Re: A China-Sumer connection

joerevskelton_at_bellsouth.net
Date: 03/06/05 

Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 15:31:19 -0600

<phippsmartin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1110079915.949753.131050@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> 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.

I think you'd better take a nap and try again. Why can't nomads or boat
people have schools?

  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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