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A little linguistic thread.
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 basicly 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 trait, that most of these languages are spoken by hunter-gatherers or 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
I'd be really interested in your thoughts or explanations.
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 basicly 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 trait, that most of these languages are spoken by hunter-gatherers or 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
I'd be really interested in your thoughts or explanations.
