> Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously > neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific > biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern > languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must > therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who > deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. > This is not so absurd that it looks like - if you replace the supernatural wrathful force by the force of Mankind itself.
For example, it seems that Portuguese as spoken in Portugal has diverged _more_ than Portuguese as spoken in Brazil, when both languages are compared to Portuguese as spoken in 1500 to 1600 or so. The reason would be that 1500-Portuguese was very close to 1500-Spanish, and for some 50 years after 1590 (or so) Portugal was part of Spain. Portuguese nationalists deliberately tried to speak as much differently than Spanish as they could, forcing the languages to diverge - a wrathful dispersion :-) Primitive languages might have suffered a similar proccess, when a tribe split into two enemy tribes. Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
