that it is used in the article, which may not be apparent until you read his explicit definition of the term "civilization."

I think I've provided evidence of the above in my comments below. It appears to me that this article is indeed reflective of existing mainstream scholarship, even if its concepts are presented in a way that is untenable to a number of trained linguists. I would be interested to know if you have the same sense after examining some of the sources cited below.O.M. Nash (talk) 13:43, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Ethnic groups-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 08:18, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Africa-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 08:18, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Topic is WP:SYNTH, also has WP:FORK issues with the articles for each country. MrsSnoozyTurtle 10:00, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete I'm constantly finding articles cropping up that match my idea of a guideline for WP:NOTATHING. Clear WP:SYNTH and WP:FORK as MST above. One day I'll get around to doing for Omani Empire too, another of these. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 10:13, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep, passes WP:GNG, due to this ethnolinguistic group receiving significant coverage in multiple, reliable, secondary sources.^[1][2][3][4]

SailingInABathTub (talk) 10:15, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Clarification for @SailingInABathTub: I should have foreseen this, but forgot. All of these sources refer to the Kingdom of Kush (3 & 4) or the Cush of the Bible (1 & 2). The former is almost certainly the source of the latter, & thus indirectly the source of the name given the Cushitic languages by nineteenth century European linguists. These sources do not relate to people who speak Cushitic languages as an ethnicity, & it is by no means certain that there is any relationship between Kush & modern speakers of Cushitic languages: In fact, the best accepted theory is that Kushites spoke a Nilo-Saharan language. (I do not mean to endorse that theory, but it's certainly accepted as proven in much academic literature.) So, yes: The subjects of the books you cite are absolutely notable, but despite the similarity in name they are not the subject of this page. Pathawi (talk) 10:25, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Ok, so this article is the equivalent of creating an article on "Latin peoples", saying "The Latin peoples are a grouping of people who are primarily indigenous to Western Europe and North Africa and speak or have historically spoken Latin languages of the Indo-European language family"? It's essentially a WP:SYNTH, per MrsSnoozyTurtle and Alexandermcnabb? SailingInABathTub (talk) 11:11, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment It's an etymological fallacy. The "Cushites"/"Kushites" known from ancient Egyptian and biblical sources are eponymic for the Cushitic language family, but this coinage was based on 19th-century assumptions about the identity of the Kushites. This is a completely different topic from "Cushitic-speaking peoples". The name "Cushitic languages" is a misnomer that has stuck even though we know better now. It's comparable to equating the Teutons with Teutonic (i.e. Germanic)-speaking peoples. –Austronesier (talk) 11:36, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Add And yes, it's SYNTH or OR. The analogy with "Latin peoples" is good: this was discussed in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Romance peoples. –Austronesier (talk) 11:47, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per nom (or Redirect to Cushitic languages). There is no reliable source which covers Cushitic peoples as a topic. "Cushitic peoples" is often found in the literature meaning "Cushitic-speaking peoples", but there is no academic source that attributes any exclusive commonalities to them beyong their linguistic affiliation. Collecting extra-linguistic facts about this loose grouping of peoples automatically becomes WP:SYNTH. There are a handful of genetic studies which try to correlate the expansion of language families and certain genetic markers, but even these studies do not treat the modern Cushitic-speaking ethnicities as a single entity. Such material could be integrated in Cushitic languages, but strongly vetted against WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. AFAICS, everything in the section "Genetics" of the current article Cushitic peoples violates WP:OR and WP:SYNTH, so per WP:TNT, there is nothing to merge.

