Re: Languages of Africa

From: Anti-imperialist (ai_at_anti-imperialist.net)
Date: 09/21/04 

Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 14:04:02 -0700

"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
>
> Jacques Guy wrote:
> >
> > Anti-imperialist wrote:
> >
> > > "The greatest linguistic diversity appears to be in Africa.
> >
> > Papua-New Guinea, moron.
>
> Did you manage to miss "Indo-Pacific"?
>
> That was G's proposal that disappeared with nary a trace, to unite all
> of NAN PNG plus Tasmanian and Andamanese.

Not really, Wurm (1971) agreed with about 70% of it. Without a trace,
eh?

http://ehl.santafe.edu/indopac.htm

Taxonomy and Genetic Relationships Between Indo-Pacific Languages

Timothy Usher, Santa Fe Institute

The main object of this project is a better historical understanding of
the relations between the vast language family of Indo-Pacific
languages. Tim Usher has put together (in the form of several large
electronic spreadsheets) an impressive collection of material from most
of these languages, sufficient for a serious historic analysis of these
relations.

So far, he has managed to resolve the consonantal correspondences of the
Halmaheran, South Bird’s Head, West Bomberai, Nimboran and Upper Tami
groups and made substantial progress on the Timor-Alor-Pantar, Bird’s
Head, East Bird’s Head, Mairasi-Tanah Merah, Kwerba, Tor, Pauwasi and
Senagi groups. This has resulted in the generation of citable protoforms
along with the resolution of a number of low-level classification issues
and the correction of erroneous dialect assignations found in the
literature.

Altogether, these groups comprise the major western peninsulas of Irian
Jaya (Bird’s Head, Bomberai) and the northern half of mainland Irian
Jaya, and include some of the families whose classifications are most
disputed (to the extent there has been a debate at all). Tim has
developed a workflow system which exploit his pre-existing lexical
databases with maximal efficiency, greatly reducing the time needed to
discern and support proposed correspondences. The immediate goal of the
project is to feasibly envision a preliminary reconstruction of all New
Guinean families for which there is sufficient data. As correspondences
are resolved and protoforms discovered, they are checked against Tim's
vast lists of Greenberg-style comparisons in order to confirm or falsify
previously proposed connections and to bring outcomparisons to bear on
family-level issues. Slowly but surely, these lists are taking on the
manner and reliability of an etymological dictionary, the ultimate goal
of this project. This improved dataset will provide the basis for the
definitive resolution of Indo-Pacific taxonomy at the highest levels, as
well as providing ample source material for the reconstruction of the
most ancient proto-languages.

Thought you said "it disappeared without a trace"? :P 

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