--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "sreenathan.ansi"
<sreenathan.ansi@...> wrote:
> I am told that there [are] enough cognates [that] were observed
> between Australian aboriginal languages and Dravidian. I don't
> have direct access to such a database. But I found it is
> interesting.
Although it is near certain that the Australian aborigines have
lived in a virtual isolation from the rest of humankind for more
than 50,000 years, some lexical relics of the languages their
progenitors spoke at the time they bid farewell to the groups who
stayed back in South Asia might have survived for 50,000+ years.
In the early 20th century some pioneers of long-range comparative
linguistics such as, for instance, the Italian Alfredo Trombetti,
made some attempts at systematically comparing Australian, Papuan
and Dravidian word sets in order to detect possible cognates.
Trombetti made some promising finds, but his results were never
accepted by mainstream linguists. His data have, however, been
recently re-examined by exponents of a new generation of long-range
comparative linguists who have added on many new lexical comparisons
and have extended their analysis to Andamanese languages (related to
Papuan languages according to Joseph Greenberg and his followers
such as Merrit Ruhlen).
In the latest issue of _Mother Tongue_, the yearly periodical of the
Association for the Study of Languages in Prehistory (ASLIP), Vaclav
Blaz^ek proposes a re-assessment of all these linguistic data. His
article contains tens and tens of comparisons between reconstructed
Proto-Dravidian words and attested Australian, Papuan and Andamanese
words. (N.B. Papuan and Andamanese languages were grouped by
Greenberg's school in a new and controversial language super-phylum
called Indo-Pacific, which in their views is distantly related to
the far less controversial Australian language super-phylum.) The
similarities are quite impressive (I have read the article and can
scan it and post it to the List if requested). What Blaz^ek proposes
is that these lexical similarities may indicate not a common origin
of Australian and Dravidian, but rather the persistence for 50,000+
years, in both Australia and South Asia, of lexical roots derived
from words that belonged to the common languages spoken in South
Asia 50,000+ yaers ago, when the progenitors of the Australian
aborigines started to migrate towards Australia (which they reached
some thousands of years later). This does not amount to saying that
Dravidian languages were spoken in South Asia 50,000 years ago; more
simply, the words in question might have entered the Proto-Dravidian
vocabulary at the time the speakers of that language(s) migrated to
South Asia (where some pre-existing languages, now extinct, might
have preserved till then the lexical roots that Blaz^ek considers to
be shared by both Dravidian and Australian).
Regards,
Francesco