Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

Every so often anthropologists are asked questions about historical linguistics — typically something like “The words X, Y, and Z in these two languages are spoken in different areas of world — proof of alien colonization, perhaps?!?!?” The answer is: of course not — the Mayan sysadmins who first seeded our green world of clocks with our kind scrambled our neuronal cortex in order to erase all such clues. C’mon folks — these guys were _professionals_. The other main answer to give people is some sense of what historical linguists do — for which I just want to bookmark here “How do linguists decide how languages are related”:http://www.zompist.com/lang9.html#10 as well as “Deriving Proto-world with tools you probably have at home”:http://www.zompist.com/proto.html and “How likely are chance resemblances between languages?”:http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm all of them over at Zompist.com. I first got on to these writings in the course of tracking down the relationship between “Quechua”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua and “Hutese”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huttese_language (the later is modeled on the former) and rather than googling around forever for them again I thought I’d make a note of them here as I’m currently attempting to explain to someone that there is no phylogenetic relationship between Berber and Hawaiian (other than the well-developed 19th century notions of a semitic origin for Polynesian people, some of which have sort of sunk into the culture around here).