h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

jwf:

I still curious what you meant by "Peruvian Hieroglyphs".

I mean "I'm still curious"

Yes. I heard you the first time. And I sure hope you enjoy that curious feeling cuz it's a gonna stick witchew furlong time/time...

In a thread about the origins and dispersal of language, I believe any discussion of Aztec stone carvings would only take us down a cultural and linguistic dead-end and perilously off topic.
Maya, my oh my uh


Note to readers:
In addition to my carelessness and stupidity and smelling pistakes, please add 'hotty' arrogance to my list of sins and ignorance of early Central and South American cultures to my deficiencies.

peace

~jwf~

So, I'm thinking I'll this time: Nazca markings? Tiahuanco? (no, that's Bolivia). Gee, I hope he isn't really confused in his geography.

"Some pictographic shortcuts used instead of drawing out full symbols every time a subject is mentioned in long heiroglyphic texts have been
fairly well established in Egyptian and Peruvian heiroglyphs. These are like pronouns and abbreviations. But nobody is yet looking for the
verbs, their tenses and the whole realm of other descriptors. "

concerning your last sentence in that paragraph (if I understand your last musical reference) if it is refering to "Peruvian" heiroglyphs, I suggest you check out the exceptionally dry (and fairly old, but wonderful) "Maya Glyphs: The Verbs" by Linda Schele. If, on the other hand, you were suggesting that no one was yet looking for verbs etc. in Paleolithic symbol systems, I'll shut up (finally).

anhaga

Excuse me, Mr. Fulton, but neither Aztec nor Mayan stone carvings are linquistic deadends. They are representives of living languages.

I'm not sure if Quechua ever had similar things, Anhaga, but I wouldn't rule it out. Much was destroyed in the Conquest after all.

Quechua like Nahuatl and Quiche is also a living language. Please, let's avoid burying people before their time if we can.

So, let's take Quechua, for example. Is there any data that correlates linguistic evolution with any other data as to the migrations of early people leading to the settlement of Peru?

Here's a general page on Quechua http://www.shef.ac.uk/q/quechua/i_HOME.HTM and it links to another page with some history: http://www.shef.ac.uk/q/quechua/i_INTRO.HTM#HistoryUpToConquest

The short answer to your question is maybe. The slightly longer answer is that there isn't really a consensus yet. But check out that second link: the "history up to the conquest" is a pretty short read.

The spread of Quechua seems to follow the career of the Inca. That doesn't necessarily correlate with migrations, but more with influence. There's no reason to suppose the people under Inca suzereinty migrated anywhere.

There's an analogous situation in the Great Basin that shares many linguistic attributes with the Valley of Mexico. It's possible there have been migrations on and off for over two thousand years within the region defined by that geographic range. It's also possible there were wide-ranging trading networks that spread languages.

There's a Newe tradition about white, red-haired cannibals that has been attributed by one commentator at least to an encounter with corpses under specific environmental conditions that leave the hair reddish and the skin bleached but I think that's probably a false attribution.

There seems to have been an invasion of sorts of cannibals from Mexico sometime in the latter part of the first millenium CE that affected the Hitsatsenom so I suspect the cannibals the Newe remember are the same ones, maybe people typically called Hohokam by the archeologists. How they got to be white and red-haired is another matter.

I bet there's probably a Celtic invasion hypothesis to cover that as long as someone can establish that the Celts were cannibals during the medieval period in Europe, which I don't think they can. But maybe they adopted Mexican customs upon arriving in the western hemisphere.

But given that people's appearance in the so-called New World doesn't necessarily follow any preconceived notion of race, it might be there were red-haired white people originating in Mexico who invaded the north during the period in question. What language they might have spoken is hard to say, but I suspect it wasn't anything the Newe could understand.

Newe tradition says that the Newe came from the west not the south and that might reflect an even earlier migration memory.

One thing seems to become more apparent as time goes by is that the classic Bering Stait migration 10,000 years ago hypothesis, first advanced during the first part of the 20th century,is mostly a case of anthropological wishful thinking. It might account for some Athabaskan speakers but little more.

Languages are funny too. Sometimes they don't reflect much about the people who speak them who may in fact come from a variety of cultural traditions that don't strictly correlate with the language or languages they might be speaking at the time. Look at how widespread English is. All of those people didn't originate in Lincolnshire after all.

That's sort of what Quechua was too. A language imposed by influence more than migrations I think.

But seriously folks...

Ice storms and power failures here in the Great White North have kept me offline for a couple of days so I hope you haven't been thinking I'm avoiding your questions, comments and criticisms. Nor have I lost interest in this discussion...

On the other hand, you all seem to know more about all this than I was originally led to believe so I'll just shut up and learn for a change.

BTW:
However, I also suspect the notion that migration is usually 'westward' is an assumption, an ethnocentric conceipt based on the very recent (2500 years) flow of our own 'western' civilisation. On a purely intuitive (drug induced) basis I would be more inclined to believe primitive peoples would tend to wander eastward looking for the source of the morning sun which in most traditions represents rebirth and new life, while the western sunset usually represents death and darkness.
The fact that the orient was first populated by people coming out of Africa would seem to support that theory. Subsequent 'westward' migrations into Europe were more of the refugee and displaced warriors variety.
I believe that there is also evidence that many oriental symbols, including dragons and huge heads, seem to spread across the Pacific to Central and South America, icebridge or not. And, icebridge or not, the apparent genetic (dna) and linguistic connections between our northern aboriginals and orientals is hard to deny. Maybe Paul Revere knew what he was talking about when he said, "One if by land, two if by sea."
Oh what a tangley weeb we web.

