Language Death, Language Genesis, and World History.

要旨

even more than their colleagues in orthodox and national histo ries, obviously cannot do it all. They have to be selective, and in origi nal ways. The field cannot focus on major figures?Moses, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Genghis Khan, Columbus, Napoleon, Albert Einstein, and the like?because there are too many of them and because the Marxists have taught us, if nothing else, that history is more than biography. World historians want to learn about where whole societies were going, especially?in our age of multicultur alism at home and the Japanese colossus and the struggle toward west ern European unity abroad?about the influence of one society on others. How can it be done? One route has been economic and demo graphic analysis. We wonder, and can often learn much, about the spread of new crops and agricultural techniques, of technological and industrial techniques, about population growth and decline, about migrations. Such data can be enormously enlightening, largely because they are often statistical, and statistical omissions and mistakes are easier to locate than verbal equivalents. But the statistics even today are not very good. Statistics for the developing world are usually flat out bad, and for the developed world they are not always a whole lot better.

主題