What a semantic mess. I am amazed how difficult for you is to understand such a clear situation. I already said above.
First, I have to said I am agnostic and I discard God and myracles.
Then, the question is, was the native dead?
(1) Natives believed so. That’s is clear from the text.
(2) De Vaca believed it so? It seems he did. So, he prayed God for a myracle, something quite common in the lives of Spaniards of the time. :rolleyes:
(3) God interviened? If you are a believer, say it did.
(4) What happened? A bet it was a cataleptic state, or something like that. I bet you have never seen a dead standing at his funeral :smack:
Was the even false? Perhaps, and perhaps it was real. If it was catalepsy or something similar, you know that happens.
Out of nearly 100 posts you have made in this thread (so far), you linked to a Wikipedia article for those 3 researchers’ numbers in roughly your 35th post (and roughly the 130th post of the thread out of roughly 280 posts so far). That is not exactly “early”. If you are unaware, Wikipedia is generally not held to be a credible source on its own (especially since anybody can alter the content). Even the sources the Wikipedia article uses for citations of those figures would be a reasonable starting place.
So, again, no more distractions or digressions about analyzing populations by country or any of that.
A list of sources and some reasoning based on those sources, if you please.
Besides, all my point is that there wasn’t a census at contact, something that by now is quite clear. The figures at contact are calculations made by different scientists, and everyone of them comes with a different number.
Anyways, we will continue with the schollastic for a while. Now I am going to sleep.
For when you return and as Martin Hyde has more thoroughly noted, you have not cited source(s). You have cited a single source and made references to other sources. Please make those other sources explicitly clear.
If you have truly cited your sources already, it’s a matter of searching your own posts and copy/paste. Not a difficult task at all bur perhaps a matter of several minutes of work.
So, title and author of the relevant works, please.
Those are not “sources”. Those are authors. Sources involve actual works.
I can use “Wilson” as a source for claiming that estimates of the universes’ age are overblown. But I need to provide an actual paper, book, or other work for it to be an actual citation.
Alright let’s try this another way. I’m not arguing that de Vaca raised a man from the dead. I’m arguing that he claimed he had. You were originally arguing that he never made the claim.
[QUOTE=pinguin]
First, La Vaca didn’t claim he raised a man from the dead.
[/QUOTE]
No you seem to agree that he did make the claim.
[QUOTE=pinguin]
(2) De Vaca believed it so? It seems he did.
[/QUOTE]
There we go. For the first point of this tiny piece of the argument everything else is irrelevant. We both agree that de Vaca claimed to, as Martin Hyde put it, “have healed all individuals who ask for it satisfactorily, and at one point to have raised a dead man back to life.”
Now on to the second point of this this tiny piece of the argument. As Martin Hyde put it, “it is not a dispassionate or particularly fact-laden account.” Given that de Vaca claims to have worked miracles. Given that you are agnostic and don’t believe in miracles. Would you agree that this is an indication that de Vaca’s book is a less than completely reliable source?
Good God man, no. That was a rhetorical question and I answered it myself in the same post… three pages back. Please don’t waste your or our time.
Here is the one question you need to provide an answer to:
Why should we believe a pre-columbian population for the Americas was 8-15?
And the way you need to answer that is providing us, at the very least, with the name and author of the book that supports your argument.
You have no need to answer them, since you are the one making them.
= = =
Regarding the multiplicity of languages claim, it would appear that you are unaware of the number of languages extant in Europe during periods of large populations. You probably think of “Celtic,” English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Italian, for Western Europe, (an area smaller than Brazil), ignoring, (or failing to realize) that each of those languages had multiple mutually unintelligible dialects as late as the eighteenth century, (some surviving to today). It was not the massive numbers of people that eliminated the many languages, but the rise of the Napoleonic empire, followed immediatly by the Industrial Revolution with its concentration of people in cities accompanied by mass media, (first telegraph and newspapers, finally radio), that homogenized European languages. Even today, several have separate dialects that are considered by some linguists separate languages.
