Re[2]: [tied] Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts

From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 52422
Date: 2008-02-07

Patrick Ryan <proto-language@...> wrote:

[...]

> Australian and Greenland Inuit: these populations are
> literally bombarded with non-Inuit material; and being
> small populations, they have no means of defending their
> linguistic cultural heritage.

According to the Britannica:

Greenlandic contains four loanwords from medieval
Norse; from the colonial period after 1721 there have
been surprisingly few borrowings until the mid-20th
century.

However, its speakers practise a form of word taboo that has
resulted in an unusually high rate of lexical turnover.

Brian