Actually, most "Cushitic-speaking peoples" are part of an interesting and valid topic that is often discussed in academic literature, viz. East African pastoralists. Unfortunately, no such article exists, since Wikipedians have been mostly busy in creating spurious articles about "Foo peoples" (i.e. ethnicites speaking "Foo languages") instead of building content based on existing concepts in cultural anthropological literature. –Austronesier (talk) 11:36, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. We could also merge some of the into People of Ethiopia, Demographics of Sudan, and other articles. Greenwhitedino (talk) 12:31, 19 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, changing vote. I am convinced by the arguments of those voting delete that this is a WP:SYNTH. SailingInABathTub (talk) 11:46, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, as per nom. WP:TNT, because large portions of the edit history are by two or more blocked and/or banned users with agendas to push, and their respective sockpuppets. I'm not entirely sure whether, or where to, redirect this: Cushitic languages doesn't(*) mention how the linguistic name was (mis)identified with Kingdom of Kush and/or Cush, while redirecting to the latter two articles implies that this article was about the actual descendants of either of those. (*Whether Cushitic languages should mention the etymology or not is, perhaps, a headache for another time & place.) -- Gyrofrog (talk) 14:03, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I beg to differ from all of the votes and comments above. I see this as no more controversial or spurious than articles like Bantu peoples, Austronesian peoples, and Uralic peoples. However, Niger-Congo peoples would be spurious and WP:SYNTH. Although some people argue that the concept of Cushitic peoples is a made-up one with no basis in scientific reality, the fact is that there is much more concerete genetic and archaeological evidence backing this up, at the level of Bantu, Austronesian, and Uralic rather than Niger-Congo or Afroasiatic (in other words, Niger-Congo peoples or Afroasiatic peoples certainly shouldn't be created because there's not much evidence for such proto-ethnic groups). Cushitic peoples is a concept very well known in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somali, and it wasn't just some recent WP:SYNTH project made up several years ago by random Wikipedians. Also, what do we do with the other language versions? Greenwhitedino (talk) 12:28, 19 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I don't think we have any responsibility for what is happening in other-language projects, so that shouldn't bother us. Based on what evidence/source do you assert that the case of Cushitic peoples is rather like Bantu peoples and not like Latin peoples? This gets us back to the problem that really there is not much, if any, coverage of Cushitic peoples in the academic literature. And this in turn lets us hit the brick wall of original research and synthesis. LandLing 14:05, 19 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. The fact that this was nominated for deletion is extraordinarily frustrating. Christopher Ehret is a prominent historian and linguist who has written a history of Africa to 1800 that uses a scheme of identifying ethnic groups by language family. The proposer may have personal issues with that methodology, but contrary to their assertion, the scholarship exists, and it is notable enough to warrant inclusion (unless University of Virginia Press is all of a sudden not "mainstream" enough). You will find his discussion of "Cushitic peoples" in the source below. Several of Ehret's publications are cited in the article, and I'm assuming that the nominator didn't bother looking at them. Further, the incidence of the phrase "Cushitic peoples" in the titles of books and academic articles is an irrelevant measure of the academic coverage of the topic. You should actually do the work of reading the sources before taking a step as drastic as nominating an article for deletion.^[1]O.M. Nash (talk) 16:38, 19 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Christoper Ehret's use of "Cushitic peoples" is what was called above a short-hand for "peoples speaking Cushitic languages". In none of his writings does he ever suggest that there is a common ethnicity shared by all "Cushitic peoples", which is the main point of the page that is under discussion here. If you think that Ehret does use the term with this meaning, please provide a quotation. LandLing 20:09, 19 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Read the sources. Ehret conceives of "peoples speaking Cushitic languages" as a meta-ethnicity. Ehret's approach is something that other scholars have criticized him for. However, scholarly disagreement with the methdologies used in the sources is not a reason to delete an article based on reliable sources. In any case, as your comment itself indicates, "Cushitic speaking peoples" is indeed a subject of abundant scholarship, and if you think the article misrepresents the concept as presented in the literature, the solution is to read the sources yourself and make a correction, not delete the article for "lack of notability." Wikipedia isn't a collection of knowledge that everyone thinks is valid. It's an assemblage of knowledge that is notable enough to appear in reliable sources. O.M. Nash (talk) 22:20, 19 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: I was going to try to avoid responding to every comment so as to avoid WP:BLUDGEONing, but since I've been addressed directly… I have read Ehret. I have read his 1987 reconstruction of Proto-Cushitic. I have read his 1995 reconstruction of Proto-Afrasian. I have read The Civilizations of Africa. I have read his 2008 chapter on Cushitic branch evolution. I have read History and the Testimony of Language. In response to the above comments, I'd like to make a few points:

