--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "John <jdcroft@...>"
<jdcroft@...> wrote:

> Regarding Aboriginal languages too, it would seem that there are
> other factors involved as well.
>
> In the Pama-Nyungan family the attempts to construct "tree" have
> consistently proven to be impossible. Not only does one get a
> situation where language borrowing is an "art", and the idea

of "song-

> lines" means that many words tend to travel up and down songlines

at

> times when groups come to "sing country". A song-line (the path
> taken by a cultural hero of the "dreaming" in which the geography

of

> landscape gets sung into being) may travel across 5-6 different
> languages - as neighbouring groups may share a story, but not the
> language it is carried in. And in which no language is dominant to
> any other. With words coming from multiple directions, the problem
> of English is magnified. (For example imagine that rather than
> Norman French Romance words entering a language that was basically
> Germanic Anglo-Saxon that it had been the case of Anglo-Saxon words
> fusing with a language that was basically Norman French. Then
> consider a third case in which 50% of the language was Norman

French

> and 50% of the language was Anglo-Saxon and you begin to get close

to

> the situation. (This 50:50 breakdown is close to the situation one
> finds with Japanese - a language that seems to be Altaic or
> Austronesian depending upon at what one looks!)
>
> Now magnify this by 1000%, so much so that one can no longer
> discriminate any which one was the parent language and which the
> external influences - and you have the linguistic situation in
> Australia.
>
> Regards
>
> John

If one regards creating song lines as the Aboriginal equivalent as
surveying, it's interesting (I think) that many of the putative
loanwords from Sundalandish I put on my site, eg.

http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Hrg.html
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/md.html

seem to have to do with surveying; note the Benveniste quote in the
former. Also, these loanwords are a pain in the way you describe;
they seem to follow no rules.
I note that this situation applies to Pama-Nyungan, which is a late
intrusion into Australia?

Torsten