Re: Languages of Africa

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 09/21/04 

Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 22:26:17 GMT

Anti-imperialist wrote:
>
> "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

Ruhlen hoodwinked Gell-Mann's Santa Fe Institute into sponsoring a
conference on this sort of thing a few years ago. The participants were
physicists and Ruhlenian crackpots.
 
> 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.

A spread*** with data from something like a thousand languages, for
most of which virtually no usable data are available? That must be
really something!

> 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

Of course you didn't put a date on this. Nor a title on Wurm 1971, which
was published _before_ G's IP. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net