  First, Ehret 2002 (The Civilizations of Africa) never explicitly assigns to the early "Cushitic peoples" an ethnicity, but he does talk about language, material culture, & population groups as bound together (in a way that most current archæologists reject, but more on that later). However, the book is a history of the entire continent up to the beginning of the nineteenth century; Ehret's latest mention of "Cushitic peoples" is in chapter four, covering the period 3500 to 1000 BCE. The present article is explicitly talking about a contemporary agglomeration of peoples. The reason for this three millennium discrepancy is that Ehret is not talking about the subject of this article. He is using "Cushitic peoples" as an abstraction to talk about evolution toward the contemporary African linguistic landscape—not as a descriptor of existing ethnic groups. Literally nowhere in the book does this latter characterisation—the topic of the present page—occur. Ehret's work supports nothing like the statements on religion, music, archæogenetics, or even history in this article. He uses the term "Cushitic peoples" because he does not know how the peoples in question at the time he's writing about described themselves (see, eg, p62 on "Northern Sudanians"). As soon as it becomes possible to distinguish finer grained groups of people, he does, & "Cushitic peoples" disappear.

  Second & second-&-a-halfth: Among the notability criteria is significant coverage. From WP:GNG:

  "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.

  I think we're on shaky ground, here. In the 460 pages of Ehret 2002, there are five mentions of "Cushitic peoples" tout court. In Ehret 2011 (History and the Testimony of Language) there are two. I don't see any sources cited in this article which are stronger sources. Drawing from these sources alone, one could assemble perhaps a half dozen sentences about what Ehret has to say about "Cushitic peoples". Synthesising all the Ehret sources, you might be able to pull together three paragraphs.

  Third: I have read Ehret. I have also read Grover Hudson's 1989 reconstruction of Highland East Cushitic, which does not cite Ehret. I have read Maarten Mous & Roland Kießling's 2003 reconstruction of West Rift Southern Cushitic and David Appleyard's 2006 reconstruction of Agaw, which cite Ehret only to reject his reconstructions. I don't think Ehret is "fringe" in this encyclopædia's sense, but his is a marginal view within the mainstream. When you read work by current linguists working on Cushitic languages, Ehret's work—when cited—is almost always accompanied by some form of hedging. Most citations are simply acknowledgments of the "notwithstanding Ehret (1980)…" variety. I don't know the archæological literature well, but my impression is that he's even further from the mainstream in archæology than he is in historical linguistics. (I will be happy to concede that I was wrong if someone with familiarity with the archæological literature can demonstrate otherwise.) None of this disqualifies Ehret as a valid, reliable source for Wikipedia. Christopher Ehret is not on trial. But what it points to is that it is hard to place this particular work within a broader body of scholarship: the core issue of notability. So, great: We find Ehret mentions "Cushitic peoples" (again, see my first paragraph, with a different meaning from that in this article) seven times in two monographs. Maybe if we comb everything we can find, we can get thirty mentions of "Cushitic peoples" by Ehret over the past four decades. But where's the article where he deals with Cushitic peoples themselves (rather than Cushitic languages) in more than a passing manner? & much more importantly, where's the body of broader scholarship that is in dialogue with Ehret about this specific topic? Note: WP:3REFS & WP:GNG:

  "Multiple publications from the same author or organization are usually regarded as a single source for the purposes of establishing notability."

  Fourth: If we don't have a broader body of scholarship, then we really aren't in a place to write an article about "Cushitic peoples". Given the paucity of detail on "Cushitic peoples" in Ehret's work, an article like any of those on specific theoretical accounts of histories—France profonde, The Geographical Pivot of History, &c—treating his work on Africa as a whole (Cushitic, Nilo-Saharan, Bantu…) might be in order. It would remain to be demonstrated that Ehret's historical reconstructions are in & of themselves notable, but I think that the review literature & the citation within history broadly (not within archæology or historical linguistics) would probably support that. I don't propose writing that article—I'm perfectly satisfied with his work appearing in the History sections of Cushitic languages, &c.: I'm just talking about what kind of article that material would support.

  Finalth: You seem to have a mistaken understanding of how a Google Scholar search works. It is not by default a search of titles. It is a text search. I searched for the term "Cushitic peoples" & looked at all results that seemed plausible. If you'll look at the conversation at Talk:Cushitic peoples you'll find that another editor did the same with similar results. I didn't draw my conclusions from titles. That is a weird & unnecessarily ungenerous assumption.

