What about China and India? REH
----- Original Message ----- From: "pete" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 11:34 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Languages (fwd) > > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Futurework mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
