Re: dating of aryans

At 7:43:15 PM on Thursday, April 10, 2008,
david_russell_watson wrote:

[...]

> I mainly had in mind some of the languages of New Guinea,
> a Papuan language named Imas being the only one for which
> I can recall any detail now. It has a very complex verbal
> system, and many more noun classes than the three genders
> we're used to.

> I don't know where I first read about Imas, though, and I
> couldn't find any mention of it searching on Google today
> either.

Try Yimas. Wikipedia says:

The Yimas language is spoken by the Yimas people of Papua
New Guinea. It is a polysynthetic language with (somewhat)
free word order. It is an ergative-absolutive language
morphologically but not syntactically, although it has
several other case-like relations encoded on its verbs. It
has over 9 classes (genders) of nouns, and a unique number
system.

Brian