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The Indo-Pacific Hypothesis
... Three applications of mass comparison have been made by Greenberg. The first, Greenberg (1963), gave a classification of African languages. This classification, at least in its broad outlines, has been accepted by Africanist historical linguists. ...
... This classification has not been generally accepted and has provoked a torrent of criticism of the method (see §4.1 below). In between these two applications came Greenberg's (1971), which applied the method to the languages of the Andaman Islands, the Papuan languages, and the Tasmanian dialects, and purported to identify an 'Indo-Pacific' group including all of these (but omitting mainland Australian languages). I will not consider Greenberg's findings here, as his approach displays the shortcomings outlined in the previous paragraph. ...
... However, these could be chance resemblances. Readers may be tempted to equate the proposal that Papuan languages have a common source with Greenberg's (1971) Indo-Pacific hypothesis. But my proposal is part of a tentative application of Step 1 of the comparative method ( §2.1): 'Determine on the strength of diagnostic evidence that a set of languages are genetically related'; that is, I am offering diagnostic evidence of a family, and weak evidence at that. ...
... Meanwhile more speculative efforts to join the known language families into larger macrofamilies and super-macrofamilies continue unabated. Candidates (some of them overlapping) include Almosan and the larger Amerind (Greenberg 1987), Altaic and the larger Ural-Altaic (Starostin, Dybo, and Mudrak 2003), Indo-Uralic and the larger Nostratic (Bomhard 2008), Austric (Reid 2005), Eurasiatic (Greenberg 2000), and Indo-Pacific (Greenberg 1971, criticized in Pawley 2009). Hypotheses of remote genetic relationship can never be definitively refuted, but none of the above are supported by solid linguistic evidence (Campbell and Poser 2008), nor, for the most part, do they conform with results of population genetics (Heggarty 2012). ...
... But this is like classical Chinese and classical Javanese (Corbett 2000: 50-51), languages which were hardly limited to dyadic communication. 32 19th century CPE texts (Li, Matthews, & Smith 2005) present a more variable and probably more realistic picture, with occasional examples of 'we' (e.g. we tomorrow makee move 'we move tomorrow'), 'they', and English-type plural nouns. ...
... 33 Here again the first person pronoun patterns 31 The rare "properties" of pidgins and artificial languages might be the absence of exceptions and the lack of certain expressive resources. 32 Also reportedly Mura Pirahã. The obsolete conjecture by Forchheimer (1953) that every language has a separate form for 1Pl "we" has long been known to be false. ...
... The remaining four languages, Bilua, Touo, Lavukaleve and Savosavo, are called Papuan, a non-genetic label used for the non-Austronesian indigenous languages of the New Guinea continent and surrounding areas. Evidence for genealogical grouping including the four Papuan languages of the Central Solomon Islands group has been proposed on typological as well as on morphological/lexical grounds (Codrington 1885, Schmidt 1902, Ray 1926, 1928, Lanyon-Orgill 1953, Wurm 1972, Todd 1975, Greenberg 1971), but no comparative method reconstruction of a Proto-Central Solomons group has ever been published. The most recent inquiries into the relatedness of the Central Solomons Papuan languages have been carried out in the structural phylogenetics framework (Dunn et al. 2005, 2008, Dunn 2009), which uses structural features to investigate potential genealogical relationships between these languages. ...
... We demonstrate that the lexical similarities between the Central Solomons Papuan languages appear superficially to be significant, but that the statistical effect shrinks or disappears when probable Oceanic loanwords are removed. A particular point of reference here is Greenberg's Indo-Pacific Hypothesis (Greenberg 1971), which includes a Central Solomons group, embedded within an East Papuan group. We demonstrate that the positive identification produced by Greenberg's methodology is an artefact of Papuan -Austronesian language contact. ...
... This binary feature system was devised following Lass (1984). However, with the relatively small set of canonical matches given in Greenberg (1971) this kind of system is unnecessarily elaborate. ...
In the absence of comparative method reconstruction, high rate of lexical cognate candidates is often used as evidence for relationships between languages. This paper uses the Oswalt Monte Carlo Shift test (a variant of Oswalt 1970) to explore the statistical basis of the claim that the four Papuan languages of the Solomon Islands have greater than chance levels of lexical similarity. The results of this test initially appear to show that the lexical similarities between the Central Solomons Papuan languages are statistically significant, but the effect disappears when known Oceanic loanwords are removed. The Oswalt Monte Carlo test is a useful technique to test a claim of greater than chance similarity between any two word lists — with the proviso that undetected loanwords strongly increase the chance of spurious identification.
