GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

3 2 4 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
linguistic disunity of other long-settled parts of the world. For instance,
we saw in the last chapter that New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of
China's area and with only about 40,000 years of human history, has a
thousand languages, including dozens of language groups whose differences
are far greater than those among the eight main Chinese languages.
Western Europe has evolved or acquired about 40 languages just in the
6,000-8,000 years since the arrival of Indo-European languages, including
languages as different as English, Finnish, and Russian. Yet fossils attest
to human presence in China for over half a million years. What happened
to the tens of thousands of distinct languages that must have arisen in
China over that long time span?
These paradoxes hint that China too was once diverse, as all other populous
nations still are. China differs only by having been unified much
earlier. Its "Sinification" involved the drastic homogenization of a huge
region in an ancient melting pot, the repopulation of tropical Southeast
Asia, and the exertion of a massive influence on Japan, Korea, and possibly
even India. Hence the history of China offers the key to the history of all
of East Asia. This chapter will tell the story of how China did become
Chinese.
A CONVENIENT STARTING point is a detailed linguistic map of China
(see Figure 16.1). A glance at it is an eye-opener to all of us accustomed to
thinking of China as monolithic. It turns out that, in addition to China's
eight "big" languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often
referred to collectively simply as "Chinese"), with between 11 million and
800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 "little" languages,
many of them with just a few thousand speakers. All these languages,
"big" and "little," fall into four language families, which differ greatly in
the compactness of their distributions.
At the one extreme, Mandarin and its relatives, which constitute the
Chinese subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan language family, are distributed
continuously from North to South China. One could walk through China,
from Manchuria in the north to the Gulf of Tonkin in the south, while
remaining entirely within land occupied by native speakers of Mandarin
and its relatives. The other three families have fragmented distributions,
being spoken by "islands" of people surrounded by a "sea" of speakers of
Chinese and other language families.