Re: Question about linguistics

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Makoto Taniguchi) wrote in news:botnv9$e3r$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

> I was wondering, why is there so much diversity in languages?
> especially countries that live side by side.
>
> For example, Japanese, Korean, Inuit and Mongolian has been said to be
> in the Tungusic language family. This makes me wonder why Cantonese
> and Mandrin has little to no similarity to the nearby Tungusic
> speaking peoples.
>
> The Chinese, Japanese Korean and Mongolians at one time must have
> evolved from a common ancestor lets just call it a "master race" just
> like Hitler claimed... of course this time we don't know who it is and
> no one is claiming that anyone is the master race.
>
> Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics
> change so much?
>
> This story is sort of similar when we're talking about the difference
> between French and German. The countries are side by side but
> obviously the language family is completely different.

French and German are not "completely different". They may look and sound
superficially different, but their basic vocabulary and grammar are derived
from a relatively recent common ancestor. The same is true of most other
languages in Europe, including English, Russian, Spanish, Greek and Albanian
(but excluding Basque, Hungarian and Finnish), as well as languages in the
Near East and northern India. See
http://iiasnt.leidenuniv.nl/pie/ielangs/ielangs.html for information on the
Indo-European languages.

In fact, all languages in the world belong to wider language groups or
families, including Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Vietnamese), Altaic (Turkish,
Mongolian, Uzbek) ...etc. This indicates a shared cultural and/or genetic
history.

Languages evolve far faster than genes so it is difficult to go back much
beyond 8,000 years and still obtain meaningful results. English and Dutch,
for example, were mutually intelligible until 1000 years ago. Nevertheless,
the data, however tenuous, suggest all languages in the world evolved from a
common ancestor, which supports the genetic evidence.

For a good account of how genes and languages are interrelated see "Genes,
Peoples and Languages" by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and  "Archaeology and
Language" by Colin Renfrew.

Try Google searches on "Noam Chomsky", "Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza" and
"comparative historical linguistics".