Re: Can relationships between languages be determined after 80,000 y

Excellent point.
There is also much more work to be done --hard
nitpicking work.
First --provide reconstructions for supposed
proto-languages.
Then fill in the gaps.
Has anyone checked out supposed substrate in Southern
Dravidian? (as mentioned in Wikipedia "Dravidian")
Has anyone looked at relic words and possible
substrate in Vedda? Supposedly there is a Vedda
dialect with its own peculiarities.On Metaverse the
Vedda versions of numbers have some type of marker.
Has anyone looked at possible substrate in
Austronesian and Austroasiatic?
If not, then it would be foolish to make an
Indo-Pacific pronouncement.
If you're saying Indo-Pacific exists, then there must
be some trace of common subtrate along the trajectory
between the Himalayas and Tasmania.
A problem --there aren't very many possible members
for IP: Kusunda, Koldo/Nihali, Andaman, Papuan,
Tasmanian, and most of those don't look promising or
don't have much to work on. Others have linked Kusunda
to Ainu and Austroasiatic --also on very slender
evidence. I think only about 20-25% of Koldo/Nihali is
non-IE/non-Dravidian/non Austroasiatic. No one has put
together a reconstruction of Andaman languages AFAIK.
I don't think anyone has yet untangled Papuan
languages. Tasmanian has next to nothing to work with
and much/most of what's there was collected by
non-linguists and much of that after people from the
various areas had been corralled together and formed a
pidgen. In any case, Tasmanian is more likely related
to whatever Australian language existed on the other
side of Bass Straight before the Pama-Nyungen
expansion.
The main problem --too many people want to invent
answers without doing hard work.
I agree with Piotr. But if you really really want to
try to demonstrate IP, concentrate on Papuan first,
then look at Andaman, then substrate in S and SE Asia,
Indonesia et al.
After all, IP is based on logic --to get from Africa
to New Guinea and beyond, humans had to pass through
India.




--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> On 2008-01-28 18:52, mkelkar2003 wrote:
>
> >
>

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001037.html

>
> The Andamanese languages were assigned to the
> Indo-Pacific superfamily
> by Joseph Greenberg (together with Tasmanian, for
> example). I, for one,
> find such classifications unacceptable. The
> Andamanese peoples have
> probably lived there for tens of thousands of years
> and speak languages
> belonging to at least two endemic families. Not all
> their pronoun
> systems are similar to that of Juwoi, so the
> argument involves some
> cherrypicking (BTW, Kusunda has <gina>, not <gida>
> for 'he', which makes
> the similarity to Juwoi kitE slightly less striking,
> and I'm sorry to
> report that the similarity does not extend to the
> plural).
>
> We have no proof that the Kusunda have lived just
> where they still live
> for time immemorial; their language may once have
> had relatives all over
> India. With all these reservation the idea that a
> small segment of the
> basic vocabulary, such as the pronoun system, can
> remain in existence
> for tens of millennia, is not absurd. I mentioned
> this very possibility
> a few days ago, commenting on the word-evolution
> study by Pagel et al.
> However, to DETERMINE relationships between distant
> languages which have
> pronoun systems that look as if they might be
> related one would have to
> look for further matches following the same pattern.
> After all, striking
> as the similarity is, it MAY be accidental. A
> correspondence like tui :
> tsi, gen. tii-ye : tsi-yi seems to indicate that
> both languages are
> incredibly conservative -- almost no change over
> millennia upon
> millennia. It looks closer than the agreement
> between, say, Greek and
> Gothic! If so, cognates should be very easy to find,
> and if they haven't
> been found outside the pronoun system -- well, we
> may be dealing with
> another BD/BD case (barely detectable but beyond
> demonstration), or
> merely a ghost relationship.
>
> Piotr
>
>

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