Author Topic: The linguistics of Guns, Germs, and Steel (Read 1365 times)

Jonathon · « **on:** February 12, 2006, 06:32:38 PM »

I just finished the book, and I have to say that in addition to liking the book on the whole and finding the evidence and argument compelling, I was very satisfied with Diamond's use of linguistic evidence.

It was very clear that he had really done his homework, unlike some other works that I have criticized. He used linguistic evidence to support other evidence and to help establish timelines and migration routes. For instance, I didn't know that the Austronesian family originated in southern China; I had assumed it came from Indonesia because that's the more central location.

Only once or twice did he mention something that sounded a little questionable. He mentioned that the Afroasiatic family probably originated in North Africa, but he didn't provide anything to back it up other than the fact that most Afroasiatic languages are spoken there. To support this claim, he should have mentioned that the Afroasiatic languages of Africa are more diverse, while the Afroasiatic languages of the Middle East are more closely related, which would show that they split off from the rest more recently.

He also mentioned glottochronology* in connection with the expansion of Bantu languages across sub-Saharan Africa. As this article mentions at the end, glottochronology is only reliable when it is used on language families whose historical phonology is well known. However, he seemed to use the glottochronological evidence accurately, so this wasn't a big deal.

I was still nonetheless very impressed with his consistent and accurate application of linguistic evidence to show the expansions and movements of certain groups of people. I learned a few things I didn't know before, particularly concerning African, Southeast Asian, and Austronesian languages. Good stuff. I think I'll see if I can get my hands on a few of the books he used as references.

*Porter, was this the word that you were thinking of but couldn't remember?

Porter · « **Reply #1 on:** February 12, 2006, 06:33:18 PM »

Ha! You can't do itallics in titles!

Jonathon · « **Reply #2 on:** February 12, 2006, 06:34:56 PM »

I thought so, but I couldn't remember for sure.

Porter · « **Reply #3 on:** February 12, 2006, 06:36:05 PM »

I'm glad that you enjoyed it, and that the linguistic stuff, which I found utterly fascinating, wasn't crap.

I'm almost through with Collapse which is in many ways a "sequel" to GGS. It is a very different type of book, but I have enjoyed it immensely. I recommend it as well.

Yes, that was the word I was thinking of.

Jonathon · « **Reply #4 on:** February 12, 2006, 07:38:48 PM »

I just remembered another minor quibble: he says that the Chinese probably developed a logogram (rather than a syllabary or alphabet) because Chinese has too many homophones, which aren't distinguished by the latter two (though this isn't necessarily true).

However, the "homophones" that he is referring to are distinguished by tone, so they aren't actually homophones. And anyway, I'm not even sure that those sets of words were even homophones or near-homophones back when the Chinese writing system was developed. I know very little about either Sino-Tibetan languages or the Chinese writing system, though, so take all that with a grain of salt.

So what is Collapse about, Porter?

Porter · « **Reply #5 on:** February 12, 2006, 07:49:15 PM »

The subtitle is "How societies choose to fail or succeed".

Most of it deals with the mismanagement of natural resources and how this caused the collapse of societies. Some societies that it examines (not all have collapsed): Easter Island, Anasazi Indians, Montana, Maya, the Viking colonies (Greenland, Iceland, Vinland, etc.), New Guinea, Japan, Rwanda, Haiti, China, and Australia.

I wouldn't have been as interested in reading the book if I had known that, but I've enjoyed it far more than I would have thought.

pooka · « **Reply #6 on:** February 13, 2006, 02:48:56 PM »

I'm not sure why the tonal nature of chinese is not accounted differently in the orthography. Certainly it would be less daunting to study if it were. Sheesh, if the communists had thought of fixing that maybe their goal of world conquest would be going better.

Many tonal languages have shifts in the tonality depending on the features of surrounding syllables. This actually happens with most phonological features in most languages, but the most obvious example is liason in French where a word does or doesn't have a consonant on the end depending on what the next word starts with. I haven't heard whether this is normally the case with chinese, but that it is may be... I don't know. I'm all confused now.

Chinese has very little in the way of prefixes and suffixes and prepositions and such like. My linguistic professors always said the writing system of a language is not really a linguistic issue. But the difficulty of Chinese orthography always bothered me.

Jonathon · « **Reply #7 on:** February 13, 2006, 02:58:35 PM »

From what I understand, tonality originates with changes in phonation (voicing and aspiration and all that jazz) of consonants surrounding a vowel or in deletion of coda consonants. Apparently not all Sino-Tibetan languages are tonal, but there's also still quite a bit of dispute over what exactly is included in the Sino-Tibetan language family.