[Lingtyp] Temporal features?

[David Gil]

Martin,

On 01/10/2018 22:45, Martin Kohlberger wrote:
> Dear David,
>
> Following Joseph's comment, I really don't follow your point.  How 
> does your "national language" value necessarily correlate with greater 
> socio-political complexity compared to a "local language only recently 
> part of larger polity"?  Are you implying that communities which speak 
> a local language that is not part of a larger polity are necessarily 
> socio-politically less complex than communities which speak a national 
> language?
More or less, yes, that's what I'm implying.  Nation states have 
multiple levels of jurisdictional hieraerchy; they have newspapers, 
public transport, bureaucracies, football leagues, universities, you 
name it.  Hunter-gatherer societies have essentially none of the above.

(I'm not quite sure what the source of the misunderstanding is.  If it 
has anything to do with apparent value judgements, I should emphasize 
that there is nothing inherently better or worse in being more complex, 
be it grammatically or socio-politically.)

David



-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
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