... The most comprehensive 'tree' of Andamanese languages is given in Figure 5; Source: Manoharan (1983) Andamanese plays a key role in Greenberg's (1971) 'Indo-Pacific' hypothesis, rejected by most scholars, which links together Andamanese, Papuan and Tasmanian and gives a name to this culture-historical area. This hypothesis, originating with Gatti (1906-9), has a crypto-racial element since it links together the curlyhaired 'Negrito' populations of the Indo-Pacific region. ...
... The most significant overviews of Papuan are Wurm (1975Wurm ( , 1982, Foley (1986) and Pawley et al. (2005). Papuan is best treated as a 'geographical' term, and few writers apart from Greenberg (1971) have been willing to treat these languages as all related. However, a hypothesis that conjoins a large number of Papuan languages, the Trans New-Guinea phylum (TNGP), has recently received new support. ...
... The 'Indo-Pacific' hypothesis of Joseph Greenberg (1971) has not found favour with linguists, it may be true in some historical sense. The Tasmanians may represent a relic of the first wave of the peopling of Australia, which was rapidly eliminated by a second wave, a movement of Mongoloids, which assimilated and replaced much of the 'Papuan' population on the mainland. ...
... All these hypotheses, so called language macrofamilies, are highly controversial. While Greenberg's classification of African languages (Greenberg 1963) remains quite popular in Africanists and non-linguistic circles despite the lack of historical-comparative evidence (Güldemann 2018; and see Güldemann this volume), other language macrofamilies such as Eurasiatic/Nostratic (Bomhard and Kerns 1994;Greenberg 2000Greenberg , 2002, Indo-Pacific (Greenberg 1971), and Amerind (Greenberg 1987) are almost universally viewed as contentious or discredited. ...
... This is consistent with previous findings that Andamanese represent a basal, isolated lineage, with genetic affinities to populations of Sahul and Melanesia, particularly to the Papuans (Aghakhanian et al. 2015). Linguistic affinities of Andamanese to Papuans were proposed early by Greenberg (1971) but continue to remain controversial (Reesink, Singer, and Dunn 2009). ...
Over the past three decades, modern human origins and dispersal have been investigated using phylogenetic analyses of genetic and linguistic data. As a result, a large body of phylogenetic hypotheses is available for formal meta-analysis. Here we present a “matrix representation with parsimony” (MRP) supertree of 1,962 human populations, based on 388 genetic and linguistic phylogenies. This supertree represents a comprehensive global phylogeny of extant human populations, covering all world regions and ~100 language families (including isolates). It is in near-perfect agreement with phylogeny based on supermatrix (concatenation) analysis, showing that these conceptually different approaches to phylogenetic inference tend to produce a similar phylogenetic pattern of global human population. Although human population history is certainly not purely tree-like, there is an underlying hierarchical structure (especially at deeper levels) that can be hypothesized as phylogeny. However, the question of large-scale coevolution between genes and languages must be reassessed critically since most of the well-substantiated language families do not form genetically consistent groups. A tree-like model of human population history provides a useful tool for assessing the congruence and conflict between genetic and linguistic data and for studying cultural evolution.
... There are, however, no traces of this early Sunda population (independent of whether Multiregional or Single Origin models are assumed, the Southeast Asian population immediately ancestral to Australians remains unknown), its existence being inferred on biogeographical grounds, shared dental similarities between Southeast Asians and Australians (T. Hanihara, 1992a;Turner, 19921, and linguistic affinities between Southeast Asian "Negritos" and Melanesian groups (speakers of Indo-Pacific, non-Austronesian, languages; Greenberg, 1971). There are several archaeological sites from 40 ka that indicate a widespread late Pleistocene occupation of the Sunda landmass [-37 ka at Long Rongrien, Thailand (Anderson, 1987),31 ka at Lean Burung 2 cave, Sulawesi (Glover, 1981), 31 ka at Kota Tampan in peninsular Malaysia (Zuraina and Tija, 19881, 28 ka at Ting Kayum, island Malaysia (Bellwood and Koon, 1988), 28 ka a t Pilanduk cave (Fox, 19781, c. 25 ka at Da-phuk, Vietnam, 25 ka at Sai-vok, Thailand, and 14 ka at Uai Bob0 2 cave, Timor (Glover, 1987;Glover and Presland, 1985), and 23-18 ka at the sites of Mai Da Ngubm, Mai Da Dieu, Ong Quyen and Xom Trai, Vietnam (Ha Va Tan, 1980;Hoang Xukn Chinh, 199111. ...
... Hanihara, 1990aHanihara, ,b,c, 1991aHanihara, ,b,c, 1992aOmoto, 1984). Nevertheless, they share a linguistic complex with Melanesian populations (Greenberg, 1971). ...