~jwf~

Why does it have to go one way or the other? Assuming some limits at the start, if we accept the African genesis hypothesis, once people are out in the world what's to keep them from going anyway they want within the geographic constraints?

Here's an interesting article about African elephant language.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0221_030221_elephantvocal1.html

Anhaga,
Thanks for those (Quechua) links. That's a facinating review. The author makes the point that the linguistic similarities can be used to trace the movement and interaction of people. Now, I know it's an abuse of analogy to stretch this too far but what if you can develop an "operator" that maps that relationship. Then perhaps in earlier archeological data, where there is no linguistic data, the inverse operator can be used to map the language?

Alitnil:

I think my initial response to your suggestion is "Ye-e-e-s-s-s, but . . ."
I think (this is me thinking for myself, not me talking about what those links said) that linguistic similarities can only be used to trace movement and interaction in a very general way. And the linguistic similarities are the result of movement and interaction of linguistic elements. What I mean is, if there is a linguistic similarity from one area to another, it may be the result of a movement of people (migration), or of a movement of linguistic elements from one area to another through political or trade interactions. With only linguistic evidence it would be pretty much impossible to develop a dependable "operator" to map the relationship as the evidence of one event would look similar to the evidence of different event. I think there has to be an interdisciplinary approach. Now, perhaps an operator could be developed that depended on evidence from a large number of disciplines that could make some projections for an archaeological situation in which one type of evidence (linguistic, for example) was missing, but I suspect it would be very unreliable.

I'm going to keep thinking about this one.

Anhaga

>> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0221_030221_elephantvocal1.html <<

Thanks for that link Analiese.

"...elephants not only trumpet ...their calls range from as soft as a whisper to more powerful than a jackhammer; from as abrasive as a rooster's crow to fluid as water gurgling and pulsating through an underground tunnel."

I bet they can talk to just about every kinda other critter there is with a repetoire like that. Oh the stories they could tell, if we had the ears.

"Some of the sounds are so low-pitched they aren't audible to human ears."

Makes y'wonder what they aren't telling us.


~jwf~

Hi, I've just been listening in when I've had the time...

Analiese,
when I read this bit...
"There's a Newe tradition about white, red-haired cannibals that has been attributed by one commentator at least to an encounter with corpses under specific environmental conditions that leave the hair reddish and the skin bleached but I think that's probably a false attribution."
...I immediately thought you meant that something WAS actually bleaching their hair and skin. Most darker hair will have a red tone to it if bleached so this would make sense if they were naturally dark but something in the environment or some disease (like the one claimed by Michael Jackson) was bleaching them.

Sorry about veering off topic - it's all been very interesting.

Ythika

the way around the language similarity problem with the operator is to make it suggestive.

that way, if you knew that the language was found at A on X, and at C on Z, you might have good evidence to confirm the suggestion that it should also be found (or not found) at B on Y.

and yes, A multi disciplinary approach is usually the best way anyway.

Actually, if they were the same cannibals who vexed the Hisatsinom then maybe they rubbed gypsum or other white clay on their bodies or hair and that would account for their coloration maybe. And if they imbedded jade in their teeth and wore quetzel feathers, gold nose ornaments and huge earrings that would have made them truly terrible to behold, don't you think?

I think many creatures have a much richer communication than most humans, especially people from developed nations fully appreciate.

It's sort of like when they hear aboriginal languages and think it's all gibberish. Yet those languages are no less expressive than the so-called developed ones, and usually just as well adapted if not more adapted to lifeways of the people using them.

A typical example is the variety of grass seeds in the desert. These commonly have no common English names except like "grass seeds" yet the natives can distinguish them linguistically without resorting to scientific jargon.

So what are the elephants not telling us? Plenty I think because we don't listen very well.

Modern European languages are a lot less strict in their grammatical rules than Latin which proceeded them (or so I understand, not speaking Latin or indeed anything other than English, I could be completly wrong), does this represent a trend in language evolution ?

Another idea in the form of a question, not even really my idea but still I think it is a good idea and as its about language I thought I might mention it, though I admit it is a bit off topic.
Does a language which allows misiterpretation increase the potential for new ideas through such misundersatandings, or is the lack of clarity more a hinderance to expressing ideas ?

Math

"Modern European languages are a lot less strict in their grammatical rules than Latin which proceeded them (or so I understand, not
speaking Latin or indeed anything other than English, I could be completly wrong), does this represent a trend in language evolution ?"

Actually, Latin in the fixed (dead) form you're thinking of does have strict grammatical rules. Latin in its living forms (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) is just as flexible as any modern European language. When the Romans spoke Latin (a period of about 1000 years), it went through just as many changes as any other language. In answer to your question, yes, there is a trend involved, but it's just a trend of change, not a trend of greater flexibility.