Re: dialectal diversity in English

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> It's a weird story: although a Southern province, only Mandarin is
> spoken
> there, apparently the result of a depopulation event (a plague,
> perhaps,
> or a really massive scorched-earth war) about 400 years ago.  But of
> course
> the Mandarin is by no means that of Beijing.
Is Chinese history that poorly known that a major depopulation event a mere
400 years ago has to be infered from linguistic data? Odd ...

                                                            Andreas

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