The study of modern human origins and the study of the origins of modern human diversity are intimately linked. The evolutionary models employed have implications both for interpreting the significance of morphological variation and evolutionary trends, and in terms of the processes that gave rise to such variation. Although controversial, available evidence is taken to indicate a single, recent origin of modern humans.
This paper explores the process of differentiation of modern populations in Asia and argues for morphological discontinuities in the late Pleistocene populations in the region. The intensely studied population history of Eastern Asia suggests that the evolution of the Mongoloid population complex may result from a process of differentiations, expansions, and dispersals, resulting in the development of regional morphological patterns. The relatively late appearance of regional morphological differentiation, especially in Northeast Asia, opens the possibility of the earliest Amerindians not being a typical “Mongoloid” population.
A more generalized Mongoloid morphology has been described for both North and South American Paleoindian remains. In this paper, the morphology of a robust, not typically Mongoloid, population in South America is investigated, and its implications for the homogeneity of Amerindians discussed. Since a derived, typically Mongoloid morphology cannot be attributed to the early Amerindian and Fueguian-Patagonian populations, it is argued either that the sinodont dental pattern was acquired in parallel in Asia and the Americas or that at least two migratory waves ancestral to Amerinds took place.
... Such tests either act bilaterally, i.e., on a pair of languages or proto-languages, or multilaterally on a group of languages. Among these, the multilateral comparison, which was made famous by Greenberg (1963Greenberg ( , 1971Greenberg ( , 1987Greenberg ( , 2000 in traditional historical linguistics, has been a subject of much criticism (Poser and Campbell, 2008). Hence, the preferred way of comparing two language families has been to compare their reconstructed proto-forms bilaterally. ...
... Since the first explanation is the most reasonable one, pronouns seem to be good evidence to take into consideration (Ross, 2005). Ross is not the first person who used pronouns for grouping languages; Greenberg (1971) used them before. However, there is a significant difference between the two methodologies. ...
في علم اللغة، يستخدم المنهج المقارن (comparative method) لمعرفة العلاقات التاريخية بين اللغات المختلفة وردها للغة واحدة، تُسمى عادة باللغة الأم. وقد أثبت هذا المنهج دقة ونجاحا في الكثير من الأحيان لا سيما في ردّ اللغات الهندية الأوربية لأصلها وجمعها تحت مظلة عائلة واحدة. لكن يبدو أن هذا المنهج لا يمكن تطبيقه على بعض اللغات، وفي هذا البحث، يعرض الباحث لمنهج اللسانيات المقارنة أولا ثم يوضح آلية العمل به وكيفية تطبيقه ثم يناقش بعض الأمثلة لشرح كيف أن هذا المنهج غير قابل للتطبيق في بعض الحالات، وأخيرا يختتم البحث بالحديث عن علم اللغة التقابلي وشرح منهجه، وكيف يمكن الإفادة من هذا المنهج للتوصل إلى العلاقات التاريخية بين اللغات المختلفة التي لا يمكن استخدام المنهج المقارن معها، وتأكيد العلاقات التاريخية بين اللغات التي سبق أن تم استخدامه معها.
... According to Carneiro, many of the traits that Murdock used as indicators of probable common origin are frequently found together because they belong together on the scale of cultural evolution, not just in Africa but all over the world (1973: 844-845). This raises the possibility that some of the traits used by linguists, such as Greenberg (1971a), to justify such groupings as the Indo-Pacific super-phylum might be of a similar sort, fairly common to languages at particular stages of cultural development. ...
... The history of the north Halmahera languages is less clear, but they are related to languages of the Bird's Head (Voorhoeve 1987). Papuan languages otherwise manifest no known relationship with any language outside Near Oceania (despite Greenberg's 1971 proposed Indo-Pacific grouping). ...
The Language of Hunter-Gatherers - edited by Tom Güldemann February 2020
... The families of insects were present on carcasses in both seasons spring and summer, but with different seasonal faunal composition and played an important role in the decomposition of rabbit carcasses. Only the families Calliphoridae, Sarcophagidae and Muscidae belong to the Diptera (28) and the families Dermestidae, Cleridae, Silphidae and Histeridae (29,30) belong to the Coleoptera are the most important to be used in forensic entomology. These species of insects don't visit carcass at the same time but in 'sequential waves' (31). ...
... Suggestions about the wider relationships of Papuan and Australian lan- guages have not been lacking, but given the long periods of time involved, most of these can remain no more than suggestions. Greenberg's (1971) Indo-Pacific Hypothesis attempts to link Papuan languages with those of Tasmania (but not mainland Australia) and of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. Greenberg speculated that Australian languages are related to the Dravidian languages of South India. ...
