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

That is very interesting. It would have never occurred to me as a causal
factor.


Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:35 AM
Subject: Re[2]: [tied] Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts


> 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
>
>
>