From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 52416
Date: 2008-02-07
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick McCallister" <gabaroo6958@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 4:56 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts
> This is pretty specious --there are Australian and
> Greenland Inuit languages that are said to have very
> rapid word replacement. The articles Kelkar included
> listed Polynesian languages with varying levels of
> replacement. Native Australians, Inuits and
> pre-European Polynesians were the most homogenous
> people on the planet --much more so than the Japanese
> who have Jomon, Yayoi, Korean and Chinese ancestry and
> whose language has changed immensely over the
> centuries and has great diversity.
>
>
> --- Patrick Ryan <proto-language@...> wrote:
>
> > Icelandic conservation is due to ethnic continuity.
> >
> > Compare Japanese.
> >
> >
> > Patrick
<snip>
My statement was an overly broad generalization that does not take into
consideration cultural and political factors so let me say I think it is the
_main_ cause for conservation but there are other causes for
non-conservation.
Without ethnic continuity, language changes rapidly notwithstanding any
other causative factors.
Now, you bring up several specific examples.
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. And for the elite of these
populations, an additional factor is prestige mating with members of the
area-dominant cultures, namely non-Inuit.
What people were and what they are now is two different things.
Are you alleging, by the way, that rapid change characterizes Polynesian
languages, for example. The article succinctly explain how small _isolated_
populations develop changes but this would not, IMHO, negate my basic
proposition since by continuity I imply and now explicitly assert continuous
ethnic contact.
However many ethic inputs the Japanese people had, the have had thousands of
years to fuse and become integrally homogenous. That is the secret to their
success, in my opinion. They all march in lock-step for the interests of
their people as they perceive.
This is one of the major reasons why, in the USA, with our grand visions, we
actually accomplish so little - too many, mostly ethnic factions, vying for
the advantage.
Compare German (continuity) and England (non-continuity) - which has changed
more?
Patrick