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Anonymous
2015-12-08 13:29:17 Post No. 375874
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Anonymous
2015-12-08 13:29:17
Post No. 375874
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Have you ever wondered why polysynthetic languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language) have lost so much ground? Is it coincidence or is there some sort of explanation for this phenomenon? As of now, some Caucasian, Paleo-Siberian, Eskimo and Native American languages remained basically and I guess most of them are endangered too, so it's likely they are going to be extinct in the next 50 years or so. Once an enormous part of America used these type of languages. Btw these are usually the languages that also use another rare feature, an ergative-absolutive structure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language).
I noticed another characteristic feature of these languages: the most of them are spoken by hunter-gatherers (or maybe ethnicities that used to be hunter-gatherers for the longest time?). Am I onto something here? Does this kind of linguistic morphology provide some kind of advantage for hunter-gatherers, but disadvantage for more developed and more complex nomadic pastoral or agricultural societies? Or is it the other way around, new methods led to more complex, shorter, but more dense phrases and language types, so the direction of linguistic development looks like this:
Polysynthetic->agglutinative->analytic->isolating
Of course this is just a highly speculative theory and it might be just just an areal feature of certain territorries and a coincidence that these languages got suppressed the most.
Anyway, I would be really interested in your thoughts or explanations.