... Merging Kusunda, a language isolate in Nepal, Andamanese, such as Aka-Jeru, non-Austronesian Melanesian, Papuan Aboriginal, and now extinct Tasmanian languages into the hypothetical Indo-Pacific superfamily has been rejected by mainstream linguistics, although it was acknowledged for partially contributing to the establishment of the currently accepted Trans-New Guinea family (Wurm 1982). However, its apologists argue that its extraordinary oldness of up to 55,000 years and the subsequent divisions to the mutually remote places are the main cases of the obscurity of their common origin, which, nevertheless, may be demonstrated on very fundamental levels (Greenberg 1971, Ruhlen 1994, Whitehouse et al. 2004). The debate pro et contra the existence of the Indo-Pacific family and its structure is still going on, addressing not only linguists, but also anthropologists and archaeologists (Clark et al. 2017). ...
Lexicon of Pulse Crops integrates botanical and linguistic data to analyze and interpret the grain legume significance from the earliest archaeological and written records until the present day. Aimed at both agronomic and linguistic research communities, this book presents a database containing 9,500 common names in more than 900 languages and dialects of all ethnolinguistic families, denoting more than 1,100 botanical taxa of 14 selected pulse crop genera and species.
The book begins with overviews of the world’s economically most important grain legume crops and their uncultivated relatives, as well as the world’s language families with their inner structure, including both extinct and living members. The main section of the text presents 14 specialized book chapters covering Arachis, Cajanus, Cicer, Ervum, Faba, Glycine, Lablab, Lathyrus, Lens, Lupinus, Phaseolus, Pisum, Vicia, and Vigna. They provide the reader with extensive lists of the botanically accepted species and subtaxa and surveys lexicological abundance in all world’s ethnolinguistic families, comprising extinct and living as well as natural and constructed languages, while the vernacular names for the most significant taxa are presented in comprehensive tables. Each of these chapters also presents the existing etymologies and novel approaches to deciphering the origins of common names, accompanied by one original colour plate depicting possible root evolutions in the form of corresponding pulse crop plants.
Other details may be found at the official book web page, https://www.crcpress.com/Lexicon-of-Pulse-Crops/Mikic/p/book/9781138089433.
... Some called this assumption the 'Pan-Negrito Theory' or 'Indo-Pacific'. The late Joseph Greenberg (1971) revitalised the idea, and his pupil Merritt Ruhlen and three colleagues have recently attempted to include the Kusunda language into Indo-Pacific, viz. Whitehouse et al. (2004). ...
... Papuan languages Estimates run to as many as a thousand languages in an area about a quarter of the size of India, making New Guinea the most linguistically diverse region in the world (Foley 2000: 357). Major groupings have been proposed by Greenberg (1971), Wurm (1982, and Ross (2005). Greenberg put all the languages into a single family and included some others from outside New Guinea, but the evidence for this has not generally been deemed credible. ...
About 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today. The actual number depends on where the line is drawn between language and dialect—an arbitrary decision because languages are always in flux. But specialists applying a reasonably uniform criterion across the globe count well over 2,000 languages in Asia and Africa, while Europe has just shy of 300. In between are the Pacific region, with over 1,300 languages, and the Americas, with just over 1,000. Languages spoken natively by over a million speakers number around 250, but the vast majority have very few speakers. Something like half are thought likely to disappear over the next few decades, as speakers of endangered languages turn to more widely spoken ones.
... The families of insects were present on carcasses in both seasons spring and summer, but with different seasonal faunal composition and played an important role in the decomposition of rabbit carcasses. Only the families Calliphoridae, Sarcophagidae and Muscidae belong to the Diptera (28) and the families Dermestidae, Cleridae, Silphidae and Histeridae (29,30) belong to the Coleoptera are the most important to be used in forensic entomology. These species of insects don't visit carcass at the same time but in 'sequential waves' (31). ...
Forensic entomology is the application and study of insect biology to medico-legal matters. This study was conducted to gather database information about forensically important insects and their succession on decomposing exposed rabbit carcasses at rural area of An-Najaf province-Iraq during two seasons spring and summer of year 2014. Ten species from 7 families under 3 orders were successfully identified during the study period, these orders were Diptera, Coleoptera and Hymenoptera. The most important families of Diptera to breed on carcass were Calliphoridae such as Calliphora vicina, Chrysomya megacephala, Chrysomya albiceps, Lucilia sericata, and Sarcophagidae such as Sarcophaga africa. Dermestidae was most important families of Coleoptera such as Dermestes maculatus. All of these species can used as forensic indicators to estimate the PMI. The majority of the collected species were abundant during Spring than Summer. The most important species with respect to abundance and frequency were C.vicina, Chrysomya albiceps and Sarcophaga africa. Four stages of decomposition were observed (fresh, bloated, decay and dry stage). The duration of it varies with temperature and relative humidity of each season. The total period of decomposition of carcasses was 21 days in Spring, while reached 12 days in Summer. There was interaction between decomposition stages of carcasses and colonization by insects species arriving to the carcass. The succession patterns of insect on exposed carcasses occurred in a predictable sequence that varied across seasons. Carcasses placed in spring attracted a more diverse assemblage of insects than Summer-placed carcass. Members of Calliphoridae-Calliphora vicina were the first dipterans colonizers and breed on a carcass in Spring, While the Chrysomya albiceps was the first colonizer during Summer. The second wave of insects were members of Coleoptera:Dermestes maculatus. Adults of Cataglyphis sp. continued in appeared during two seasons from the advanced stage to the end of later stages.
