Re: Khoisan is very old

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Apr 8, 2:51 pm, "mb" <azyth...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 7, 4:47 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Apr 7, 1:44 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"mb" <azyth...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
most
likely location for the homeland of a language family is the centre
of
the region where most branches were spoken when they first became
known
to history.

If any "linguists" do that, well then they are not doing it as
linguists, in which quality they would have absolutely no way of
supposing anything about so-called homelands, but as bad-ass amateur
mythologists (and should be properly berated for doing that).

Hmm. Last night googlegroups didn't tell me that this existed as a
"new posting." Evidently Mr. self-taught mb has never heard of Isidore
Dyen and the "least moves hypothesis," which has been a standard in
this question for welll over forty years.

Repeating because googroups eats posts:
Not 40 but a lot less, from the mid-80es

Sorry, I should have said "over 50 years."

Dyen, Isidore. "Language Distribution and Migration Theory." Language
32 (1956): 611-26.

--everyone heard of him and
his quite valuable stuff on *linguistic* distance with Kruskal, which
at least guaranteed passable mathematical treatment. As for
generalizing some very local characteristics of his own stuff

Very few of his examples are from Austronesian; he may not even have
begun the study of Austronesian yet by them.

I.Dyen, 1947. The Tagalog reflexes of Malayo-Polynesian *D. Language 23:
227-38
______, 1949, Malayo=Polynesian *Z. Language 25:534-40.
______, 1953a, Dempwolff's *R. Language 29: 359-66.
______, 1953b, The Proto-Malayo-Polynesian Laryngeals. William Dwight
Whitney Linguisic Series, Linguistic Society of America.

Your general point is right, though.

Ross Clark
.

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