If I get your point here amidst all the verbiage, Sean, the answer would be that this is merely a variant of the bloody horse

Not so. All I'm saying that whilst all music is human, none is Equine. All music is born of idiomatic tradition, community, culture & ethnicity but is ultimately about the individual mastery of that idiom. That all musical idioms are demonstrably & evidently unique is something else entirely. I suspect the same can be said of different languages - and (apologies to Mr Ed fans) horses don't speak either. I accept 'Folk Character' - in contrasting different approaches to even the same instrument (the violin playing of Jim Eldon, or the violin playing of Nigel Kennedy) I might admit that whilst both are a matter of aesthetical mastery, I'm more inclined to ascribe a greater 'human' intent to the former. But you get muso tedium in any music; to hell with slickness (but another reason I avoid diddley-dee).   

How we see the uniqueness of Word Musics comes down to two things I suppose, depending on your proclivities for nationalism and/or racism. I think it was Hamish Henderson who pointed out that before we can be truly National, we must first be truly International. I also think that lies at the heart of what Folk Roots is about. Music isn't quite so coded as language - I like watching foriegn films with subtitles, rather than dubbed, to get the cadences at least. Japanese cadences appeal to me in a way that French ones don't (though I love French rap); I love watching Icelandic sitcoms for the same reasons, just as I might react differently to (say) Iranian Classical music than I do Indian, if only because the Iranian modes & structures feel closer to home somehow, but I'm prepared to admit that's a personal thing entirely. I once was moved to tears by a recital of Chinese classical Guanzi music - an instrument I'd never heard before up until then but, for whatever reason, it went straight to the heart.