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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Major Linguistic Areas in the World
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References: <01bbf1a1$2bddb780$965f47cc@jhoward.vvm.com> <32DA9B7F.3FC2@sn.nono>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 21:50:52 GMT
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In article <32DA9B7F.3FC2@sn.nono>, Anders Blehr  <ablehr@sn.nono> wrote:
>Jim Howard wrote:
>
>> The world is divided into a few basic linguistic and cultural areas or
>> "blocs" (and also, political), whose most obvious (but not sole)
>> characteristic is their _writing systems_.  The three most unique and
>> defining writing systems of the world are:
>
>Before you persue this any further: There is absolutely no connection
>whatsoever between the linguistics of a language and the alphabet that's
>used to represent it in writing.
[rest deleted]

Yes and no.  As I understood it, he was dividing the world into "cultural
blocs" based on various criteria, not all of them linguistic.  He was
merely using the writing systems as the identifying characterisitics of
each bloc, which has a certain elegance gained at the expense of drastic
oversimplification.

I've also noticed that the world falls into several large "cultural blocs"
based on a variety of criteria (ethnic, religious, historical, etc.), but
most easily recognised by the language of "high culture".  The "Christian"
cultural bloc, centred on Europe, is defined in large part by the presence
of borrowings from Latin (and, to a lesser extant, Greek).  All the major
languages use a Latin script, with the exception the the members of an
"Orthodox subbloc" in the east, where the scripts are Greek-derived and
Old High Church Slavonic may be as important in forming learned
vocabularly as Latin.

Simlarly, the "Islamic bloc" has Arabic (and, to a lesser extant, Persian) 
as the language of learning and leading script.  It includes the Middle
East, Central Asia, North and parts of East Africa, and parts of South and
Southeast Asia.  The "Hindu bloc" has Sanskrit/Pali and Indic-derived
scripts in these roles (and an East-West division reminiscent of the split
in the "Christian bloc"). The major associated religions are Hinduism
(West) and Therevada Buddhism (East)and the domain is South and Southeast
Asia (overlapping substantially with the "Islamic bloc").  East Asia is
dominated by a "Confucian bloc" with Classical Chinese, Sinitic characters
(recently replaced by Hankul and romanisation respectively in Korea and
Vietnam), and Confucianism/Mahayana Buddhism as its identifying
characteristics.

Obviously, this neat division is a vast oversimplification of the actual
situation; people and cultures being what they are, there has been a lot
of mutual influence.  Extinct or near-extinct cultural matrices
("Zoroastrian" and "Egyptian", for instance) have had a huge effect on
current "blocs".  Also, large portions of the world are left out of this 
rubric.  By virtue of tremendous immigration flows from Europe, Australia
and the Americas are now firmly in the "Christian bloc", but Subsaharan
Africa cannot be said to belong to any bloc or to form an independent bloc
comparable to the others.  The Jews are also a special case:  Highly
influential in both the "Christian" and "Islamic" blocs, but in a
particular way not really "of" either (their religious/cultural language
has always been Hebrew).  The Parsees are in a similar position vis-a-vis
the "Islamic" and "Hindu" blocs.

If one were to form interlanguages for these four blocs (and one
"anti-bloc"), the natural sources for lexicon would be Latin, Arabic,
Sanskrit, and Chinese (and, for lack of a better choice, Proto-Bantu).
There's no real evidence that, say, an isolating or agglutinative grammar
might not work equally well in each "bloc".  However, the association of
these languages with past hegemonies might harm their chances of being
fully acceptable sources of vocabulary with large portions of the
populations of the respective "blocs" (e.g. the Dravidians in South Asia
or the Turks in Central Asia (or Nigerians in West Africa)).

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
