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People Speak Greek: There are many minorities that speak non-Chinese languages that belong neither to the Altaic nor the Sino-Tibetan group. These include the 14,000 Tajiks of southwestern Sinkiang, who speak an Iranic language of the Indo-European group, and the Wa and Puman people who speak an Austroasian language. The Wa and Puman are fierce tribesmen who live on both sides of the Yiinnan-Burma border and number only about 100,000. The Austronesian or Ma-layo-Polynesian language is also spoken in China by various groups, predominantly in Taiwan.
The Island of Cyprus is a British possession, most of whose people speak Greek and are ethnically as Greek as their mainland brothers in Athens or Corinth. Britain got Cyprus in 1878, not from Greece but from Ottoman Turkey, and made it a crown colony in 1925. The Greeks have been agitating for years for Enosis, meaning the union of Cyprus with the motherland, but to Britain this Mediterranean outpost, almost within gunshot of Asia Minor, is a vital link in defense. Whatever the island's ultimate political fate, it is, and will remain, a paradise of tourism matching even its sister island of Rhodes.
What defines a Greek historically is his language and the culture it expresses, not his race. Racially, the Greek people are a composite of the various peoples who have settled in the region over the centuries. That was probably true of the classical Greeks, who were separated from the original Greek-speaking inhabitants of the region by at least 1,000 years. It is certainly the case with the Greeks of today. |
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