GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

328 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
language group occupying a large, continuous area testify to a recent geographic
expansion of that group, such that not enough historical time has
elapsed for it to differentiate into many languages. Finally, we can reason
conversely that modern areas with a high diversity of languages within a
given language family lie closer to the early center of distribution of that
language family.
Using those three types of reasoning to turn back the linguistic clock,
we conclude that North China was originally occupied by speakers of Chinese
and other Sino-Tibetan languages; that different parts of South China
were variously occupied by speakers of Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-
Kadai languages; and that Sino-Tibetan speakers have replaced most
speakers of those other families over South China. An even more drastic
linguistic upheaval must have swept over tropical Southeast Asia to the
south of China—in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and
Peninsular Malaysia. Whatever languages were originally spoken there
must now be entirely extinct, because all of the modern languages of those
countries appear to be recent invaders, mainly from South China or, in a
few cases, from Indonesia. Since Miao-Yao languages barely survived into
the present, we might also guess that South China once harbored still other
language families besides Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, but
that those other families left no modern surviving languages. As we shall
see, the Austronesian language family (to which all Philippine and Polynesian
languages belong) may have been one of those other families that
vanished from the Chinese mainland, and that we know only because it
spread to Pacific islands and survived there.
These language replacements in East Asia remind us of the spread of
European languages, especially English and Spanish, into the New World,
formerly home to a thousand or more Native American languages. We
know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S.
Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears.
Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing
most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving
Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
The immediate causes of that language replacement were the advantages
in technology and political organization, stemming ultimately from the
advantage of an early rise of food production, that invading Europeans
held over Native Americans. Essentially the same processes accounted for
the replacement of Aboriginal Australian languages by English, and of