ELL: response to WSJ editorial

[William J Poser]

I have to agree with Mike Cahill. On the one hand, as I understand it,
it is far from clear how much impact the League of the Iroquois had
on the American colonies. And on the other hand, they had ample
acquaintance with examples of democracy in the Old World. They certainly
knew about the Athenian city state and the Roman Republic as well as their
own Parliament. Admittedly, all of these excluded slaves and women
(as did the United States for a long time) or those without property
(again, many US states had such requirements at one time), but they
still provided examples of the idea. They may well have known of other
European examples, such as the that of Iceland, though I am not sure
about that.

Bill
--
Bill Poser, Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/
billposer at alum.mit.edu
----
Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
----