Foundations of the Age-Area Hypothesis

A useful tool in understanding the roots of the world geography of culture is the Age-Area-Hypothesis. The Age-Area Hypothesis (AAH) asserts that the point of geographical origin of a group of related cultures is most likely where the culture speaking the most divergent language is located. In spite of its widespread, multidisciplinary application, the hypothesis remains imprecisely stated, and has no theoretical underpinnings. This paper describes a model of the AAH based on an economic theory of mass migrations. The theory leads to a family of measures of cultural divergence, which can be referred to as Dyen divergence measures. One measure is used to develop an Age-Area Theorem, which links linguistic divergence and likelihood of geographical origin. The theory allows for computation of the likelihood different locations are origin points for a group of related cultures, and can be applied recursively to yield probabilities of different historical migratory paths. The theory yields an Occam’s-razor-like result: migratory paths that are the simplest are also the most likely; a key principle of the AAH. The paper concludes with an application to the geographical origins of the peoples speaking Semitic languages.

WORLD GEOGRAPHY OF JOKES

Jokes between countries are useful to reveal the ethnotypes existing in each of them, to represent them in cartographic form allows to perceive their distribution and the spatial projection of mockery: who are we laughing at, who are the scapegoats for the inhabitants of each country? Based on the analysis of an ad hoc database covering more than 60% of the countries and territories of the world and 90% of its population, the text shows that these jokes are social constructions, have a temporality and are divided basically in two categories, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. Keywords: jokes, ethnotypes, social construction, stupidity, arrogance

Asnyk’s notebook of rhymes

The material basis for the article was Adam Asnyk’s notebook, which is presently owned by The Jagiellonian Library in Kraków (Manuscript Archive, 7185I, no. 16261). The notebook contains 56 pages handwritten by Asnyk on both sides of a sheet. Asnyk wrote down the words which rhymed. He made use of the notebook when he needed set rhymes as a tool while composing poems. The list of these words demonstrates a high frequency of words borrowed from Latin, Greek, and French. They apply to abstract nouns, antiquity, literary classics, as well as proper nouns related to world geography and history. All indicates the intellectual and intelligentsia model of his poetry. The sets of words often included associations which emphasised Asnyk’s irony towards Romanticism. The rhymes were not accidental sets of words phonetically similar but instead they indicated grammatical and semantic fields. The analysis of Asnyk’s notebook enabled the following conclusions: 1) in spite of some scholars’ opinions, in his rhymes Asnyk used noninflectional grammatical forms (infinitives, adverbs); and 2) partial rhyme in Polish poetry had appeared earlier than it was commonly assumed (the end of the 19th century).