{"id":51767,"date":"2021-08-17T21:23:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T02:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51767"},"modified":"2021-08-17T22:19:51","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T03:19:51","slug":"the-hu-line-the-significance-of-geography-for-historical-linguistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51767","title":{"rendered":"The Hu Line: The significance of geography for historical linguistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have lived a long time.\u00a0 When I was in high school (1957-1961), geography was an important subject of the curriculum.\u00a0 When I went to college (1961-1965), there were still departments of geography in many, if not most, self-respecting colleges and universities, but they were slowly starting to disappear.\u00a0 Now, I suspect that there are very few, if any, schools, colleges, and universities that teach geography and train professors of that discipline.\u00a0 Still, there are vestiges of the days in the first half of the twentieth century when geography was upheld as a princely pursuit.<\/p>\n

At Penn, there is a building that once housed the geography department and still has markings that bear witness to its pedigree, but has now been swallowed up by the\u00a0School of Engineering and Applied Science.\u00a0 At Harvard, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) occupies what used to be the Department of Geography, in a building filled with geographical motifs that has a special history linked to the Widener family (who gave their wealth and their name to Harvard's main library in memory of Philadelphian Harry Elkins Widener (January 3, 1885-April 15, 1912) who went down with the Titanic at the age of 27.\u00a0 The Widener family also gifted Harvard with the building that presently belongs to EALC, as part of an endowment meant to create a geography professorship for a member of the Widener family.\u00a0 While I was teaching at Harvard, my office was in the penthouse of that building.\u00a0 It was an eerie feeling to be situated all alone in that aerie above all my peers and superiors.<\/p>\n

Despite the support of the Wideners and its illustrious past, geography did not thrive at Harvard, Penn, and elsewhere.\u00a0 To me, this is cause for lament, and I have often pondered what forces have been at work that led to this unfortunate result.<\/p>\n

My private, personal theory on the demise of geography (I'm not trying to convince anyone else that this is what really happened) is that it has essentially been displaced by sociology and anthropology.\u00a0 What used to be learning about humankind and the land has now become analysis of configurations and interactions of groups in their shifting spatial arrangements, i.e., sociology, and intense investigations of individuals in their relationships to others in terms of the four fields of archeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, though I have often heard older anthropologists complain that these traditional four fields are giving way to increasingly theoretical approaches.<\/p>\n

Geography had its own two branches, human and physical, and one can see how these two branches could gradually be cannibalized by or morph into the four fields of anthropology.\u00a0 My strong impression is that geography in its early stages was highly empirical in nature, and that emphasis on the physical, evidential facets of human existence on earth continued in three of the four fields of anthropology, i.e., all but cultural.<\/p>\n

During my international research project on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age inhabitants of Eastern Central Asia (ECA), I worked closely with an Italian geneticist named Paolo Francalacci.\u00a0 When I visited his university, Sassari, in the early 90s and spent some time in the department of anthropology where he worked, I was amazed that there was no trace of cultural studies, only the physical sciences.\u00a0 Paolo thought that was natural and normal for anthropology, and couldn't understand why I kept asking him where the cultural anthropologists were.\u00a0 My recollection is that he was more intent on showing me all their great labs for research on fish and other animals, and so forth.<\/p>\n

When I think of great geographers after the classical (Anaximander<\/a>\u00a0[c. 610\u2013545 BC]),\u00a0Ptolemy<\/a>\u00a0[c. 100-170 AD]) and medieval (Ibn Battuta<\/a>\u00a0(1304-1368-69),\u00a0Ibn Khaldun<\/a>\u00a0[1332-1406]) periods, the names of the first geographers (in the modern sense) that come to mind are the following:<\/p>\n