Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Isolation and accessibility are recorded in the ethnic stock of every island. Like its flora and fauna, its aboriginal population shows an affinity to that of the nearest mainland, and this generally in proportion to geographical proximity. The long line of deposit islands, built of the off-scourings of the land, and fringing the German and Netherland coast from Texel to Wangeroog, is inhabited by the same Frisian folk which occupies the nearby shore. The people of the Channel Isles, though long subject to England, belong to the Franco-Gallic stock and the langue d'oïl linguistic family of northern France. The native Canary Islanders, though giving no evidence of previous communication with any continental land at the time of their discovery, could be traced, through their physical features, speech, customs and utensils, to a remote origin in Egypt and the Berber regions of North Africa prior to the Mohammedan conquest.838 Sakhalin harbors to-day, besides the immigrant Russians, five different peoples—Ainos, Gilyaks, Orochons, Tunguse, and Yakuts, all of them offshoots of tribes now or formerly found on the Siberian mainland a few miles away.839
Where the isolation of the island is more pronounced, owing either to a broader and more dangerous channel, as in the case of Madagascar and Formosa, or to the nautical incapacity of the neighboring coast peoples, as in the case of Tasmania and the Canary Islands, the ethnic influence of the mainland is weak, and the ethnic divergence of the insular population therefore more marked, even to the point of total difference in race. But this is generally a case of survival of a primitive stock in the protection of an unattractive island offering to a superior people few allurements to conquest, as illustrated by the ethnic history of the Andaman and Kurile Isles.
The sea forms the sharpest and broadest boundary; it makes in the island which it surrounds the conditions for differentiation. Thus while an insular population is allied in race and civilization to that of the nearest continent, it nevertheless differs from the same more than the several sub-groups of its continental kindred differ from each other. In other words, isolation makes ethnic and cultural divergence more marked on islands than on continents. The English people, despite their close kinship and constant communication with the Teutonic peoples of the European mainland, deviate from them more than any of these Germanic nations deviate from each other. The Celts of Great Britain and Ireland are sharply distinguished from the whole body of continental Celts in physical features, temperament, and cultural development. In Ireland the primitive Catholic Church underwent a distinctive development. It was closely bound up in the tribal organization of the Irish people, lacked the system, order and magnificence of the Latinized Church, had its peculiar tonsure for monks, and its own date for celebrating Easter for nearly three hundred years after the coming of St. Patrick.840 The Japanese, in their physical and mental characteristics, as in their whole national spirit, are more strikingly differentiated from the Chinese than the agricultural Chinese from the nomadic Buriat shepherds living east of Lake Baikal, though Chinese and Japanese are located much nearer together and are in the same stage of civilization. The Eskimo, who form one of the most homogeneous stocks, and display the greatest uniformity in language and cultural achievements of all the native American groups, have only one differentiated offshoot, the Aleutian Islanders. These, under the protection and isolation of their insular habitat from a very remote period, have developed to a greater extent than their Eskimo brethren of the mainland. The difference is evident in their language, religious ceremonies, and in details of their handiwork, such as embroidery and grass-fiber weaving.841 The Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago show such a divergence in physique and culture from the related tribes of the mainland, that they have been accredited with a distinct origin from the other coast Indians.842
The differentiating influence is conspicuous in the speech of island people, which tends to form a distinct language or dialect or, in an archipelago, a group of dialects. The Channel Isles, along with their distinctive breeds of cattle, has each its own variant of the langue d'oïl.843 According to Boccaccio's narrative of a Portuguese voyage to the Canaries in 1341, the natives of one island could not understand those from another, so different were their languages. The statement was repeated by a later authority in 1455 in regard to the inhabitants of Lancerote, Fuerteventura, Gomera and Ferro, who had then been Christianized. A partial explanation is supplied by the earlier visitors, who found the Canary Guanches with no means of communication between the several islands except by swimming.844 In the Visayan group of the Philippines, inhabited exclusively by the civilized Visayan tribes except for the Negritos in the mountainous interior, the people of Cebu can not understand their brethren in the adjacent islands; in Cuyos and Calmanianes, dialects of the Visayan are spoken.845 [See map page 147.]
The differentiation of language from the nearby continental speech may be due to a higher development, especially on large islands affording very advantageous conditions, such as Great Britain and Japan. Japanese speech has some affinity with the great Altaic linguistic family, but no close resemblance to any sub-group.846 It presents marked contrasts to the Chinese because it has passed beyond the agglutinative stage of development, just as English has sloughed off more of its inflectional forms than the continental Teutonic languages.