... This survey has shown no more than a hint of the directions in which such explorations could grow. Notes 1 An 'Indo-Pacific' phylum has also been proposed by Greenberg (1971), on the basis of large scale multilateral lexical comparisons, that includes the Papuan languages of the Papua-New Guinea/Irian Jaya mainland, and islands of western Melanesia and eastern Indonesia, as well as the languages of the Andaman Islands, west of lower Thailand. If this grouping is plausible, the Australian, Papuan and Andaman languages may represent a linguistic macro-phylum that once occupied the extended land masses of southern south-east Asia and Australia in the late Pleistocene ice-age, before the southward migrations of Austronesian speakers. ...
This chapter looks at resources for meaning in the language of the Anangu people of Australia’s Western Desert, exemplified with the dialect Pitjantjatjara. I will attempt to outline some of the semantic motifs with which Pitjantjatjara speakers enact their culture as social discourse. In order to do so I have endeavoured as far as possible to exemplify the range of resources available in each functional region of the grammar with whole texts that evoke the social contexts in which they were spoken.
... The forefather of Indo-Pacific Jonathan Morris São Paulo, Brazil The work of the Italian linguists Alfredo Trombetti and Riccardo Gatti on their hypothesis of genetic relationship between the languages of the Andaman Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, and the Dravidian languages is discussed in detail. It is shown that Trombetti and Gatti had formulated a coherent precursor of the "Indo-Pacific" hypothesis (Greenberg 1971) by 1906. ) deal with the subject (see Morris 2006), this is no easy task. These few pages nevertheless contain many references to another earlier work by Riccardo Gatti (1906Gatti ( -1909 ...
Compiled in honor and celebration of veteran anthropologist Harold C. Fleming, this book contains 23 articles by anthropologists (in the general sense) from the four main disciplines of prehistory: archaeology, biogenetics, paleoanthropology, and genetic (historical) linguistics. Because of Professor Fleming's major focus on language - he founded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and the journal Mother Tongue - the content of the book is heavily tilted toward the study of human language, its origins, historical development, and taxonomy. Because of Fleming's extensive field experience in Africa some of the articles deal with African topics. This volume is intended to exemplify the principle, in the words of Fleming himself, that each of the four disciplines is enriched when it combines with any one of the other four. The authors are representative of the cutting edge of their respective fields, and this book is unusual in including contributions from a wide range of anthropological fields rather than concentrating in any one of them.
... The forefather of Indo-Pacific Jonathan Morris São Paulo, Brazil The work of the Italian linguists Alfredo Trombetti and Riccardo Gatti on their hypothesis of genetic relationship between the languages of the Andaman Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, and the Dravidian languages is discussed in detail. It is shown that Trombetti and Gatti had formulated a coherent precursor of the "Indo-Pacific" hypothesis (Greenberg 1971) by 1906. ) deal with the subject (see Morris 2006), this is no easy task. These few pages nevertheless contain many references to another earlier work by Riccardo Gatti (1906Gatti ( -1909 ...
The taxonomy of the Omotic language family is thoroughly analyzed. The hypotheses of "West Cushitic" vs. a "Cushomotic" super-branch, vs. separating Omotic as the sixth branch of Afroasiatic (Fleming) are compared. Earlier classifications of the Omotic family are presented, followed by the author's version based on S.A. Starostin's variant of glottochronology. According to the latter the North/South Omotic disintegration can be dated to the beginning of the 5th mill. BC. Borrowings can be distinguished from inherited lexicon, though often one can only speculate on the direction of borrowing. Nilo-Saharan parallels were also taken into account. The numbers of cognates common to Omotic and other Cushitic branches on the one hand are contrasted with those common to Omotic and the other Afroasiatic families on the other. It seems most natural to see in Omotic an independent member of the Afroasiatic macro-phylum. 1. Internal classification 2. Phonetic correspondences 3. Basic lexicon 4. Etymological comments
... Moreover, even in human genetic research, Chen et al. (1995) find no correlation between genes and the higherorder macro-families proposed by Ruhlen, but still argue for small correlations at lower taxonomic levels.8 Linguists would advise geneticists to be cautious about proposed but rejected or highly disputed remote linguistic affiliations, such as those in Greenberg (1971Greenberg ( , 1987Greenberg ( , 2000 and Ruhlen (1987Ruhlen ( , 1994aRuhlen ( , 1994b. 7 In later work Ruhlen (1994aRuhlen ( , 1994b reduces the number to only 12 phyla, and in fact, in his Proto-World hypothesis, he believes ultimately there was only one. ...
