Re: dialectal diversity in English

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > Is Chinese history that poorly known that a major depopulation event a
> mere
> > 400 years ago has to be infered from linguistic data? Odd ...
>
> China's an awfully big place, and unlike Europe (with which it may be
> roughly
> compared in size and scope, at least until modern times) it had only
> one
> center point.  What happened in the provinces often didn't make it to
> the
> historians in Beijing.
One might've thought a such depopulation would've left big traces in tax
records etc - but perhaps the archives got burnt down at some point?

I really do ought to read up a bit better on Chinese history. Consider it
added to the list ...

If the list'll tolerate some more personal OT ramblings, I'm of the opinion
that a certain bit of eurocentrism is perfectly justified in history books
written by Europeans for Europeans. But eurocentrism, or
rather "occidentocentrism", is taken too far when my local library has three
history books on France for each one on China, Korea or Japan, not to mention
dozens on the Native American tribes of what is now the US, and _none_ on pre-
Columbian Mesoamerica. Am I the only guy who finds the Aztecs more interesting
that the Sioux, or even interesting at all? The absolute worst still remains
the history books we had in high school - not only did they waste paragraph
after paragraph expunding on the evil eurocentrism of older school textbooks,
they also devoted a pathetic few percent of the space available to non-Western
history, and portraited non-Westerners almost exclusively as passive victims
of European aggression. After readin them, one might be forgiven if one
believed that the slave trade and colonialization was all that ever happened
in sub-Saharan Africa.

                                                          Andrea