Differentiation of peoples and civilizations on islands.
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]
Differentiation of language in islands.
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.
Archaic forms of speech in islands.
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.