Re: A China-Sumer connection

phippsmartin_at_hotmail.com
Date: 03/06/05 

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

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