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

On 2008-02-01 21:34, Rick McCallister wrote:

> Afro-Asiatic goes back beyond 7,000 years --I've seen claims that
> take it back to 11,000 years ago I read something recently about
> Australian languages that makes claims about an Australian language
> family, which obstensibly goes back 50,000 years or so.

Humans have been around for more than that, but it doesn't mean that the
_last_ common ancestor of the Australian languages is as old as the
population of Australia. On the other hand, there may have been any
number of more recent intrusions bringing new languages into the continent.

Robert M. W. Dixon, once an ardent supporter of a pan-Australian family,
now not only denies the possibility of reconstructing Proto-Australian,
but is even sceptical about the status of Pama-Nyungan as a family (as
opposed to a network of tiny families within a convergence area).

> An obvious problem is that Pama Nyungan seems to have spread across
> the landscape around 4-6,000 years ago. If Sanskrit, Ancient Greek
> and Latin had not been documented, IE would have been figured out,
> although it might look different --perhaps even closer to reality,
> given that the IE pioneers tended to give us a Greek-Sanskrit creole
> and call it IE

Yes, the correspondences are too many and too conspicuous to be missed.