Milo asks:
"What could cause a periodic 4,000 year spin off of a new language off an old language stock?"The only thing I can speak to is Korean, mentioned at the end of the quote from the book... that was a purely nationalistic maneuver on the part of King Sejong - Koreans already had a spoken language, which incorporates a lot of structure from Chinese and Japanese - and strangely, is related to Finnish, although I don't remember how. This King fashioned a phonetic alphabet that's used to this day - all words are broken down into syllables, and the phonetic sounds of the syllables are written into syllabic blocks. I found it quite easy to learn to read Korean - I probably had it down after about 2 months there. Understanding the words I was reading was quite another matter, but at least I could tell a pharmacy from a whorehouse.
Another side-note on Korean: certain Chinese characters are still used in the written language, although I don't know what criteria they used for determining what stays and what goes. Korean is obviously easier to learn to read and write than Chinese ~ accounting for South Korea's preternaturally high literacy rate ~ but you won't see anything but the Chinese character to indicate "teahouse", for example. There are other concepts for which they only employ the Chinese character, but teahouse is the only one I remember...
