Here's an interesting pickle about linguistic diversity: Jane Austen is roughly temporally equidistant between modern day and Shakespeare, yet our level of mutu

Here's an interesting pickle about linguistic diversity: Jane Austen is roughly temporally equidistant between modern day and Shakespeare, yet our level of mutual intelligibility is so much higher. What changed? Standardization (such as printing a standard dictionary) drastically reduced the rate at which languages evolved. And one major historical difference between China and India is a history of unification, starting with the Qin Dynasty, which introduced dictionaries, standardized weights and measures, a single currency, and standard widths of roads. They were brutal in their implementation and it ultimately led to popular revolt, but the standards stuck. However, that would not be the last attempt at unification. In China's history, there have been repeated efforts at unifying an empire, splitting into multiple nations, re-unification, rinse, repeat. Have you noticed that all the terms that translate into "ethnic Chinese" in English are named after dynasties? At one point in time, identifying oneself as "Han" was like saying "I'm an American." Sure, my ancestors are a mix of Wu and Manchurian, but now we're part of the Han Nation. Or a different mix of other ethnicities for the Tang Dynasty. To put it another way, let's say the EU became one nation that lasted at least a century. People who previously identified as "German" or "Italian" (or Anglos? Saxons? Celts?) all self-identify as European. Fast forward another century. The empire is expanding, and Central Asia is part of the equation now, so European is defined "as opposed to" another group, but another unification event happens, and now everyone on that continent refers to themselves as Eurasian. And sometimes, on the East Coast, there's an influx of Australian immigrants which adds up over the next century. How arbitrary is it to say that Eurasia is 95% Eurasian? As for visual phenotype difference between Northern and Southern Chinese being "minor" -- these differences look very pronounced to me. Yet I have trouble telling the difference between, say, British and German people, for instance. Maybe we're just trained on different data sets?