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Subject:
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How to research the origin of language
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Question:
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I have read that when linguists want to find where a language family originated, they look for the place where the greatest diversity of its subfamilies are found e. g. austroasiatic on Taiwan. Could the same method be used to find where language itself started? It's usually assumed to be in Africa, but it has only four indigenous families. East Asia is far more linguistically diverse and New Guinea has dozens of families. Could language have originated there and spread to the rest of the world?
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Reply:
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I'll add one thing and recommend a book to you. The book is
Ostler, Nicholas
2005 Empires of the World: a Language History of the World.
New York: Harper Collins.
The additional observation was actually alluded to by both my colleagues to have answered: I'll do it directly in anthropological terms. New Guinea native social organization at time of European contact and to a considerable extent even now was at the tribal level of sociocultural complexity. There was endemic warfare, and the warfare was indirectly and sometimes directly over resources and control of land. Not ownership mind you but control. However, tribal societies do not engage in or conduct wars of conquest and assimilation. They have not the population, the resources, nor anyone with a central authority do carry such endeavors out.
Chiefdoms and states however can and do conduct wars of conquest, absorption, and assimilation (and of course extermination). Chiefdoms were quite common in Africa and on some occasions some African groups developed a fully fleged State level society. So there was a social absorption and linguistic levelling process in subsaharan Africa that was so far as we know never generated by sociocultural conditions in New Guinea.
NW Coast North America was an interesting case because it is sometimes difficult to determine whether some of those groups were chiefdoms or tribes. But the area is highly compartmentalized topographically and highly focused on aquatic and marine resources, so chiefly wars of conquest and absorption appear not to have been rampant enough to have had a diversity diminishing effect.
U of Cincinnati
Dept. of Anthropology
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Reply From:
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Joseph F Foster
click here to access email
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| Date: |
Oct-18-2009
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Other Replies:
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Re: How to research the origin of language
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(Oct-18-2009)
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Re: How to research the origin of language
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(Oct-19-2009)
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