jad@dayton.UUCP (John A. Deters) (01/19/88)
You may be on the right track comparing word ordering to the agricultural origins of the people. It may be based more on the stability (or relative mobility) of the people who speak it, and the Japanese, being primarily agricultural, have been very stable, location-wise. The English (Germanic) peoples, being originally hunters, were substantially more mobile. The Japanese culture has been in place for many thousands of years, and they have not left a very small geographic location. Their language has stabilized. English, French, and Russian, on the other hand, have derived from a more mobile people who were moved about substantially due to wars, invasions, etc. In English, we all know that the verbs can come almost anywhere. In French, also, the verb can come between the subject and the object. The French language is a Latin-based language somewhat similar to English, and the culture is roughly the same age. Modern Russian (from what I could glean from a friend) also has a flexible structure allowing the verb to come anyplace in a sentence, and it too came from a mobile culture. My friend also brought up an interesting point from this -- it would be nice to hear from someone who knows Hebrew, the language of the "race of wanderers". It might be an answer in this mobile language theory, and to find out what the sentence structure is like in that language would prove interesting. P.S. Any racial references are not* to be construed as slurs! -- -john deters Dayton Hudson Department Store Company uucp: rutgers!dayton!jad MIS 1060/700 on the Mall/Mpls, MN 55402 ARTHUR: "A scratch? Your arm's off!" BLACK KNIGHT: "It's only a flesh wound."
tanner@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mike Tanner) (01/20/88)
It is probably an error to consider English, German, or any people as being originally hunters. What is meant by "originally"? In historic times Europe has been agricultural. In prehistoric times, i.e., something like 20,000 years ago or more, the people of Europe were probably hunter-gatherers. In hunter-gatherer societies only about one-third of the food comes from meat (hunting), the rest is gathered by women. Hunting is almost never done by women, for many very good reasons. But women were the child-rearers, most likely the ones who passed on language. When half the people spend their lives walking around digging up roots and picking berries, and everybody is raised (and probably learns language) in that environment, I find it hard to believe that hunting could very strongly influence language. Though you might be able to argue that gathering is still more active than agriculture, requiring more emphatic language, etc. However, the claim that Japan has "always" been agrarian is also probably false. At least in the relevant time-span. Japan has not been agrarian for more than 10,000 years or so, about the same as Europe. The influences on the development of language are many and complex. But the hunting-agriculture explanation for the differences between English and Japanese is a red-herring. Based on the false assumption that Europeans were primarily hunters at one time and the false assumption that Japan has had agriculture longer than Europe. -- mike