  The above is quite a lot. I am anxious about avoiding bludgeoning, as AfDs are so ripe for the practice, but I felt compelled to reply when there was an ad hom. Pathawi (talk) 08:07, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Dear O.M., thanks for providing the link to Maddox's review, which I found most helpful, and thanks also for your willingness to challenge us. I have to admit that I had not read anything written by Ehret (don't have access), and that is still the case now. But Maddox gives a fair representation of his work, and it confirms what I said above, and what Pathawi also asserts - Ehret does not support the main assumption of the article, that is that "Cushitic peoples" can be used as a common denominator to a number of East African ethnic groups, including most of the peoples speaking Ethiopian Semitic languages. For Ehret, Cushitic Peoples is a name given to ethnic groups that in his opinion spoke Cushitic languages or even Proto-Cushitic in a very remote past. Of course it would be totally legitimate to have an article based on this use of the name, but I see two issues here that speak against it: First, as Pathawi states, it would mean that the current article needs to be gutted to a point that will not look very different from actually deleting it entirely. Making reference to Ehret's use of Cushitic peoples in Cushitic languages would be just as helpful, and the redirect could even point to that particular section of the article - I think this would be an appropriate reflection of the academic notability of the term. The second issue is that as long as Cushitic peoples is alive as a page, it will continue to be a dark playground for the banned editors and their revenants who want to abuse it to push their political agendas which are quite devoid of any encyclopaedic value. We would have to keep a very close watch on this page to keep that from happening. LandLing 08:57, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Dear Landling, thanks for your reply. I will concede that the sections "Ethnonym" and "Ethnic group" may be constructed in a way that synthesizes the sources into original research. However, it appears to me that for the most part this concern can be alleviated by simply inserting the word "speaking" into the phrase "Cushitic peoples" Deleting the article entirely for lack of notability doesn't seem correct or appropriate, particularly when a simple correction for the problems in those sections is readily available. As for Ehret, I quote p. 6 of "The Civilizations of Africa": There is, however, another use of the term 'civilization' that, if applied carefully, does have historical validity, and this is the meaning we will adopt in this work. What is this other meaning? Consider the phrases "Western civilization" and "Islamic civilization." In this context, "civilization" refers to a grouping of societies and their individual cultures, conjoined by their sharing of deep common historical roots. Despite many individual cultural differences, the societies in question share a range of fundamental social and cultural ideas and often a variety of less fundamental expectations and customs. These ideas and practices form a common historical heritage, stemming either from many centuries of close cultural interactions and the mutual diffusion of ideas or from a still more ancient common historical descent of the societies involved from some much earlier society or grouping of related societies. In our exploration of African history, we will encounter several key civilizations, far-flung groupings of culturally and historically linked societies, such as the Niger-Congo, Afrasian, Sudanic, and Khoesan civilizations. At times we will also use an alternative terminology, describing these historically linked culture groupings as cultural or historical "traditions." That seems like a pretty explicit conception of language family as meta-ethnicity to me. Several scholars have called this concept into question, but there it is. My take is, the page needs a bit of work. Some of the claims in the two aforementioned sections are probably unsourced. That doesn't invalidate the contents of the entire page, but most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, that also doesn't mean that the subject itself lacks notability.O.M. Nash (talk) 10:59, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• For the closer: Ehret in a nutshell Ehret's book is about (pre-)history, not about constructing modern meta-/macro-ethnic entities. When Ehret says "Cushitic peoples" or "Cushites", he doesn't refer to modern Cushitic-speaking peoples, but rather to the expansion of Proto-Cushitic speakers before Proto-Cushitic differentiated into subbranches. After the differentiation, he carefully refers to the speakers of Proto Eastern Cushitic as "Eastern Cushites", and further to the speakers of Proto Highland Eastern Cushitic as "Highland Eastern Cushites" and so on. As pointed out by the nom: Once the contemporary ethnicites enter the historic stage, Ehret refers to them individually as such, and not as "Cushitic peoples".
  So Ehret's controversial Kossinna-ish approach of monolithically identifying proto-languages with ancient cultures and peoples arguably turns "Cushitic peoples" into a thing, but this thing is a) completely different from the topic of this article, and b) does not have WP:SIGCOV for a standalone article, being only a subtopic of two wider topics (viz. 1. the prehistory of Proto-Cushitic expansion 2. the interaction of populations in ancient eastern Africa according to one scholar). –Austronesier (talk) 10:53, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment A very scholarly redress from Pathawi above, but also - as I see it - a fundamentally sound reason to Delete and Salt. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 10:54, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: It may be that the original creator of the page, and the critics who are calling for its deletion, are both in their own way construing the phrase "Cushitic peoples" far too narrowly. Reading the phrase as referring to a distinct contemporary ethnicity may not be supported by the sources. However, the concept of "Cushitic peoples" as a distinctive civilizational grouping is explicitly presented in some the sources, and the concept isn't simply being invented, as the pro-deletion proponents are contending. There may well be dubious aspects to the article, but at this moment, it does not appear to me that deletion for lack of notability is warranted.O.M. Nash (talk) 11:20, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Incidentally, a five-minute JSTOR search on the exact phrase "Cushitic peoples" turned up dozens of articles that use the phrase in exactly the same manner as the article under discussion. Likewise for Google scholar. The assertion that the topic lacks notability looks increasingly dubious.O.M. Nash (talk) 11:38, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:Comment on content, not on the contributor and WP:assume good faith. And WP:PROVEIT (a five-minute JSTOR search on the exact phrase "Cushitic peoples" turned up dozens of articles that use the phrase in exactly the same manner as the article under discussion). After the Ehret reference, I am interested to see what follows (including the actual topic of these articles). –Austronesier (talk) 12:05, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: A few of the sources that refer to "Cushitic peoples" as a distinctive cultural grouping, and not simply as a group of language speakers:

