Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 6:42 AM

> It's important to keep historic movements of languages and/or peoples in mind
> to show the sort of thing that _does_ happen.

> For example, the dispersal of the Nguni language in early 19th century Africa
> saw speakers of Nguni moving out from a small nuclear area in what's now
> Kwa-Zulu/Natal as far north as Lake Victoria -- 6000 miles, the equivalent of
> travelling from the Rhine to China.

[Ed]
You mean 3000 kilometers, I suppose? Or 2000 miles? (Brussels-Athens by road -
via Belgrade, when former Yugoslavia was still a touristic region).

> The number of actual original Zulu-speakers was tiny -- no more than a few
> thousand, probably less; possibly only a few hundred.

> In the course of 40 years, they moved 1000 miles from their original homeland
> and linguistically and culturally assimilated something hundreds of times
> their own numbers.

[Ed]
But the Zulus were fierce warriors who actually built a kind of empire.

> The Turkic expansion through Central Asia and the Eurasian steppe zone is
> another example; or the massive expansion of Germanic at the expense of
> Celtic in Central Europe.

[Ed]
I don't think Germanic expanded all that much, and the Celtic fringe (along the
Danube, mainly) that was colonized was probably no larger than the Slavic one.

Ed Selleslagh