Re: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.

----- Original Message -----

From: John Croft

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 6:50 AM

Subject: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.

>>Robert Dixon (_The Rise and Fall of Languages_, 1997) argues that it's not a family at all, but the result of tens of millennia of areal diffusion in Australia's
"tangled bush".

John asked: >Do you have further bibliographic details for Dixon

 

Robert Dixon. 1997. The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: CUP. Dixon, as you surely know, is one of the very best Australianists, with lots of field experience, and his opinions are certainly worth reading. Note that the experts who divide Papuan, African, Native American, etc., languages into "phyla", don't call those taxa "families". This is because they themselves realise that the decisive judgement about their affinities cannot be pronounced yet and the genetic units they propose are not generally agreed to exist. "Phylum" is not a taxon higher than a family but a conventional shorthand for "proposed but not demonstrated distant linguistic relationship". In many cases the vague affinity which makes people construct phyla may be due to lateral influence rather than common descent.

 

Piotr