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Have you ever wondered why polysynthetic languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language) have lost so much ground? Is it coincidence or is there some sort of explanation for this phenomenon? As of now, some Caucasian, Paleo-Siberian, Eskimo and Native American languages remained basically and I guess most of them are endangered too, so it's likely they are going to be extinct in the next 50 years or so. Once an enormous part of America used these type of languages. Btw these are usually the languages that also use another rare feature, an ergative-absolutive structure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language).
I noticed another characteristic feature of these languages: the most of them are spoken by hunter-gatherers (or maybe ethnicities that used to be hunter-gatherers for the longest time?). Am I onto something here? Does this kind of linguistic morphology provide some kind of advantage for hunter-gatherers, but disadvantage for more developed and more complex nomadic pastoral or agricultural societies? Or is it the other way around, new methods led to more complex, shorter, but more dense phrases and language types, so the direction of linguistic development looks like this:
Polysynthetic->agglutinative->analytic->isolating
Of course this is just a highly speculative theory and it might be just just an areal feature of certain territorries and a coincidence that these languages got suppressed the most.
Anyway, I would be really interested in your thoughts or explanations.
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>>375874
>Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer."
Gee I wonder why it's losing so much ground.
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Languages rarely exist in isolation though OP, they are influenced by each other all the time, so while it might seem like there is something linguistic natural selection going on, it's very unlikely.
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>>375874
Well, maybe they lost ground because they were conquered.
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>>375902
That's retarded though, it's just a different logic, it doesn't make them more difficult for native speakers, speaking it comes to them just as natural as you speaking your own native language.
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>>375936
Obviously, but the question was why was it them who got conquered and not vice versa?
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>>376072
Your proposed answer better not be "because other language types enable you to make steel and cross the atlantic".
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>>376072
no reason at all. It just happen to be a rare langauge type that didn't had a strong civilization tied to it (pretty much like thousand and thousand of other languages of all possible tpes that are/will go extinct)
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>>376072
Because of thousands of years of history unrelated to linguistics.
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>>376122
In case of the Old World yes, but if you look at the map, you can see that for the New World that's not necessarily true as Mayan, Kechua and Aymara languages belonged to great civilizations.
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>>376174
And they got fucked by smallpox and the like.
Even were it not for smallpox they probably would've still been conquered, but the Americas would still have a mostly native population today (who would likely continue to speak their native language) instead of having a predominantly European and Mulatto population.
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>>375874
because English is the dominant lingua franca and it's better for people of the world to learn it
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