This paper examines aspects of how linguistics and human genetics can collaborate in the investigation of human prehistory. Matters that need more careful attention for linguistic-genetic correlations to have value are emphasized. Some ways to make collaboration between geneticists and linguists more productive are considered, while some misconceptions frequently encountered in work which correlates languages and genes are clarified. In particular, the questions posed by Comrie (2006) in his position paper on language and genes are addressed.
... Following the neo-Darwinian 'wedding of [Mendelian] genetics to evolutionary biology' (Hull 1988: 57) in the 'new synthesis' of the 1930s and 1940s (Dobzhansky 1937;Huxley 1942;Mayr 1942), cultural neo-evolutionism was introduced as a controversial theory in American anthropology (Steward 1955;White 1949;Sahlins and Service 1960). 22 In the 1980s, modern population genetics was combined with long-range linguistic comparison (Greenberg 1963(Greenberg , 1971(Greenberg , 1987(Greenberg , 2000(Greenberg /2002 and 'archaeological genetics' (Renfrew 1987;Renfrew and Foster 2006). Linguists, psychologists, population geneticists, and archaeologists have made such attempts to synthesise cultural and linguistic classification with biomapping (e. g. . ...
... Following the neo-Darwinian 'wedding of [Mendelian] genetics to evolutionary biology' (Hull 1988: 57) in the 'new synthesis' of the 1930s and 1940s (Dobzhansky 1937;Huxley 1942;Mayr 1942), cultural neo-evolutionism was introduced as a controversial theory in American anthropology (Steward 1955;White 1949;Sahlins and Service 1960). 22 In the 1980s, modern population genetics was combined with long-range linguistic comparison (Greenberg 1963(Greenberg , 1971(Greenberg , 1987(Greenberg , 2000(Greenberg /2002 and 'archaeological genetics' (Renfrew 1987;Renfrew and Foster 2006). Linguists, psychologists, population geneticists, and archaeologists have made such attempts to synthesise cultural and linguistic classification with biomapping (e. g. . ...
... As for the Andaman Islands, Greenberg (1971) proposed that the various languages here, or at least those of the Great Andamanese family, are distantly related to a disparate scatter of languages: the (non-Austronesian) languages of New Guinea and other islands of Melanesia, and the extinct tongues of Tasmania (but not mainland Australia). The claimed links are especially speculative given how little data are available on such languages: almost all Great Andamanese languages are extinct, as too are the Tasmanian languages, on which so few data are available that they are generally considered unclassifiable in any case. ...
A survey of the language prehistory of South and Island South-East Asia, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.
... And concerns in this sense apply all the more strongly to some even broader hypotheses, which would set the languages of New Guinea into a much wider global context, but in very different ways. Quite independently of Trans-New Guinea, Greenberg (1971) proposed a putative macro-family far wider still, his "Indo-Pacific". This would bring together not just Trans-New Guinea but all Papuan languages, and others from still further afield: Great Andamanese of the northern Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and the languages of Tasmania (but not mainland Australia). ...
A survey of the language prehistory of the Pacific region, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.
... Genetic analyses suggest that the inhabitants of Andaman Islands have remained isolated since their arrival during the Pleistocene, up until the mid- 19th century [70,72,77]. The 13 languages spoken on the islands at that time period are linguistic isolates, with no clear relationship to other Asian languages78798081. We estimate the parameters t, P B and P C in Equations 1 and 2 as follows. ...
Language is a key adaptation of our species, yet we do not know when it evolved. Here, we use data on language phonemic diversity to estimate a minimum date for the origin of language. We take advantage of the fact that phonemic diversity evolves slowly and use it as a clock to calculate how long the oldest African languages would have to have been around in order to accumulate the number of phonemes they possess today. We use a natural experiment, the colonization of Southeast Asia and Andaman Islands, to estimate the rate at which phonemic diversity increases through time. Using this rate, we estimate that present-day languages date back to the Middle Stone Age in Africa. Our analysis is consistent with the archaeological evidence suggesting that complex human behavior evolved during the Middle Stone Age in Africa, and does not support the view that language is a recent adaptation that has sparked the dispersal of humans out of Africa. While some of our assumptions require testing and our results rely at present on a single case-study, our analysis constitutes the first estimate of when language evolved that is directly based on linguistic data.
