Comments on: Polyglot to the Extreme

By: Brendan I. Koerner

Brendan I. Koerner — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:09:34 +0000

@Yangshao: Excellent point. Wasn’t aware of the correlation btw. proximity to the tropics and language diversity. More posts on this topic tk next month, so keep an eye peeled.

By: Yangshao

Yangshao — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:09:42 +0000

i’m a big fan of daniel nettle and his discussions of language diversity. but what’s missing in this excerpt is an explanation of why the context of symbolic capitol in PNG would be any different from anywhere else. see paper on “explaining global patterns of language diversity” (environmental volatility = resource risk = larger social networks and support nets = low linguistic diversity). linguistic diversity is highest nearest the tropics. why is PNG diffierent from, other places at similar latitude?

By: What Hath New Guinea To Do with American Poetry?

What Hath New Guinea To Do with American Poetry? — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:33:31 +0000

[...] Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s Vanishing Voices (via Brendan Koerner’s excellent Microkhan blog): Language is, to adopt the terminology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, [...]