On Thu, 21 Aug, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Languages differ enormously in their links to what might be termed
>"global culture". English and other major European and Asiatic languages
>have very strong links and millions upon millions of users. They are the
>languages of power, commerce and science. To participate in global
>culture, one has to use one of them, and increasingly English. The
>languages spoken by the many tribes of New Guinea would simply not get
>you anywhere. You'd remain stuck in the jungle.
The persistence of New Guinean languages is simply explained by
observing the language distribution in precolumbian americas.
BC had a profusion of widely differing languages, like PNG,
while much of the rest of the continent was under sway of
large homogeneous blocks. The point in common is the rugged
mountain geography, combined with absense of any means of
transportation beyond feet. The resulting extreme limitation
to travel results in preservation of language pockets among
a largely local population. Where the land opens up, nomadic
or even simply widely ranging populations establish large
unilingual regions. The thesis of the article remains valid:
there are no cultures to my knowledge one can point to where more
than one language was sustained for any length of time simultaneously
by a single homogeneous population. Generally what rapidly happens
is either a hybrid emerges, or one becomes dominant (which of these
occurs is a function of demographics and power relations).
People have no interest in maintaining the complication of
multiplicities. Most of what initially appear to be counterexamples
are in reality boundary regions (either social or geographical)
between neighbouring monolinguistic groups, where two languages
are regularly required by the boundary population for communication
with the two outgroups.
-Pete Vincent
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