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

Wikipedia "Australian languages (vel sim)" mentioned
Dixon but stated that no one else supports his view.
My suspicion is that Pama-Nyungan probably spread with
the introduction of new technology around 4-6,000
years ago and its ancestor may an Australian language
whose speakers picked up new technology through trade
or oursiders whose language spread. Someone with more
knowledge than me will have to answer that.
OTOH, I see the attraction of Dixon's idea --Australia
is flat and its ethnic groups were nomadic and
relatively fluid. So the situation may be similar to
that of Altaic, where a sprachbund is so strong that
it may obliterate traces of genetic relationships


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

> 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.
>
>

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