Guns, Germs, and Steel PBS miniseries discussion thread.

[Sikander]

So mountain ranges are now "relatively flat"?

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


He explains this by the fact that China was largely unified (explained by geography) and that therefore there was less competition and drive to expand.

As I said before, that's an argument driven by mere happenstance. Regardless of where the modernizing civilization came from, any deterministic theory can be derived to show that "here and only here could such a thing have happened because it was here and only here that such a thing did happen."

[Drake Tungsten]

Originally posted by Sikander
So mountain ranges are now "relatively flat"?

Apparently so...

[lord of the mark]

what are the key mountain ranges dividing continental europe? The Alps and the Pyrenees essentially. They shouldnt prevent a unitary state in the mediterranean basin - the Roman empire minus Britain and northern Gaul, essentially. Yet that empire was never recreated after the fall of western Rome, despite the absence of geographical barriers. It was never recreated for largely contingent reasons.

Of course even if it HAD been recreated, that would still leave SOME interstate competition in Europe. So, the question comes up, were the Pyrenees/Alps/Massif Central really that big a barrier to incorporating northern France/Gaul etc into a Med Sea empire? Rome managed to hold on to Gaul for 400 years. When the empire lost it to the barbarians, it lost spain and italy as well. Byz never reconquered gaul, but then it never fully retook Italy, either. Renaissance France had difficulty dominating Italy, but AFAIK that was more due to balance of power considerations than to the barrier of the Alps.

Im not sure the geographic thesis as the origin of European disunity really stands up to detailed scrutiny.

[Immortal Wombat]

I suspect most of the problems with building an empire in Europe are due to an already highly regionalised population. Oceans are as good for preventing cultural diffusion as mountain ranges are. Italy, Greece, Iberia, Britain, Denmark, Scandanavia, Gaul/Germany north of the Alps all have good reasons to be culturally distinct from one another. Without the flow of peoples and languages and cultures, regions diverge, and become increasingly difficult to unify.

Under detailed scrutiny, perhaps the contingent reasons turn out to be at least partly geographical in nature as well.

[VetLegion]

Have Chinese dialects diverged as much from each other as European languages have since fall of Rome? If not, it would be interesting to know why.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
I suspect most of the problems with building an empire in Europe are due to an already highly regionalised population. Oceans are as good for preventing cultural diffusion as mountain ranges are. Italy, Greece, Iberia, Britain, Denmark, Scandanavia, Gaul/Germany north of the Alps all have good reasons to be culturally distinct from one another. Without the flow of peoples and languages and cultures, regions diverge, and become increasingly difficult to unify.

Under detailed scrutiny, perhaps the contingent reasons turn out to be at least partly geographical in nature as well.

ya but

case 1 France - the massif central divides two very different linguistic and cultural areas, IIUC. Yet France has been united across that barrier since the the 13th c.
OTOH, there is, IIUC, substantial cultural contininuity along the Med coast, from northwest Italy, to Provence, to Catalonia - yet they have NOT been united politically.

I think purely political contingencies are quite important.

[Dis]

got a chance to watch the first episode which was shown last night on our PBS station. There is nothing tonight, perhaps they only run one episode a week.

The episode was pretty good. though they didn't show any opposing views, they just said some of his ideas are controversial and not accepted by everyone.

[Berzerker]

It is interesting that the fertile crescent had the grains and animals people needed to create the first big civilisation - Truly the Garden of Eden.

[GePap]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Have Chinese dialects diverged as much from each other as European languages have since fall of Rome? If not, it would be interesting to know why.

They have diverged more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/international/asia/10chinese.html?

Uniting China to Speak Mandarin, the One Official Language: Easier Said Than Done

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 10, 2005

DATIAN, China - As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town's open-air market, the conversation turned quickly from the price of dried fish and fresh fruit to how many dialects people here could muster.

Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.

What was the third dialect? someone asked. "Putonghua," the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues.

As seen by many outsiders, China is a behemoth: the world's most populous country with a galloping economy and a more or less unified culture. But if Putonghua - Mandarin - is one of the world's most heavily spoken languages, in many parts of China it is lost in the mazes of local dialects.

In recent years migrant labor, which has brought about huge population movements from the hinterlands to China's prosperous eastern cities, has obliged millions of Chinese to learn more Mandarin, but by official estimates even today barely half of the population can speak the official dialect.

China has 55 ethnic minorities, many of them with cultural roots in neighboring countries. The linguistic diversity among these minorities, however, pales in comparison with the variety of tongues spoken among China's Han, the ethnic group that makes up more than 90 percent of the population. The Han speak as many 1,500 dialects, with the bulk of those concentrated in the southern half of the country.

The official view here is that all of the tongues spoken by Han are variants of one language, Chinese. But in a country with a traumatic history of civil war and fragmentation, many specialists say this theory may have more to do with politics than with linguistic reality. Many of the Han dialects are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible, more distinct than languages from disparate regions of Europe.

"No one can clearly answer the question how many dialects there are in China," said Zhang Hongming, a professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Wisconsin who is in China doing fieldwork. "The degree of difference among dialects is much higher than the degree of difference among European languages. In Europe they call them languages, but in China we share a culture, so the central government would like to consider that one language is shared by many different peoples. It is simply a different definition."

