We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Preliminaries: Extraterritorial languages
General concepts
An extraterritorial language (henceforth ETL) is one that has been transported from its original geographical home to another area. If we take this concept to its logical conclusion, all human languages spoken outside of East Africa are extraterritorial (henceforth ET) versions of whatever was spoken by the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens who left Africa about 60,000 years ago. This kind of historical depth is unavailable to language historians, and the notion is generally applied over relatively shorter time-spans.
But it is useful in the fairly long term; for example, Icelandic, though an ‘autonomous’ language (in the sense that it is not intercomprehensible with any other Scandinavian language) still bears the marks of being ninth-century ET Norwegian; and English itself (in all its varieties) could be considered to be ET North-Sea Germanic, since it was brought to the British Isles from the continent in the fifth century; indeed this origin accounts for the particular features it shares with Frisian in particular, Dutch, and somewhat less with German. Its ET origin is the key that unlocks its prehistory.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