• Segregating and timing generations: Social Organization in Cushitic East Africa and Beyond
• Musico-Moro-Syllabic Relationships in the Scansion of Somali Oral Poetry
• "Bribing the Land": An Appraisal of the Farming Systems of the Maccaa Oromo in Wallagga

— Preceding unsigned comment added by O.M. Nash (talk • contribs) 12:33, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: O.M. Nash asked me, above, to comment on these. My apologies if I'm having a dominating influence on this conversation. In general, I would say that these articles (interesting in themselves!) suffer from three major problems in relation to the purpose for which they're being adduced:

1. I would say that it is very clear in the Johnson & Ta'a articles that the term "Cushitic peoples" is a trivial mention in the sense of WP:GNG. In both articles, the term appears only one time (tho Ta'a also cites work by James McCann that uses the singular term "Cushitic people" with a further specifier). I think this is actually true of the Hazel article as well, where the collocation "Cushitic peoples" without further ethnic modification appears only three times, two of which are in the phrase 'the four Cushitic peoples discussed in this article'.
2. Now, note that in every case in the Hazel article the term "Cushitic peoples" is preceded by a quantifier: 'Some of the Cushitic peoples of East Africa, whether agricultural or pastoral, shared a common cultural emphasis on the importance of isolating parental and filial generations.' (Otherwise, variations of 'the four Cushitic peoples discussed in this article'.) "Cushitic" is being used as a modifier for "peoples", but we don't have "the Cushitic peoples" as a denomination of a group. (Cp "Jamaicans are an Anglophone people" vs "the Anglophone peoples".) The same is clearly true for the sole mention in the Johnson article. I think it's the most reasonable reading of Ta'a's only use, but not the only possible one.
3. Finally, it's true these articles are either not about language or are about more than language, but I think language is still the identifier. In each case we have the kind of linguistic shorthand mentioned above, meaning 'groups who speak/spoke Cushitic languages'. Again, Ta'a's sole use could be read otherwise, perhaps denoting a collective cultural whole. But if these are meant to talk about a "distinctive cultural grouping", they do not do so in a way that is distinguishable from talking about some subset of speakers of a family of languages. (Try to think about what statements about "Cushitic peoples" you could draw from any of these articles to incorporate into this Wikipedia article. There's not much.)

