Wow

[benlehman]

Watch Jared Diamond embarass himself. Albeit, this is 12 years old. Nonetheless, wow.

To clue in those playing along at home: China has considerably more linguistic diversity than Europe. Or, indeed, most other places on earth.

Note also how he taps into the "OMG China is a monolith that will eat us" fears of modern Americans.

Nice. Nice.

Comments

[heyunyi.livejournal.com]

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.

[bigbluebackpack.livejournal.com]

This confused me too.

Also: bah. Africa has more linguistic diversity than like half the rest of the world combined (or so I've heard). And they're bigger than China, but not nearly as populous.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

It's complicated. Generally areas with less or smaller empires have more linguistic diversity (naturally). So sub-saharan africa has a lot of linguistic diversity.

But Diamond's point that China is somehow specially non-diverse as an empire is crap. When I'm travelling in China, there are people who complain that they can't understand other people from different neighborhoods of the same city because of dialect differences (not like the british have a hard time understand, literally incomprehensible). Mutually unintelligible dialects = languages.

yrs--
--Ben

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

He counts "Chinese" as one language. That's like counting "Latin" and "Germanic" as the two primary languages of Europe.

yrs--
--Ben

[faerieloch.livejournal.com]

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.

[faerieloch.livejournal.com]

Arg.arg.arg. yes. *sighs* He spouts tons of information, but doesn't substantiate it in any way (what are his sources for how many languages are spoken? for when different countries were settled? for how languages evolve?). I couldn't even finish the article. Does he ever think that maybe China has less diversity because the languages have converged over time? They have a *much* longer history of strong cultural influences/government than the New World, or even Europe, I believe, so it's possible we're seeing the next step in language evolution. Arg.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

That's hilarious.

[locke61dv.livejournal.com]

Indonesia and India are the same country; referring to both in the same paragraph is just confusing. Call it "Indonesianiana" (See also: Indiana.)

[heyunyi.livejournal.com]

Yes. This is true. When I was in India, I had a hotel clerk argue with what I put on the check-in form because it didn't match the information for the Indonesian visa that was in my passport. Clearly it's all just interchangable.

[evilmagnus]

There are only four racial groups in the world.
- White
- Black
- Hispanic
- Asian
I learned this from government forms and surveys, so it must be true.

[russiandude.livejournal.com]

Well, duh... Next thing you'll be telling me that everybody who picks "Other" is not deluding themselves.