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Yes I understand all this. I was speaking to the specific, named examples. Curry, orange, candy, cowry, ginger, bamboo, cheroot, mango, mongoose, bandicoot, teak, the "jack" in "jackfruit".

As far as I'm concerned, creoles cut from the same cloth as Haitian and Tok Pisin/Bislama (having taken vocabulary from one source and grammar from another) are embryonic new language families.

No. No. English is directly descended from Proto-Germanic with substantial borrowings from Romance and other language families. It is unambiguously a Germanic language. Categorizing English as Romance based on lexical borrowings is as absurd as deeming it Afro-Asiatic due to the origins of...

D'aw shucks :p

Even with Shoshenq I's campaigns, Egypt was essentially broken as a power by that time frame in OTL anyway. Shoshenq didn't even control the whole country, despite his Levantine adventures. Without the campaigns, Judah probably does a bit better for a while, but it's likely going to be subsumed...

No incubating Neo-Vietnam? There are ~10 times as many Vietnamese as Japanese in France. Though admittedly they tend to be quite integrated, one could at least imagine a Nouveau Saïgon in Paris's orbit if the Japanese have a foot in the home islands.

Honestly, I don't believe you. I've seen you use that sort of language when talking about Islam and Arab culture way too frequently to buy that. I've never, for example, seen you use similar terms to describe the Romans or Greeks and how they assimilated many native populations under their...

That's a truly disgusting, chauvinistic, and laughably inaccurate way of describing everything from Tangiers to Ürümqi.

Let's say certain things go right and they experience a population boom, around the time of the first Adyghe kingdom ca. 400 BCE... One group of Adyghe/Circassians then moves out of the North Caucasus and onto the Pontic Steppe (the ethnogenesis of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may very well have...

Yeah, no... If you want to get THAT technical about it, they (the aristocratic explorer and sultan) would probably still be speaking Classical Arabic, and the only proper way to spell it would be الرحلة. When it comes to Romanization, pretty much anything is fair game as long as you're...

Most of the population ruled by the Avars was Slavic, so they would most likely be Slavicized (just like the Bulgars). The Slavs had a lot of assimilating inertia at this point in history, to boot. If the *SlAvars go Christian (which is likely), they'll probably gravitate towards...

Inuk (fillerrific)

That was probably my favorite single moment - Laila's silent joke about how "God does allow four", hearkening back to Paolo's only half-serious lament about being allowed only four. How times change... Especially given that Laila actually got what she wanted. I also really enjoyed the whole...

Probably an Andean civilization, like the Incas. They did a lot of construction using principles of tension, so potentially it's only a matter of time before someone realizes a tense string (of llama gut? - not sure what the best local substances would be) makes a sound when plucked, and decides...

An outside possibility: the Hittites. They were skilled at metallurgy (they were among the first to work iron), so if they stumble upon it they could make use of it pretty early (there's a thread going about gunpowder and bronze age tech. I'm not sure how advanced their alchemy was (if I recall...

300+ years of butterflies wreaking havoc between point A and point B. Quite possibly. And even if not, see above. ASB :p

I use Paint.net to organize dynastic family trees, but that can still get out of hand and probably isn't simpler (if perhaps more intuitive) than Wikipedia. Dynastic upheavals in OTL coincided with a decline in royal authority and in Egyptian political power (remember, this was the era when...

Mongolia Maxima, China-in-Exile, *Indonesia-wank, Interesting Africa/Americas/Europe... I like everything I see happening here.

Interesting. The butterflies spare Ugarit, but Hattusa still burns... I guess this means that Egypt and Assyria are now on a collision course to fill the power vacuum. Could Assyria try expanding into Anatolia? By this point they have a long history of trade with the region, going back 1,000...

There is a fundamental difference in the nature of colonialism between TTL and OTL, though. OTL was nakedly exploitative (with mission civilisatrice and white man's burden thrown in to obfuscate it); in TTL the whole enterprise is much more collaborative. In OTL, African nations had "modernity"...