The Great Divide by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online

Eskimo-Aleut than is any
     other Eurasiatic language. Many features of Amerind (for example, kinship terms) are
     unique to the Americas and several features are common to North, Central and South
     America, suggesting to Ruhlen that this language expanded rapidly across the New World
     at a time when it was unoccupied by humans speaking any other languages.
    The second group, Na-Dene, is evidence for a second migration, later than
     that of the proto-Amerind speakers, Na-Dene being related to the Dene-Caucasian family
     whose homeland would appear to be in South East/Central Asia and includes Sino-Tibetan
     (again, see map 6). It also overlaps with the genetic marker known as M130, which
     originated in northern China and is not found in South America (see above). 18
    Finally, Eskimo-Aleut is a third language family, a branch of Eur-asiatic,
     which would make it evidence for the most recent migration. This theory is supported
     further by the thin spread of this language family around the edges of northern
     Canada.
    So far then, the linguistic evidence is broadly in agreement with the
     genetic evidence, that the main migration into the New World took place between 20,000
     and 12,000 years ago, by a group of people speaking Amerind, a branch of Eurasiatic, and
     that there was a second migration, much later, around 8,000 years ago, by a group of
     people speaking a language, Na-Dene, a form of Dene-Caucasian that originated in South
     East/Central Asia. The linguistic evidence also suggests there was a third migration
     – even more recent – of the people who speak Eskimo-Aleut, around the
     northern rim of Canada. This need not concern us too much as the Eskimo-Aleut people
     will play only a small role in our story. 19
    So far, so good then. However, just as there are a small number of genetic
     studies that show an earlier entry into the New World, earlier than the
     20,000–12,000 period (the LGM consensus), so there is one
     linguistic analysis that shows much the same. Johanna Nichols, at the University of
     California, at Berkeley, has estimated that there are in the world 167 language
     ‘stocks’ (groups of languages that can be related back to a common
     branching point). She does this on the basis of such features as word order
     (subject-object-verb, or subject-verb-object), the form of the personal pronouns,
     whether verbs are more ‘inflected’ than nouns (whether they change their
     endings according to sense and context), how number is treated, how singularity and
     plurality are represented in verbs, and so on. 20 Using this approach, she
     looked at 174 languages spread around the world, and from this interrelationship she was
     able to conclude three things that interest us.
    One, there are only four large linguistic areas across the globe: the Old
     World, Australia, New Guinea (with Melanesia), and the New World. Two, in a region such
     as a continent or subcontinent which is isolated from outside influence (such as South
     America or Australia), the number of language stocks increases as a simple function of
     time. 21
    But it is Nichols’ third conclusion that is the most interesting. In
     her own words: ‘A historical interpretation [of language diversity] would posit
     an ancient split between the linguistic populations of the Old World and the Pacific,
     with the Pacific then functioning as a secondary centre of spread and source of
     circum-Pacific colonisation. It is circum-Pacific colonisation rather than spread from
     the Old World that has populated most of the world, given rise to most of the genetic
     lineages of human language, and colonised the New World. The entry point to the New
     World was of course Beringia; but linguistic typology shows that the colonisers entering
     through Beringia were predominantly coastal people involved in the circum-Pacific
     colonisation pattern rather than inland Siberian people impelled ultimately by
     spreads out of central Eurasia.’ (Italics