Re: Conlangs in History

On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > > > That's pretty much  what I do with Korean.  :-/  French and German aren't
> > > > *that* similar, but from the perspective of Korean (isolate or grouped
> > > > with Japanese or Altaic, depending on whom you believe--I haven't heard
> > > > any definite answer on what family it belongs to!),
> > >
> > > You aren't going to, either.  Short of discovering some kind of
> > > monument of proto-Korean, we just aren't going to be able to nail down
> > > whether Japanese and Korean are part of Altaic or not.  Some people
> > > claim that Altaic isn't a real family either, just the result of
> > > a lot of borrowing by Mongolian (at the center) from Turkic and
> > > by Tungus from Mongolian.
> >
> > Pity.  It's frustrating not knowing where they come from, just because of
> > personal curiosity...
>
> Well, some people say that they don't actually descend lineally from any
> language family.  These people's theory is that Japanese (at least) is the result
> of creolization that occurred deep in antiquity when invaders speaking perhaps
> a language like Korean eventually mixed with the substrate-speaking population,
> perhaps Ainu or related.  The theory is, IMHO, so full of assumptions it ends up
> being useless as far as genuine historical linguistic research is concerned.
<wry g>  I can imagine.  I have to wonder what Korean linguists think
about the whole business, but the problem is Korean nationalism is so
strongly ingrained that in my experience it's hard to get a decently
unbiased opinion form a Korean on something Korea-related, *especially*
if Japan's involved somehow.  (This problem seems to be ameliorating
somewhat starting with my parents' and my and the next generations.)

> to other groups simply because they've been meagrely studied, or not at all.
> This is the case with a lot of Papuan and Amazonian languages.  (Not surprisingly,
> because who wants to be eaten or have their head-shrunk?  This *does* go
> on still.)
Good grief...and good reason.

YHL