Re: A China-Sumer connection

phippsmartin_at_hotmail.com
Date: 03/06/05

  • Next message: Jacques Guy: "Re: A China-Sumer connection with some examples of singular "they"" 
    Date: 5 Mar 2005 19:31:55 -0800

    Comm wrote:

    > He could have simply asked me why I thought that about Sumer and
    Tatars and
    > Indonesians (Austronesians) and I'd have simply told him - it's very
    very
    > simple. Nomads move around and spread ideas. These people were land
    and
    > sea nomads and that is 100% well known.

    It's Sunday morning in Taiwan and I am clear headed enough to refute
    arguments, including my own. This is a good thing because Peter
    Daniels outright refused to respond to my post. Oh well.

    The basic problem I see is that people living in cities have schools
    but people travelling on the land or on boats only have oral
    traditions. Worse, nomadic people are unlikely to know -or care- about
    agriculture because it isn't part of their way of life. I suppose we
    would have to assume that knowledge was passed on in the form of
    rumours: people learned enough about distant lands through third
    parties that they were inspired to do similar things. I think this
    gives everybody a lot of credit.

    > Take a look at English, the language, the Americanization of just
    about
    > every place in the world. Do you think that is independent
    development or
    > air travel and mass media that enabled this? It's threatening to
    replace
    > indigenous cultural things, even whole national cultural things. The
    same
    > exact types of things happen, over and over again. Big enough groups
    of
    > nomadic people travel around - they meet other people - they exchange
    ideas,
    > implements, knowledge and etc.

    This reminds me of another problem: language. How could Turks or
    Austronesians communicate easily with both Sumers and Chinese? I
    suppose if they were merchants then they would only need to know some
    basic words like "How much?" and "One, two, three..." and maybe some
    words for weights and measures. Not enough to communicate complex
    ideas. Of course, aliens from Vega would have had an even harder
    problem. :D

    Of course, this is why it is good that this is posted to sci.lang too.
    I understand that Turkish and Azeri is related to Korean and Japanese.
    Why and to what extent? I have studied both Japanese and Filipino and
    I find that their grammatical structures are similar too (the way they
    both add endings to a base verb to make it past tense - of course we do
    that too in English for regular verbs - and the way they have particles
    following nouns and verbs to indicate the parts of speech). It seems
    to me that linguists are more willing to believe that cultures are
    related based on the similarities of language and, indeed, this would
    seem to be what inspired the whole idea of Indo-European culture,
    namely the linguistic similarities. If languages and cultures are
    related, doesn't that mean that people _had_ to be in contact, directly
    or indirectly?

    The question, of course, is whether Asian languages are/were closely
    related enough that people from different parts of Asia could learn
    each others languages easily enough to communicate even the simplest of
    ideas. I would imagine the answer is "Yes" because some people seem to
    have a gift for learning languages. Besides, you could have had some
    Turks who could speak Sumer and some Turks who could speak Chinese:
    there wouldn't have been a need for anyone to be multi-lingual.

    Still, what you say above Americanisation, it isn't as easy as all
    that. I know because I am currently teaching English here in Taiwan:
    it isn't that easy for people in Asia to learn English; it takes a lot
    of work. It would have been even harder for a merchant to learn
    another language, even one related to his own. Or perhaps languages
    became related through contact. I do that with my wife: I speak a mix
    of Filipino and English with her and with Chinese people who can speak
    English (outside class) I and they speak a mixture of Mandarin Chinese
    and English, because neither of us is fluent. Again, Turks and
    Austronesians need not be fluent to communicate if the Sumerians and
    Chinese are willing to try learning a bit of their language too. But
    it's still difficult to communicate complex ideas. Mind you, just how
    complex are the ideas we're talking about? Not very.

    The point is that people from different parts of the world don't just
    walk up to each other and start talking and exchanging ideas. It is
    difficult.

    > It's a lot more plausible than
    > morphogensis - which is the other explanation for how all those
    ancient
    > people just happened, by mere coincidence, to develop the same kinds
    of
    > things at the same time, more or less!

    Now, hold on, morphogenesis is not completely implausible as an
    explanation for human behaviour, just not sufficent to explain the
    development of ideas. I see the problem more along the lines of having
    to believe in genetic memory or Jung's concept of archeotypes. Genes
    correspond to protiens which correspond to chemical and physical
    development. Genetics can explain certain human and animal instincts.
    What we are talking about in this thread is not instinctive behaviour,
    however, so morphogenesis isn't an issue.

    Martin

  • Next message: Jacques Guy: "Re: A China-Sumer connection with some examples of singular "they""

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