japanese, why are other asians dark skinned?

also, why do asians ahve a pictographic (i think thats right) alphabet, and the other side uses umm, i cant remember the words.

we use letters, they use pictures.

i think...

its weird, its like the brits and japanese are epitomes of being opposite cultures.

Asia is a pretty big geographic area with lots of ethnic groups, that some differ from others should come as no surprise to you if you understand the demographics at all.

Similarly, you would not be surprised that not all "North Americans" are of the same color.

As to the geographic distributions:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people#Dark_skin


As to alphabets, Asia is again much more diverse than you seem to understand and you seem to be limiting your discussion of "Asian" alphabets to East Asian alphabets from countries like China and Japan. Asia on the whole uses many different writing systems.

The "alphabets" (writing systems rather, as alphabets are a particular type of writing system with distinct letters for both consonants and vowels) you refer to are not pictographic, they aren't even true logographies but rather a mixture of a logographic and syllabary writing system.

For example, in Japan Kanji is a logography and Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries.

As to why they are used it's the same reason a ball is called a ball. A person, or persons, began to do so and there was never sufficient momentum toward anything else.

In other words there's no real "reason" and languages aren't planned. They happen. So someone started writing this way and it caught on, and so far the alternates haven't caught on enough to change this. And that's the answer to the "why" for almost any question about language ("why" used to drive me nuts when teaching languages, there's no answer to why at some level because all words are arbitrary descriptors at some point).

gracias.

one more Q, are the people in the americas derived from, uh russian area natives or asian area natives?

I suppose you are referring to Paleo-Indians, there is still not a lot of firm details on when the migrations happened and where exactly the people came from.

You are probably familiar with the Bering Strait theories which speculate that the peoples (in at least several different migrations, not one) came from North Asia (e.g. Siberia).

There are also theories of Atlantic crossings (e.g. the controversial Solutrean hypothesis) and evidence of non-Mongoloid migrations (e.g. Walter Neves work on the Luiza skeleton found in Brazil).

In short, nobody knows where all the different Native Americans came from, when they came and how they came.

i read that people from the netherlands area canoed across the ice in the north to the canadian area.

interesting.

It struck me that there has probablly been a "cultural or verbal" ancient history that outdates our own "history" as we think of it.

i still dont know why the US doesnt have the guigantic structures found in egypt,

i answered my own question.

i just realized its because if they DID build huge structures (i think the dravidians in india? im not sure, they made huge palaces out of wood i think) native american indians could have did the same.

or they didnt build anything at all, thats always a possibility.


Imagine what could have existed here before, built out of wood that we have no clue about. there are trees aplenty.

Wonders of the world wouldn't be so wonderful if they were to be found every few miles.

The Americas do, in fact, have archaeological treasures such as Machu Picchu or Teotihuacán (there are pyramids there).