Re: Alternative histories and paralele universes

Hi folks!  I'm joining this thread rather late...

>On Tue, 5 Jan 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>> Or one in which horses survived in the New World, but not the Old
>> World.  That might be an interesting idea.
Interesting.  I hadn't thought of that as a possible explanation for
why the Tokana have horses.

My conlang Tokana is spoken on the Pacific Coast of North America in an
alternate universe which never saw an industrial revolution, a population
explosion, or the rise of world-wide empires.  Instead, the people of the
world are divided into a number of small nations and tribes, which bear
no resemblance, either cultural or historical, to the civilisations of our
universe (the split with our universe happened many thousands of years ago).

In my universe, then, North America has not been conquered wholesale by
large European nation-states (although some trade and even immigration may
have taken place).  And yet the Tokana have horses.  In my timeline, though,
horses were first introduced through trade from Asia.  The Tokana belong to
a vast exchange network of small tribes extending along the Pacific rim
from (what we know as) Taiwan and Japan up the coast of Siberia to the
Aleutians, across to North America, and then down the coast all the way to
Mexico.  It was along this network that horses, cows, and various kinds
of plants were first introduced to the New World.

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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