I’m not intending to do “weekly links” or anything, but I wanted to highlight a blogpost by Victor Mair : what the Dungan language sounds like from snippets of the movie “Jesus” dubbed in Dungan. This is the language of Chinese Muslims who fled to Russian Central Asia and is considered a divergent dialect of Mandarin. You can hear what it sounds from Mair’s links. The comments section, as usual, is excellent. Plus, the movie “Jesus” dubbed in over 1000 languages !
While I’m at it… Is English in reality a North Germanic (Scandinavian) language, rather than West Germanic ? The orthodox position is defended with great energy in a three-part critique by Asya Pereltsvaig.
T. Greer has an interesting blogpost in which he recollects that after reading Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism he started finding many “big” histories without ecological or biological awareness rather deficient. I concur with his assessment of the book, except that in my case the same process had started for me after reading Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel back when it was first published in 1997, and it was in Diamond’s bibliography that I first found Crosby.
HBDchick has a blogpost called “Reverse Renaissance“, which very much takes the opposite view from my “The Creativity of Civilisations“, at least on the subject of the Islamic Golden Age. She had also had a two-parter on “asabiyyah”, a word which (I think) has been popularised by Peter Turchin and which I wish would just go away. Those posts are Asabiyyah 1 and Asabiyyah 2. ( I am plentifuly present in the comments section of both. )
Razib Khan shows that despite nominal exogamy northern Indians still show elevated homozygosity, because they marry locally and within-caste.
Also, Pincher Martin recommended The Empire Trap, which I also now recommend, if you were interested in the discussion of foreign investment from last week. It chronicles the messy, ad hoc evolution of the US government’s attempts to protect American property abroad.
Filed under: Links
