Explaining Global Patterns of Language Diversity

The six and a half thousand languages spoken by humankind are very unevenly distributed across the globe. Language diversity generally increases as one moves from the poles toward the equator and is very low in arid environments. Two belts of extremely high language diversity can be identified. One runs through West and Central Africa, while the other covers South and South-East Asia and the Pacific. Most of the world's languages are found in these two areas. This paper attempts to explain aspects of the global distribution of language diversity. It is proposed that a key factor influencing it has been climatic variability. Where the climate allows continuous food production throughout the year, small groups of people can be reliably self-sufficient and so populations fragment into many small languages. Where the variability of the climate is greater, the size of social network necessary for reliable subsistence is larger, and so languages tend to be more widespread. A regression analysis relating the number of languages spoken in the major tropical countries to the variability of their climates is performed and the results support the hypothesis. The geographical patterning of languages has, however, begun to be destroyed by the spread of Eurasian diseases, Eurasian people, and the world economy.     

断代通史著作的成功尝试

中国社会科学院近代史研究所组织编撰的《中国近代通史》近期已由江苏人民出版社出版。全书共10卷,约550万字,各卷名称如下:第1卷《近代中国历史进程概说》,第2卷《近代中国的开端(1840—1864)》,第3卷《早期现代化的尝试(1865—1895)》,第4卷《从戊戌维新到义和团(1895—1900)》,第5卷《新政、立宪与辛亥革命(1901—1912)》,第6卷《民国的初建(1912—1923)》,第7卷《国共合作与国民革命(1924—1927)》,第8卷《内战与危机(1927—1937)》,第9卷《抗日战争(1937—1945)》,第10卷《中国命运的决战(1945—1949)》。本书的出版,完成了近代史研究所几代人的夙愿。对于1840—1949年完整的中国近代史来说,本书的撰写还是一个尝试。本刊特别约请我国近代史学界几位著名学者通过笔谈的形式发表看法,以期引起关注和讨论。     

日喀则旅游发展模式研究

本通过对日喀则地区旅游发展条件的综合分析,提出了以政府启动、交通引动、外资促动、国际联动、开放推动和全域化、生态化、网络化、差异化、小型化为核心的“日喀则旅游发展模式”,并确立了发展战略体系。     

《鄞江送别图》考析

本就《鄞江送别图》创作的历史背景与时间、地点、人物和作及其艺术特色进行分析和考证。     

A Great Big Melting Pot: Exploring Patterns of Glass Supply,Consumption and Recycling in Roman Coppergate,York*

One hundred and ninety three glass fragments from the canabae in York were analysed (first to fourth centuries). They fall into six compositional groups: antimony colourless (Sb), high‐manganese (high‐Mn), low‐manganese (low‐Mn), mixed antimony and manganese (Sb–Mn), high iron, manganese and titanium (HIMT) and plant ash. Some groups represent production groups, some of which appear to be in limited supply in this western outpost, but are more prevalent elsewhere, and others reflect changing supply mechanisms. The majority of glasses fall into groups that demonstrate extensive recycling of glass. This has important implications for determining provenance using trace elements and isotopes.     

Language and nation‐building in Israel: Hebrew and its rivals*

Abstract. The problem of language preceded the founding of Israel. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of political Zionism was accompanied by a revival of Hebrew. In the early years of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, Hebrew slowly emerged as the popular language, a compromise between the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European immigrants and the Arabic or Ladino current among many Middle Eastern Jews. After World War I, as educational institutions proliferated, the challenge of French and German as languages of instruction was blocked by teachers' strikes. With the establishment of the state and the massive influx of Jewish displaced persons, mostly speakers of Yiddish, that language, regarded as a potential threat to the primacy of Hebrew, was systematically fought by the country's political and cultural elite. Today, the position of Hebrew as the national language of Israel is secure. English, however, has been asserting its influence in an increasingly postindustrial and globalised society.     

A Linguistic Survey of Khorasan: Implications for Language Isolation,Language Change,and Contact Linguistics

This paper describes and analyzes data from a number of Modern Iranian dialects spoken in Khorasan in the east of Iran which are unusual among the other Western Iranian languages in that they have grammaticalized a split tense-sensitive alignment in indexation, compared to other Iranian languages whose indexation splitness is sensitive to both tense and transitivity. These dialects are the former dialect of Birjand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the present-day dialect of Ferdows, Khanik, and Se-Ghal’e. The findings are put in the context of the available data from the Classical Persian texts to show that the tense-sensitive splitness mentioned above is traceable in those texts. A number of external factors are discussed which seem to have been influential in the restructuring of the split-alignment of the former dialect of Birjand into a uniformly nominative-accusative alignment in terms of indexation as observed in the present-day dialect of Birjand. It is proposed that this restructuring is an instance of simplification. The three other dialects cited above are endangered in the sense that they can undergo the same kind of restructuring as happened to the dialect of Birjand.