[Lingtyp] Lingtyp Digest, Vol 101, Issue 10

[David Gil]

Dear Lameen,

Thanks for your comment.My use of the "WEIRD" acronym was perhaps a 
little sloppy, but at least it served its primary purpose of triggering 
some conversation :-)

A somewhat more precise formulation of what I have in mind might appeal 
to either or both of the following partly-overlapping and 
partly-distinct notions:

1. Societies of greater sociopolitical complexity, as measured by 
various features in D-Place and other similar databases (Benítez-Burraco 
2022 and elsewhere).

2. Cultures descended from a process of urbanization that took place in 
ancient Mesapotamia and Egypt some 6,000 years ago (Wengrow 2014 and 
elsewhere)

The strong hypothesis would be that cumulative songs with syntactic 
recursion would be limited to societies of greater sociopolitical 
complexity and/or cultures descended from ancient urbanization in 
Mesapotamia and Egypt."Had Gadya" clearly satisfies the second of these 
two criteria, and probably also the first (depending on when and where 
it actually first arose).On the other hand, I suggest that cumulative 
songs with syntactic recursion would not be found in traditional (ie. 
precolonial) cultures that are geographically distant from south plus 
west Eurasia (plus northern Africa).

Best,

David

Benítez-Burraco, Antonio, Candy Cahuana, Sihan Chen, David Gil, Ljiljana 
Progovac, Jana Reifegerste and Tatiana Tatarinova (2022) "Cognitive and 
Genetic Correlates of a Single Macro-Parameter of Crosslinguistic 
Variation", The Evolution of Language, Proceedings of the 14th 
International Conference (EVOLANG14).

Wengrow, David (2014) /The Origins of Monsters/, Princeton University 
Press, Princeton NJ.


On 16/02/2023 01:38, Lameen Souag wrote:
> Dear David,
>
> > so far no examples have come to light from other "non-WEIRD" parts 
> of the world
>
> The Aramaic speakers who composed Had Gadya were neither Western nor 
> Industrialized nor Democratic, so that would appear to furnish at 
> least one non-WEIRD example. Of the components of that acronym, I 
> would bet on Educated (more specifically, literate) being the one 
> factor that might well be directly relevant, but it will be 
> interesting to see what comes up!
>
> Best,
> Lameen
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 1:00 PM 
> <lingtyp-request at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
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>     Today's Topics:
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>        1. Re: query: cumulative songs (David Gil)
>        2. Re: query: cumulative songs (Juergen Bohnemeyer)
>        3. The future of linguistics (Jesse P. Gates)
>        4. Re: Lingtyp Digest, Vol 101, Issue 9 (Lameen Souag)
>
>
>     ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>     Message: 1
>     Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2023 22:13:09 +0900
>     From: David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>
>     To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org"
>             <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>     Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] query: cumulative songs
>     Message-ID: <28daee2a-60da-345a-83ca-68dded5c0874 at shh.mpg.de>
>     Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>
>     Dear all,
>
>     Thanks for all the nice examples of cumulative songs, and do
>     please keep
>     them coming in.
>
>     I have already learned an important thing from the responses so far.?
>     While cumulative songs and stories seem to be widespread around the
>     world, they kind of recursive syntactic embedding accompanying such
>     cumulation that is found in the likes of "House that Jack Built" and
>     "Had Gadya", seems to have a much narrower distribution, and so
>     far no
>     examples have come to light from other "non-WEIRD" parts of the
>     world.?
>     Are there really no such cases from elsewhere?
>
>     I would like to be able to conclude that such syntactic recursion
>     is a
>     characteristic feature of WEIRD languages and cultures, but am
>     sticking
>     my neck out in order to invite counterexamples ...
>
>     Best,
>
>     David
>
>
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-- 
David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email:gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
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