benlehman

Yeah, when I was reading his book and came across the chapter about China, I had a similiar reaction. But then I actually read what he had to say and I didn't get the same impression that you have now at all.

He plainly states in his article that China isn't as monolithic as people are used to thinking of it. And he explains that China doesn't have nearly as many languages as New Guinea, which is just a fraction of the size. To me that seems to be his main question and I think it's a valid one.

He also lists how many languages Europe has, which is less than what he lists for China. So I'm really confused what gave you the impression that he was saying the opposite of these things.


For instance, New Guinea, although it was first settled by humans only about 40,000 years ago, evolved roughly 1,000 languages. Western Europe has by now about 40 native languages acquired just in the past 6,000 to 8,000 years, including languages as different as English, Finnish, and Russian....
A glance at a linguistic map is an eye-opener to all of us accustomed to thinking of China as monolithic. In addition to its eight big languages--Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively as Chinese), with between 11 million and 700 million speakers each--China also has some 160 smaller languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers. All these languages fall into four families, which differ greatly in their distributions.

heh. I have long held a low opinion of Jared Diamond. For a class in university we read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and analysed it. Turned out one of the major criticisms is that he never supports any of his claims. That quarter Stanford was thinking of hiring him, and since we were studying his book, he came and spoke to the class. I think the questions we asked were thoughtful, and some even deep, but he just brushed every single one off saying "I answered that in my book" "go read my book". The students uniformly recommended against hiring him and indeed, he was not hired. Sometimes arrogant men are brilliant; this one isn't.