From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 3467
Date: 2000-08-29
----- Original Message -----From: Mark OdegardSent: Tuesday, August 29, 2000 10:30 PMSubject: Re: [tied] Re: About methodology...Depends how quickly you want them to converge. Khoisan is probably such a conglomerate (Khoi + San, not to mention residual languages), Afroasiatic, Pama-Nyungan and some of the African and American phyla may be other cases. Take any "phylum", in fact: that's convergence between families rather than individual languages. The languages of the "Balkan League" (one of the most famous convergence areas) belong to a few different IE branches and include non-IE Turkish. They share several conspicuous typological traits, syntactic constructions, much vocabulary, etc.PiotrThe necessary historical and geographic conditions for two language families to converge into one are very difficult to establish or maintain. Japan, New Guinea, and perhaps the Caucasus would seem to be the only possible, presently-known candidates.