... 55–70; Burenhalt, 1996, pp. 5–24; Dasgupta and Sharma, 1982; Greenberg, 1971; Manoharan, 1989; Reid, 1994, pp. 37–72) and archeologists (Cooper, 1989, pp. ...
India represents five language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Andamanese. The origin of Andamanese tribes and its relationship with Southeast population have been the subject of speculation for centuries. Latest research by geneticists [Thangaraj, K. et al. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders. Science 308, 996] of complete mitochondrial DNA sequences from two out of three accessible tribes, i.e. Onges and Great Andamanese populations, revealed two deeply branching clades that share their most recent common ancestor in founder haplogroup M, with lineages spread among India, Africa, East Asia, New Guinea, and Australia.
... These languages show recurrent typological similarities which suggest relatedness (see, for example, Wurm, 1975; Dunn et al., 2002), but no lexical evidence has been found such that the comparative method can prove relatedness. No shared phonological innovations have been established from the cognate candidates identified by Greenberg (1971); a more recent study by Ross (2001) working with whole pronoun paradigms demonstrates a number of small groups within the Papuan languages, but neither establishes the unity of Island Melanesian Papuan nor attempts a comparative method reconstruction. A controversial proposal suggests that the history of Island Melanesia is so reticulate that discussion of Austronesian and non-Austronesian/Papuans is misplaced (Terrell et al., 2001). ...
This paper shows that despite evidence of structural convergence between some of the Austronesian and non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages of Island Melanesia, statistical methods can detect two independent genealogical signals derived from linguistic structural features. Earlier work by the author and others has presented a maximum parsimony analysis which gave evidence for a genealogical connection between the non-Austronesian languages of island Melanesia. Using the same data set, this paper demonstrates for the non-statistician the application of more sophisticated statistical techniques—including Bayesian methods of phylogenetic inference, and shows that the evidence for common ancestry is if anything stronger than originally supposed.
... Were it not for the widespread, uncritical acceptance of his hypothesis both in mainstream linguistics and in other research disciplines dealing with the peoples speaking the languages concerned, the present study would have been a pointless exercise. Finally, in more general terms, at least the Khoisan part of the African linguistic classification turns out to be as flawed as Greenberg's (1971Greenberg's ( , 1987Greenberg's ( , 2000 classificatory proposals for other areas of the world. ...
... The classification of the Papuan languages follows the preliminary results obtained by Ross [6] on the basis of comparison and reconstruction of pronominal paradigms. The classification of the Australian languages is based on [3] and [22]. The classification of AN languages is found in [9,23]. ...
Author Summary
About one-fifth of all the world's languages are spoken in present day Australia, New Guinea, and the surrounding islands. This corresponds to the boundaries of the ancient continent of Sahul, which broke up due to rising sea levels about 9000 years before present. The distribution of languages in this region conveys information about its population history. The recent migration of the Austronesian speakers can be traced with precision, but the histories of the Papuan and Australian language speakers are considerably more difficult to reconstruct. The speakers of these languages are presumably descendants of the first migrations into Sahul, and their languages have been subject to many millennia of dispersal and contact. Due to the antiquity of these language families, there is insufficient lexical evidence to reconstruct their histories. Instead we use abstract structural features to infer population history, modeling language change as a result of both inheritance and horizontal diffusion. We use a Bayesian phylogenetic clustering method, originally developed for investigating genetic recombination to infer the contribution of different linguistic lineages to the current diversity of languages. The results show the underlying structure of the diversity of these languages, reflecting ancient dispersals, millennia of contact, and probable phylogenetic groups. The analysis identifies 10 ancestral language populations, some of which can be identified with previously known phylogenetic groups (language families or subgroups), and some of which have not previously been proposed.
The Great Andamanese is a generic term used to refer to ten different tribes who spoke closely related varieties of the same language in the entire set of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Their language is known by the same name, i.e. Great Andamanese. It constitutes the sixth language family of India, the other five being Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, all of them spoken in mainland India.
We focus on three language families located along the southwestern coast of New Guinea from the Bomberai Peninsula in the northwest to Kolopom Island in the southeast: the Kamrau Bay family, the Asmat-Kamoro family, and the Muli Strait family. Our purpose is to show that these languages form a larger family called Asmat-Muli Strait. To this end we present sets of lexical cognates and the sound correspondences that can be observed in them. A crucial piece of additional evidence is a paradigm of verbal subject-indexing suffixes that can be reconstructed to Proto-Asmat-Muli Strait. Our research shows that the Kamrau Bay family and the Asmat-Kamoro family form a subgroup to which the Muli Strait family is more distantly related.