That is my (requested) take on the situation. I think that all of these are important, but that the first (all the mentions are trivial) really gets at the heart of the notability issue. Pathawi (talk) 21:50, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Thank you Pathawi. There are a number of anthropological articles, similar to the ones cited, that discuss "Cushitic people." Is it possible, anthropology being the field that it is, that this is a case of "both/and" i.e. Cushitic refers to both a language group and a cultural group? Further, would not the primary emphasis of non-linguists be on the non-linguistic aspects of the term "Cushitic?" -O.M. Nash (talk) 01:43, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Anthropology is my field. Over the past few decades, Anglophone anthropology has been dominated by a post-modern spirit that is quite antagonistic to the reification of cultural groupings. (You find exceptions, notably within the Ontological Turn, but this is the general tendency.) There's been quite a healthy literature since the '70s that digs into how groups construct their own identities: For a contemporary anthropologist, you'd expect that it would be unacceptable to accept an idea like "Oromo" qua ethnicity as given in advance, & instead to understand it as something in constant, continuing production. So I would expect anthropologists to be less likely than scholars in other disciplines to accept the idea of "the Cushitic peoples" as a cultural group. In these three articles, I think you see an attributive use of the term 'Cushitic' as an adjective. I would not expect to see it incorporated into a denominative use by anthropologists. In any case, & more importantly for Wikipedia, what's really needed is non-trivial sourcing & explicit address. Pathawi (talk) 04:47, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Ok. So it seems that what's at issue here is a paradigmatic question of whether or not "Cushitic" can be considered to be an ethnolinguistic macro-group, in the same way that "Bantu" or "Mandé" or dozens of other language groups appear to be. That's a legitimate and important question. Can we agree that there can be a legitimate difference of opinion on the answer, based on the sources themselves, and that the existence of even the possibility of rational disagreement is in itself an indication that the topic is non-trivial, and therefore further discussion of the question should not be peremptorily foreclosed by deletion? Speaking for myself, I've learned more than I had ever planned to about the history of Cushitic (speaking?) peoples. It seems a shame to eliminate the possibility of further learning on the part of others by eliminating the article, as opposed to flagging whatever appears to be objectionable and working it out in the talk page. O.M. Nash (talk) 05:49, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Reply: I really strongly recommend reading WP:GNG. I think that this framing of the question places us in a position to carry out original research. Our job as editors isn't to determine whether or not '"Cushitic" can be considered to be an ethnolinguistic macro-group', but whether or not there is significant coverage in reliable sources of the proposition that Cushitic peoples are a historically linguistically united macroethnicity. Wikipedia has policies & guidelines so that we're not trying to hash out definitions on the fly in these specific conversations. A passing mention is trivial. The fact that multiple interpretations are possible is an indication that the term was not important enough to the writers to make sure that it was clearly defined.

  I'm going to check out of this specific conversation now: It's nothing personal, but my feeling is that we've probably both made our cases adequately & at this point I'm beginning to repeat myself. Your job isn't to convince me or vice versa: We've got to make our cases & then allow others to make theirs. Pathawi (talk) 07:51, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment on the three sources: None of them provides WP:SIGCOV for the article's topic. In the latter two, we only have a passing mention. The first source (Hazel 2000) does indeed discuss common cultural aspects of four ethnic groups in depth, but as the author himself notes, these make up only a subset of the Cushitic-speaking peoples. So this is a markedly different scope from the "Cushitic peoples" that also include Beja and Dahalo people. –Austronesier (talk) 09:35, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Add A bit off-topic, as this is a general remark. I should emphasize—as an addition to Pathawi's preceding comments—that the scholarly viewpoint is not the only viewpoint that creates notability. There are construed macro-identities that initially stem from scholarly concepts, but develop a life of their own. This is a common trend in 19th and 20th century ideologies. Sometimes, the scholarly concept behind the construed macro-identity is abandoned, but that doesn't bother ideologists (Turanism is one notorious example). Such construed macro-identities are not excluded from coverage in WP; but a pre-requisite for inclusion is WP:significant coverage in reliable sources. If a "Cushitic" identity plays a significant role in the discourse among the peoples in the Horn of Africa, we need sources which explicitly discuss this phenomenon. (WP is not a WP:SOAPBOX for promoting macro-identitarian concepts which have no signifcant coverage in RS; unfortunately, WP is often abused for that purpose.) And note that an article about such a macro-identity will not be written from the internal viewpoint, but will cover it as an epiphenmenon. For this reason, we have Pan-Latinism, but not Romance peoples (because the latter only exist as a thing in the POV of proponents of Pan-Latinisim). Celts (modern) is different way to handle it: the article from the beginning explains that this is a ideologically construed macro-identity (but occasionally falls into the internalized POV in some sections). –Austronesier (talk) 09:51, 21 May 2021 (UTC) [reply]

• Comment: Okay, that makes sense. Thanks to you and Pathawi both for taking time to explain your reasoning. Your comments were very helpful and informative. I'm sensitive to African/African diaspora related material being challenged or removed merely because otherwise well-informed individuals are not acquainted with the history of the subject. I wanted to be sure that wasn't happening in this instance, it seems clear that it's not. I look forward to learning more on whatever successor page comes out of this. Thanks again. O.M. Nash (talk) 11:25, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.