E.— GEOGRAPHY 



117 



E. General Ecological Approach to Problems in Culture. 



Let us see how ecology can help the study of the evolution of languages. 

 The early settlers of New England came mainly from Suffolk and the 

 adjacent south-east of England. They carried to America the pro- 

 nunciations of early Stuart times, and some of these have changed con- 

 siderably in England since their departure. In the fifteenth century 

 words like dark, far, farm, star, etc. were spelled and sounded derk, fer, 

 ster, etc. So also clerk and new were pronounced clerk and noo in this 

 part of England. About the time of Elizabeth the pronunciations dark 

 and nioo were growing in favour, and have since become universal in 

 England. 



The older forms were carried to America and survive in rustic New 

 England. So also certain Elizabethan and Stuart ballads are perhaps 

 better preserved in the isolated mountain hamlets of the Appalachians 

 than in most of England. Many old words have become archaic in 

 England which are still in common use in much of America (Wyld 1920). 



Fig. 9. — Linguistic Evolution indicated by the distribution of early pronuncia- 

 tions and folk-lore, which survive in marginal regions. An illustration of the 

 ' Zones and Strata Concept.' Three ' strata ' are suggested on the front 

 edge. 



Examples are fall (autumn), guess (think), stdezvalk, whittle, greenhorn, 

 cordwood, gotten, cracker (biscuit), shoat, etc. Here again, as we saw in 

 race, the primitive is ' pushed to the wall ' far from the cradleland. No 

 one imagines that Shakespeare lived in the Appalachians because some of 

 his language is now perhaps more common there than at Stratford ! 

 But many philologists have thought that Sanskrit originated in Lithuania ; 

 whereas Lithuanian is a marginal survival of an early Aryan akin to Sanskrit, 

 thrust out from the common cradleland in south central Asia. 



These stages in the evolution of the details of a language are charted 

 in Fig. 9 which illustrates the principle of the ' Zones and Strata Concept ' 

 fairly clearly. As before, we see that the primitive type is pushed to the 

 margin, while the later types appear first in the central cradleland. Of 

 course conditions have changed so greatly in America in the last fifty 

 years that it is now an independent centre of stimulus—possibly the 

 greatest in the world in regard to modern culture — and Britain is borrow- 

 ing new terms from the U.S.A. There is, however, not much difficulty 

 in detecting such new centres of culture in dealing with problems of the 

 evolution of early culture in the Eur-Asian world. For the most part 

 they progressed fairly regularly from south-east to north-west. This is 

 indicated in the following graph dealing in a general fashion with certain 

 phases of progress in the last 6,000 years. 



