Why are the Americas so fucking linguistically diverse? Even Papuan and Australian languages, despite gap of thousands of years, were similar in respect to grammar.
They never went past the stone age
The incredibly diverse climate and density of the rainforests meant that communities that were even a few miles apart grew to become very insular and the abundance of natural resources meant that little trade had to be conducted between tribes other than your basic mating rituals. The noises, rainfall, density of the jungle means that each tribe had to develop a highly sophisticated form of communication to be heard over all the background noises, and since the communities were insular they were left to develop their own language with only a few similarities to their neighbor, i.e. more vowels and higher pitched words instead of consonants and deeper pitch like is found in more temperate locations. It's very similar to SE Asian and their linguistic diversity.
>>350537
:^)
Explain the situation in Australia and Papua then.
Also explain how Mesoamerica (and probably Andes before the Incas kek'd everyone's shit up) were equally diverse.
>>350563
>Explain the situation in Australia and Papua then.
Australian and Papuan languages are incredibly diverse too
>>350520
When you dominate the world, sometimes people develop their own lingo.
Oh wait, you were talking about /those/ americans
>>350601
We all know what OP meant and wrote when he said Americas, Raoul, no need to be upset that South America is irrelevant.
>>350584
But their grammar (e.g. morphology) are similar, despite diversifying for some 40 000 years. Amerindians were in America for less than 20 000, and have the biggest diversity in the whole world.
>>350557
>rainforests
>in the whole american continent
what's uh the deal, eurocunt?
>>350648
I was going off the picture posted and the linguistic map, which is basically the northern half of the continent.
>>350637
I was being satirical as an European.
>>350679
My bad, but that is what 90% of butthurt south americans say when people use the term America to talk about the U.S.
>>350645
proof?
Australia used to be more diverse but many of the people died out
>>350645
40,000 years is a long time to settle into less sharply divergent languages and cultures.
Different waves of migration. Think about it.
Egyptians had tabaco leaves, could we really rule out the idea that they (or other civilizations outside our brief period of historical knowledge) didn't leave behind linguistic and cultural roots?
If we think of America as being inhabited by people crossing a land bridge from Russia 20,000 years ago then being discovered by Columbus the linguistic divirsity doesn't make sense. If we think of it in terms of waves of immigration and being constantly rediscovered by everyone from the Egyptians to the Japanese to the Vikings the linguistic divirsity makes more sense.
Also in the case of the Pacific Northwest at least, it was mostly insular tribes waging war on each other and telling stories. Under these circumstances it makes sense that languages would flourish
No pack animals superior to humans, no sailing, and no wheel mean that obstacles Europeans/Asians/Middle Easterners/etc would consider trivial are suddenly magnified ten fold. A rainforest or mountain range is near impassable. The Inca were stopped in their tracks by rainforest to the north, desert to the south, and mountains (With more rain forest) to the east.
You also have to keep in mind that Europe and Asia used to be just as linguistically diverse. The Americas just had much less time for language to coalesce. How many languages were destroyed or absorbed in the making of Latin? Arabic? German? French? Italian? The New World never had that.
This is the maximal extent of the Aztec, Inca, and Mayan empires/civilizations by the way. The "Muh 100 million Indians murdered by evil nazi colonists" are way overblown. It's very easy to have hundreds of languages when only 100 people speak each one.
Pic related: a linguistically diverse area of Europe
>>350520
Mesoamericans were the most intelligent humans on the planet. They created new languages as hobbies.
>>350846
Fuck llamas, useless assholes.
>>350853
>accents are now languages
>>350887
>implying they didnt diverge from Latin
>implying they diverged from standard Italian which was spoken by 3% of the country at Unification in 1861, and wasn't universal until the 1950s and the introduction of the television
>>350887
There are many languages in Italy. Just because the Italian government calls them dialects doesn't mean they aren't languages. Italian is just a constructed language made for Italy, most regions have theor own language, although most of them are borderline extinct.
>>350853
beat this nigger
>>350520
>even papuan and australian languages were similar in respect to grammar
you're going to need a source on that one
>>350853
Meme map. The differences across the ranges they're describing are very slight, and not nearly as geographically neat as the map would imply.
>>351498
>mfw when Assyrian is mentioned (Syriac-Aramaic)
This is from 2012 though bro, not all these people are natives but most of these people have inhabited the caucases for centuries.
>>350853
>According to this map the glorious dialetto of Città della Pieve is described as being merely "Orvietano"
REEEEEEEEEE