Linguists say the Wu dialect widely spoken in Shanghai, to take one prominent example, shares only about 31 percent lexical similarity with Mandarin, or roughly the same as English and French.

The encounter at the Datian market began when the dumpling seller approached the foreigner with a phrase that sounded like "goodbye" in the Wu dialect. Knowing it must mean something else, the foreigner guessed she was asking his name, and provided it, producing a laugh from the woman who explained, switching to Mandarin, that she had asked if he had eaten lately.

For China, the consequences of this linguistic fragmentation are immense. Although no one in government says that local languages should be eliminated, there is a growing awareness that the country's national construction cannot be considered complete until all Chinese can speak a common language, which remains a distant goal.

Indeed, a government survey published last year said only 53 percent of the population "can communicate in Putonghua." In recognition of this fact, broadcasters commonly include subtitles - the meaning of Chinese characters is stable, even as spoken dialects vary - on television programs here to help people overcome comprehension problems.

A 2001 national language law decrees that Mandarin be used in all mass media, government offices and schools, and bars the "overuse" of dialects in movies and broadcasting.

Even by the standards of China's complicated language matrix, Fujian Province stands out for its richness, a dense thicket of tongues laid down by waves of migration over time from central China.

"We have an expression, that if you drive five miles in Fujian the culture changes, and if you drive 10 miles, the language does," said Zhang Zhenxing, a linguist from Fujian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "In recent years, because of economic growth things have been getting better, but there are still an extraordinary number of dialects in Fujian."

If Fujian Province can be said to have a Babel, tiny Datian County can stake a pretty solid claim. In this 800 square miles of rural central Fujian, where fields of rice and tobacco grow in the shadow of tall mountains, no fewer than five dialects are spoken in addition to Mandarin.

To drive a few miles down the road from one village to another is indeed to plunge into a new linguistic universe. Things can be as confusing for someone from the next town as they are for the total outsider.

In one village near the county seat, where an old Daoist shrine sits high above the roadside, a man who said he spoke southern Min, one of Fujian's most widely spoken dialects, tried to exchange words with some boys who said they also spoke southern Min. A few words from each side, however, sufficed to show they were mutually unintelligible.

Chen Wenxian, a shopkeeper in his late 20's in another village, grimaced with incomprehension when a driver pulled up and inquired about the price of shoes in his glass display case. The two switched into heavily accented but mutually comprehensible Mandarin.

Mr. Chen, slouched in his chair behind his counter, shrugged when asked the name of the village's language. Consultations with a cluster of family members did not unearth a name either.

"It's just what we speak here," he said. Asked if he could understand the language in the next village, a short distance down the road, he said: "I have no idea what they speak. Those people talk too fast."

[GePap]

Originally posted by Sikander
So mountain ranges are now "relatively flat"?

Yes, because certain mountain rages don;t pose the same obstancles as others. Either plenty of passes, or worn down and old, as opposed to high barriers of stone.

The Urals never seem to have happered anyone.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Gepap

Pretty smart, huh? It is dangerous if you need a long time to adapt and people wont help. But you keep assuming the Bushman gets help but wont allow the New Yorker help. from Bushmen. The point is the NYC system is more complicated than the Bushman's system. I believe more isolated peoples were just far enough away from sufficient contacts for their traditional lifestyles to survive. Technology expanded thru war and trade and the crossroads of the old world had plenty of contact. Civilisation spread out from those crossroads...

I don;t assume the Bushman gets a lick of help. Tens of thousands of people live in the streets of New York without help from anyone, yet one does not see large numbers of people dying from the elements in NYC. The same is not true of the Khalahari.

True, but the slavery example mimics both eugenics and survival of the fittest.

Not natural selection. In human driven processes, the choices are based on human needs and ideas- people breed for the traits they consider best- which might not actually be best, since men could be mistaken. Natural selection is far more rigorous and less driven by ideology.

We didn't get to see the farmers in the show, they just showed an aerial shot. But I didn't say New Guinea was easier than NYC, I said it wasn't that demanding, i.e., closer to NYC than the Kalahari.

They did show the farmers0 those people hacking at the Taro.

While the availability of water certainly makes the jungle a slightly easier environment than a desert, it does not make it "easy" by any stretch.

[Drake Tungsten]

The Urals never seem to have happered anyone.

Did anyone ever even try to cross the Urals? Hard to imagine given the vast expanse of open steppe south of the Urals that served as a conduit for so many peoples over the years...

[GePap]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

The Urals never seem to have happered anyone.

Did anyone ever even try to cross the Urals? Hard to imagine given the vast expanse of open steppe south of the Urals that served as a conduit for so many peoples over the years...

Yes, plenty of people have, given its an old mountain range, like the Appalachians.

Read up on the Russian Civil War someday-at least one example.

[GePap]

And looking at the map you put up before:

Thye black border is the parts of Chine that most commonly appear united in the set of historcial maps I liked too.

If you look at the mountains in the South, the run generally north-south not east-west, so there are plenty of passes. Maybe the people within those mountain rages might cause problems, but the rivers would pose a greater obstacle to north-south movement than those ranges.