Editing Carl Meinhof (section)

==Controversial views==
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'."<ref>Kevin Shillington, ''Encyclopedia of African History'', CRC Press, 2005, p.797</ref> 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 [[mixed language|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.<ref name="Ruhlen">[[Merritt Ruhlen]], ''A Guide to the World's Languages'', (Stanford University Press: 1991), p.109</ref>