Your appeal to “sign language” of the Plains Indians are also worthless. The American plains, like the Pampas, could not support large numbers of people in a hunter/gatherer mode, but the Eastern lands were heavily cultivated with millions of people. The largest were the Natchez and Iroquois groups, extending over millions of hectares, but even near the Plains, the Mandan–a group for whom we have explicit accounts of their destruction by European disease, being reduced from nine large villages to two small villages between 1740 and 1800–were also engaged in agriculture. You make ignorant comments about the portion of the land that could, (prior to agriculture), support people and extrapolate to small numbers, ignoring the far richer lands in which people lived. You even did that in your own neighborhood, extrapolating from the barren Patagonia and ridiculing larger numbers for the rich uplands of Ecuador and Peru.
I agree that the Plains and the Pampas had few people in a hunter gather style of life. At least we agree in something.
Now, please, where are your souces that the Eastern Lands had “millions” of people? And because the debate has been so tought. I demand a detailed account of your sources. If they are historical, better.
There is no firm link between population density or size and number of languages. Just look at New Guinea, or Europe, or India. And large parts of even North America did have lingua francas or other, concrete signs of unified culture. Do you think the Iriquois Federation just got by with sign language, or the Mississipian Mound Builders?
Hell, you just have to look at pre-Industrial Revolution Britain for an example of how many languages can survive in a small area - up until writing and printing comes along to simplify things, these were all mother tongues, and all still exist as living languages today:
English
Scots
Gaeilge (Irish)
Cymraeg (Welsh)
Goidealach (Scottish)
Kernowek(Cornish)
Gaelgagh (Manx)
Jèrriais (Jersey)
Guernésiais (Guernsey)
Sercquiais (Sark)
, not counting countless barely-mutually-intelligible dialects of same (have you ever *heard *a true Yorkshireman speak?), various immigrant languages (Punjabi, Urdu, Creole, Cantonese, French, etc) and some extinct ones like Cumbirc and Norn, and yet still one United Kingdom for hundreds of years.
Why is everyone getting so worked up about this discussion? I was just throwing out an observation.
Anyway, Wiki says there are “thousands” of Native American languages. I don’t know how that compares to comparable territory in highly populated parts of Europe and beyond. (I guess we’d need to work out a languages-per-square-mile ratio or something.)
And of course, there are “families” of languages, like the Romance languages, the Germanic languages, and the Celtic languages in Europe. Here is a map of language families in North America. Looking at the map, I suppose you could make a fair argument that it is divided somewhat similarly to the way language families are divided in Europe.
As an aside, there are two weird things about that map, to me. One, the number of white (unknown) areas in eastern North America seems odd. I mean we know what Indians were in Ohio and Kentucky don’t we? The other thing that seems odd is that you’d think there would be a very large family area as a relic of Mississippian culture. I know the Muskogean speakers in the South (including Creeks and Seminoles among others) are supposed to be descendants of the mound builders, but that language group encompasses a surprisingly restricted geographic range on the map, and one which doesn’t particularly correspond to our ideas of the geographic boundaries of Mississippian cultures.
Don’t know what any of that has to do with this discussion; it just struck me as odd.
I do know that DeSoto’s men described a very settled and well-populated area in north Georgia (the Coosa region) that other Spaniards found mostly overgrown only 20 years later. So there’s no question, I think, that a lot of Indians were lost to disease. The only question we’re debating is how many. The language patterns just struck me as one way of getting at that question.
Actually, 100,000 is probably an underestimate, and I’m not sure where it comes from.
According to the 6 Nations website (basically the Iroquois homepage), there were about 75,000 Iroquois descended individuals in North America in the mid-90s, which was compiled from census data from the US and Canada, though there are likely more who choose not to reveal their tribal affiliation on the census. So, 75000 as a current population estimate is itself an underestimate.
Of course, that relies on self-identification of tribal affiliation. So, even in the modern day, an accurate census (to the person) is not possible. It’s likely the population 400 years ago was greater. The tribes’ own estimates range in the hundreds of thousands, but, of course, there is a bit of a bias there.
But, this is again a digression from the important point. How about those sources? You’ve had a few days to compile a few. You’ve given a couple authors (but none of their direct works) and one eyewitness account that doesn’t seem to match your interpretation.
Why it is likely? Why do you claim there were 100.000 or more at contact? Where is your evidence? Do you have a wampum to prove it? Do you have the records? Do you think there were half a million followers of Hiawatta?
Just for curiousity. I am not forcing you to find any evidence at all.
