On the Nature of Things | Forum

why is it different when the paranoid middle class person calls in the police to bash the scary looking street kids ?

I can't think of a reason. I just thought it was interesting that New Guinean tribespeople and middle class suburbanites think so much alike.

i mentioned before that "new guinea tribespeople" is literally thousands of distinct groupings with an equal amount of variability, each with their own language and each with their own viewpoint on dealing with the wider world.

might aswell judge the west on the biker gang behaviours.

not disputing that many of them are pretty wild and you dont approach them lightly, just not convinced that its worse than any of the alleged modern civilised societies, in my experience living there i encountered all sorts.

even on the statistical proportion approach it gets messier when you include the numbers of young males in jail in some modern countries, its debatable if being dehumanised for decades in a concrete box is a preferable outcome.

Appearances to the contrary, I pretty sure that middle class suburban neighbourhoods are also very different.


The language question is something I'd like to find out more about. We frequently hear about New Guinea's many languages, but according to linguists, apart from a some coastal tribes, which speak Austronesian languages brought to the island more recently (a couple of thousand years ago or less), all New Guinean languages are related to one another, so the linguistic diversity there is not quite so great as the number of languages might suggest.

im not expert enough in the field and terminology to use the correct language or know what the exact distinctions between dialect versus distinct language are.

the general gist of it is that the place is chock full of barriers - be they high mountains or treacherous water so the villages that are within walking distance of each other share a fair bit of common tongue and can communicate with the odd cockup on words meaning different things but as you move outward from that they have morphed so much that they cant understand each other and this gets even more so again once you move along the island chains.

i spose the whole mess of language/accent/local dialect you get across england, holland, germany, scandanavia and the way those germanic languages evolved depending on interactions with other cultures, but then even more so because of the increased pyhsical barriers and lack of interaction with each other so it all happens in a tiny land area, relatively speaking.