More often the difference is due to the survival of archaic forms of speech. This is especially the case on very small or remote islands, whose limited area or extreme isolation or both factors in conjunction present conditions for retardation. The speech of the Sardinians has a strong resemblance to the ancient Latin, retains many inflectional forms now obsolete in the continental Romance languages; but it has also been enlivened by an infusion of Catalan words, which came in by the bridge of the Balearic Islands during the centuries of Spanish rule in Sardinia.847 Again, it is in Minorca and Majorca that this Catalan speech is found in its greatest purity to-day. On its native soil in eastern Spain, especially in Barcelona, it is gradually succumbing to the official Castilian, and probably in a few centuries will be found surviving only in the protected environment of the Balearic Isles. Icelandic and the kindred dialects of the Shetland and Faroe Islands had their origin in the classic Norse of the ninth century, and are divergent forms of the speech of the Viking explorers.848 The old Frisian tongue of Holland, sister speech to Anglo-Saxon, survives to-day only in West Friesland beyond the great marshlands, and in the long-drawn belt of coastal islands from Terschelling through Helgoland to Sylt, as also on the neighboring shores of Schleswig-Holstein.849 This region of linguistic survival, insulated partially by the marshes or completely by the shallow "Wattenmeer" of this lowland coast, reminds us of the protracted life of the archaic Lithuanian speech within a circle of sea and swamp in Baltic Russia, and the survival of the Celtic tongue in peninsular Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, in Ireland, and the Highlands and islands of Scotland.
Islanders are always coast dwellers with a limited hinterland. Hence their stock may be differentiated from the mainland race in part for the same reason that all coastal folk in regions of maritime development are differentiated from the people of the back country, namely, because contact with the sea allows an intermittent influx of various foreign strains, which are gradually assimilated. This occasional ethnic intercrossing can be proved in greater or less degree of all island people. Here is accessibility operating against the underlying isolation of an island habitat. The English to-day represent a mixture of Celts with various distinct Teutonic elements, which had already diverged from one another in their separate habitats—Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norse and Norman French. The subsequent detachment of these immigrant stocks by the English Channel and North Sea from their home people, and their arrival in necessarily small bands enabled them to be readily assimilated, a process which was stimulated further by the rapid increase of population, the intimate interactive life and unification of culture which characterizes all restricted areas. Hence islands, like peninsulas, despite ethnic admixtures, tend to show a surprising unification of race; they hold their people aloof from others and hold them in a close embrace, shut them off and shut them in, tend to force the amalgamation of race, culture and speech. Moreover, their relatively small area precludes effective segregation within their own borders, except where a mountainous or jungle district affords a temporary refuge for a displaced and antagonized tribe. Hence there arises a preponderance of the geographic over the ethnic and linguistic factors in the historical equation.
The uniformity in cranial type prevailing all over the British Isles is amazing; it is greater than in either Spain or Scandinavia. The cephalic indices range chiefly between 77 and 79, a restricted variation as compared with the ten points which represents the usual range for Central Europe, and the thirteen between the extremes of 75 and 88 found in France and Italy.850 Japan stands in much the same ethnic relation to Asia as Britain to Europe. She has absorbed Aino, Mongolian, Malay and perhaps Polynesian elements, but by reason of her isolation has been left free to digest these at her leisure, so that her population is fairly well assimilated, though evidences of the old mixture can be discerned.851 In Corsica and Sardinia a particularly low cephalic index, dropping in some communes to 73, and a particularly short stature point to a rare purity of the Mediterranean race,852 and indicate the maintenance here of one ethnic type, despite the intermittent intrusion of various less pure stocks from the Italian mainland, Africa, Phoenicia, Arabia, and Spain. The location of the islands off the main routes of the basin, their remoteness from shore, and the strong spirit of exclusiveness native to the people,853 bred doubtless from their isolation, have combined to reduce the amount of foreign intermixture.
Islands do not necessarily derive their population from the land that lies nearest to them. A comparatively narrow strait may effectively isolate, if the opposite shore is inhabited by a nautically inefficient race; whereas a wide stretch of ocean may fail to bar the immigration of a seafaring people. Here we find a parallel to the imperfect isolation of oceanic islands for life forms endowed with superior means of dispersal, such as marine birds, bats and insects.854 Iceland, though relatively near Greenland, was nevertheless peopled by far away Scandinavians. These bold sailors planted their settlements even in Greenland nearly two centuries before the Eskimo. England received the numerically dominant element of its population from across the wide expanse of the North Sea, from the bare but seaman-breeding coasts of Germany, Denmark and Norway, rather than from the nearer shores of Gaul. So the Madeira and Cape Verde Isles had to wait for the coming of the nautical Portuguese to supply them with a population; and only later, owing to the demand for slave labor, did they draw upon the human stock of nearby Africa, but
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