As you point out, much can be learned about more important issues from studying sports. Unfortunately, male scientists and philosophers are much less interested in sports on average than the typical man, so much is overlooked.

One useful thing to notice is the relativism of affiliations. For example, Los Angeles Dodger fans hate San Francisco Giant players, _except_ when its the All Star Game where the best players on the two teams both play for the National League. That day each year, the Dodger fans root for the Giant players because they are representing their National League.

This kind of telescoping of loyalties happens all the time. Growing up in LA, I rooted for the UCLA football team and despised USC's. When I went off to college in Texas, I immediately started rooting for USC too, because from 1500 miles away from home surrounded by boastful Texans, local differences didn't matter anymore.

The same thing happens in real life. The Arabs and Afghans say: "Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against my village; me and my village against a stranger." Americans, with our large-scale conceptions of race, have a hard time understanding this, but if we studied our reactions to sports teams, it would all make sense.

On languages, there are what you call clinal transitions within the various dialects of the middle Germanic languages (from Dutch down through SE Austria), Italian, the Romance languages generally, and the Chinese languages.

I've tried to find whether there is a transitional Scandinavian (northern Germanic) / German dialect, in southern Denmark for example, but I don't think that there is. With a land bridge there might have been a transitional English / Dutch language.

The situation is changing because of radio and education, however. A mapping on a flat map would show odd
discontinuities, but a topographical map would make many of them clearer.

There are other discontinuities based on migration and trade. (At one time Salt Lake City was distinguished because of the peculiarities of Mormon demographics). From New Orleans to Boston, for example, as many as ten U.S. seaport cities have distinct dialects, including some like Charleston that you wouldn't necessarily guess.

The discrimination of national languages, standard languages, official dialects, and unofficial dialects is intensely politicized. There are standardized objective ways of charting dialects, but these tend not to come up with clear boundaries.

Sports loyalties at the national level define a peculiar sort of media-produced ersatz group identity. Calling it pathological would be too normative I suppose, but it's reasonable to surmise that there's some kind of projection of unmet needs going on. By now only a small proportion of pro sports fans actually go to games, and a lot don't even root for a local team at all.

John,

Isn't Frisian a transitional language between Dutch and English?!

Isn't the dialect of Schleswig-Holstein, the Low Saxon language somewhere between Dutch, English and North Germanic (Scandanavian) languages.

Quote:
The Low Saxon language has commonality with the English language, the Scandinavian languages and Frisian in that it has not been influenced by the High German sound shift. Therefore a lot of Low Saxon words sound similar to their English counterparts.

The grammar also shows similarities to the English language. Low Saxon declination has only three cases. In the northern dialects the participle is formed without the prefix ge-, like the Scandinavian languages and English, but unlike Dutch and German. The syntax on the other hand is more like German syntax, though there are some differences.

Pconroy: Low Saxon is the kind of thing I was looking for. I'd never seen it mentioned, and I asked around a few times. Thanks.

I think that Frisian is a different case. It's supposed to be similiar to Old English (Anglo-Saxon), but because it's had an isolated separate development for 1000 years or so, it isn't much like modern English. Or so I've been told.

As with species, separation or isolation in valleys or on islands speeds differentiation. In China there's more language diversity in the more mountainous South, even though it's been more recently settled by Chinese (after 1 AD). Chinese is at least 1500 years older in the north, but Northern Mandarin is pretty uniform. (In part there's a second factor -- with no natural defenses, some areas of the North were decimated and resettled from time to time.)

Steve's right that academics don't study sports, so perhaps to get the point across to them in terms they'd understand, one could point out how similar it is to academia. In this corner, you have the Nativists; in the other, the Connectionists. Or the Rationalists vs the Empiricists. All the familiar tribe badges are there in who they cite in the bibliography, what catch-phrases they use, etc. If someone leaves one team for the other, he's booed as a traitor by his former colleagues -- not to be too ominous, but if Pinker goes more public w/ race & IQ, the chattering classes will soon complain that "I liked his earlier stuff, but he's crossed the line on this one."

I only know how this plays out in the linguistics / cognitive science corner of academia, but someone should do a larger study and write it up. It'd be humorous enough that academics would get the point and not look down their noses so much at the guy who goes to the sports bar after work. Tell me you all didn't feel a instinctual adrenaline rush when you read about Bruce Lahn's recent report, as if your team had just scored a touchdown.

I'm not sure how this relates, but from my anthropology (ie college)days I recall reading that many primitive tribes have a "dual" structure: the local group is divided into two halves on seemingly arbitrary though heritable grounds (heritable in the sense that you belong to the same half as your lineage). The two groups "compete" in certain cultural "games" and derive a kind of team identity as a result. Levi Strauss, if I remember correctly, used this recurrent cultural phenomenon as evidence for the "dual" structure of the human brain; it was a classicus locus back when structuralism was in vogue.

If there is indeed a naturally tendency towards dual cultural identities in human societies, I would speculate that Democrats and Republicans are good candidates for the same in contemporary American society. How else explain partisan fiends, who resemble nothing so much as rabid sports fans?

In my social circles Republicans are a rarity, even though many of my political views are close to, say, Steve Sailer's, who instinctively (it seems) identifies himself as a Republican. For most people most of the time,it seems, party identity trumps the ideas they believe in; except in extraordinary circumstances when a kind of cultural revolution occurs, and society re-divides along a different axis, as happened when the Whig and Democratic parties collapsed in the 1850s . . .

Or maybe this is just a bunch of bunkum.

Years ago I read that the dialectical differences across the Scotland/England border were markedly larger than at the Dutch/German border. The suggested explanation was that the British border was much older.

Scotland/England border were markedly larger than at the Dutch/German border.

note that the dialect of saxony is sharply differentiated from high german from what i gather.

Luke, I think that what you're talking about is called a "moiety".