Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Hawksinger wrote:

> > > That's jumping to conclusions, don't you think?  I mean, there's so few
> > > "stone age" languages to study, and those that exist are mostly in
>
> There are about a gazillion 'stone age' languages to study.  Try about
> 1000 in New Guinea, ALL of the Americas at contact and many of those
> have been studied and documented, not enough of them, but many of them.
> Ishi was still making stone tools when he wandered out the woods in
> California, indeed a particular kind of flintknapping tool is called an
> Ishi stick.  Consider that the languages of the Americas are at most
> a few generations away from stone tool use, any such hypothesis should
> be quite testable.
> Just my 2 cents,
> --
> Brad Coon
> hawksinger@fwi.com
I'm pretty ignorant about New Guinea, but most of the North American Indian
languages -- including all of them spoken east of the Great Plains when Whites
arrived -- were probably NOT "Stone Age" languages (the reason being that those
Eastern Woodlands Indians all practiced agriculture and lived in permanent
villages, instead of practicing the Stone Age lifestyle of
hunting-and-gathering and migrating seasonally): Agricultural people have
generally engaged in so much trade for so long that, if they don't speak a
language derived entirely from some old trade language, their language has
probably at least absorbed some of the sloppy habits that pidgins spawn.

New Guinea does have a unique topography -- lots of small valleys cut off from
each other by mountains -- so separate Stone Age tribes may have managed to
take up agriculture in separate valleys there without managing to trade much
with each other.  If so, perhaps they do still speak Stone Age languages.

Agriculture was quite rare among western North American Indians (except in New
Mexico and Arizona).  And there weren't any Indian tribes in the Great Plains
until wild horses came up from Spanish Mexico (and made Buffalo hunting
possible) because the Great Plains couldn't be farmed without plows (which the
Eastern Woodlands farmers lacked) and weren't suitable for the Stone Age
hunting-and-gathering lifestyle either.  So we're unlikely to find true Stone
Age languages spoken by non-Arctic North American natives anywhere except in
the Far West and Northern Rockies.

-- Tommie