With all due respect to Stephen Wurm, there
is only one good reason why a grouping of languages is called a "phylum": the
evidence of common descent is not sufficient to reconstruct the protosystem, the
intermediate stages corresponding to the nodes of the putative "family tree",
and the regular changes needed to derive the attested modern systems. Nobody
calls Austronesian or Semitic a phylum; the term is reserved for loose
and controversial groupings like Penutian, Khoisan or Niger-Congo (purists
might want to add Altaic and Afroasiatic).
NG holds more than 60 relatively
well-established "Papuan" (= non-Austronesian) families, though even this
division is tentative: much more work is required on documenting local languages
(some are still known from word-lists alone) and disentangling genetic and areal
similarities. Wurm and his ANU team did a vast amount of really
careful fieldwork and came up with a classificatory scheme that distinguishes as
many as six major phyla and leaves a residue of thirty-odd isolates
and languages grouped into itsy-bitsy families (2-8 members each). A Herculean
labour indeed, but scarcely one that solves all problems.
Trans-NG (more than 500 members),
Sepik-Ramu (ca. 100 members), Torricelli (ca. 50 members), etc., are typical
portmanteau groupings, based on a protocol of typological and lexical
agreements, not on a rigorous reconstruction. Archaeological evidence doesn't
mend matters, as an early expansion of agriculture need not have involved
speakers of just one language ("Proto-Trans-NG"). The phyla in question group
languages that are no doubt "related" in some way, but the nature of the
relationship is far from clear, as in the case of IE and Uralic.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2000 7:32 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: IE & linguistic complexity
John wrote
[on the impossibility of reconstructing large families in
NG]:
This is not really true. What is required however, is a very
intimate detailled knowledge of a large number of local languages. I
was able to follow "trees" linking Enga, Huli, Angal Heneng, Kewa,
Samberigi and Wiru languages in the Southern and Western Highlands
(Central West Highlands Family of the Trans Papuan Phylum of Stephen
Wurm), and Bosavi, Biami, Foi'i and Fasu languages of the Western
Family
of the same Phylum, in 1980-83.
Your explanation of "micro-explosions" is
very real, however, and
seems to have been linked with the introduction of
waves of new
cultivars and the effective exploitation of these. The
first one
mentioned above seems to have been due to the origins of new cold
resistent crops in the Enga Region of the Papua New Guinean
highlands.
The extent of the Trans Papua Phylum (and to related interior
languages in New Britain, New Ireland, and elsewhere) seems due to a
very early expansion of agriculture, extending outwards from New
Guinea
into the Solomon Islands to the East and into Timor and
Halmahera to the
west. This seems parallel (and even earlier) to the
Middle Eastern
Explosion associated with post glacial grain
production.