Linguistics and ancient ethnohistories within the frameworks of complex societies and complex systems: Implications and promising gaps.
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | This study was refining own theoretical approaches of a wider project focused on Inner Asian transboundary relations. It is not always obvious, that populations divided by wide distance, like in India and China, can have not only direct linguistic exchange by envoys, travelers and traders, but also indirect systemic communications influenced by differing environmental and socio-political pressures causing deeper transregional disparities and compensatory or equalizing processes. The effects of unequal pressures on the relations of distant areas can be more direct (migrations, attacks) or less direct (various forms of distant political and cultural dominance, religious missions as a special type of regulative influence). In these processes the languages are locally employed and can be studied in their particular forms. But additionally the role, function and life-cycles of languages can also be considered in the context of wider evolutionary processes and related to the understanding of complex societies and complex systems. For example varying speed of language spread and thus also unequal speed of language change have important implications for linguistics. And also other promising gaps can be inferred from local ethnohistoric sources if they are re-evaluated in wider theoretical frameworks. For both mentioned purposes a brief review of ancient Chinese and Korean travel reports about the Tarim Basin and Kashmir were presented: A) commenting the types of provided information, and B) giving practical examples how seemingly unimportant details (like side notes about iconicity and regional settings) can have high reference value for evolutionary analysis, and also for thinking in the framework of complex societies and complex systems. |
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