Historical Linguistics and Linguistic Typology have been used to demonstrate that PGA is an independent language family of India. Data from extra-linguistic sources such as anthropology, archaeology and genetics have been used as additional supportive evidence. This chapter will give a summary of the findings and will familiarise the audience with some distinct characteristics of the highly endangered language of the hunter-gatherer society of the Great Andamanese population.
This contribution shows that evolutionary thought which dominated the discourse on the development of human populations, cultures, and languages in the nineteenth century (1) dates back to pre-Darwinian concepts that emerged in the times of the Enlightenment, (2) was only possible due to an ongoing interdisciplinary exchange between different branches of anthropology, and (3) was bound to the idea that lateral exchange of “racial,” linguistic, or cultural traits would contribute to degeneration instead of “progressive” development. Specifically, we would like to draw the reader’s attention to two quite contradictory strains in the history of science:
Against a background of intermittent faunal exchanges between Africa and Eurasia over millions of years, we argue that evidence from three sub-fields of Anthropology point to two dispersions of Homo sapiens sapiens and human language out of Africa. The first dispersion clustered around 100 kya and clearly associated with the Middle Stone Age, probably settled most of tropical Eurasia and most of insular Southeast Asia, reaching Australia and New Guinea around 60 kya. No dispersion north of India happened, the human advance being confined to south Eurasia and the tropics up to Melanesia. Contact and inter-breeding with Neanderthals and their cousins, the Denisovans, probably slowed or confined the human progress beyond the tropics. Then, we argue that a second major dispersion occurred around 50 ky later, often called the " Aurignacian " and associated with the linguistic phyletic chain called Borean, This second dispersion from Africa was the source of the Upper Paleolithic in Eurasia and most modern languages of Eurasia and all in the Americas. Oriented around the 'four fields' model of historical anthropology, the disciplines involved were biological anthropology, archeology, and historical linguistics.
The complex inter-relationships between genetics and linguistics encompass all four scales highlighted by the contributions to this book and, together with cultural transmission, the genetics of language holds the promise to offer a unitary understanding of this fascinating phenomenon. There are inter-individual differences in genetic makeup which contribute to the obvious fact that we are not identical in the way we understand and use language and, by studying them, we will be able to both better treat and enhance ourselves. There are correlations between the genetic configuration of human groups and their languages, reflecting the historical processes shaping them, and there also seem to exist genes which can influence some characteristics of language, biasing it towards or against certain states by altering the way language is transmitted across generations. Besides the joys of pure knowledge, the understanding of these three aspects of genetics relevant to language will potentially trigger advances in medicine, linguistics, psychology or the understanding of our own past and, last but not least, a profound change in the way we regard one of the emblems of being human: our capacity for language.
This paper surveys the history of areal distribution of word order based on data from some 3,000 languages. When the current areal distribution of word order is viewed synchronically, only two or three word order types, namely, consistent VO and (sub)consistent OV types occupy almost equally vast areas on the globe. When the distribution is considered from a historical point of view, however, it is very likely that most of the areas had been covered with (S)OV-type languages and that the areas of a VO type had been very restricted before many large language families expanded after the Neolithic age.
Os estudos etimológicos nunca foram totalmente independentes da pesquisa linguística, embora tenham seu próprio método, o qual será apresentado de maneira historiográfica neste artigo. Passa-se do pensamento de Platão para a criação das leis fonéticas no Renascimento e seu desenvolvimento sob a ótica da Linguística Histórico-Comparativa em Gyarmathi, Rask e autores de língua alemã, bem como os novos pressupostos surgidos na primeira metade do século XX, quando houve uma interrupção, somente retomada no final do mesmo século. O conhecimento da História da Etimologia é particularmente importante para os futuros desenvolvimentos da informação etimológica da língua portuguesa.
Introduction It has been recognized for a long time that languages across a broad sub-Saharan belt from the western end of the continent to the escarpment of the Ethiopian Plateau in the east display certain linguistic affinities. At the same time, it has been difficult to identify precisely the nature and range of these affinities and to provide a plausible explanation for them. I propose in Güldemann (2003a) that the distribution of logophoric marking in Africa follows an areal pattern in that it is regularly found in languages of the sub-Saharan belt referred to above, but is virtually absent from the rest of the continent. This finding is the starting point for a more systematic investigation of the following questions: I present in section 5.2 several linguistic features which appear to share a roughly similar distribution across the African continent, as well as additional candidate features which may support the evidence provided in this chapter. Section 5.3 briefly surveys previous approaches to the general observation of linguistic commonalities across the sub-Saharan belt, among which there is the proposal that most of the languages involved belong to a genealogical lineage comprising Greenberg's super-groups Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan.
Recent work which combines methods from linguistics and evolutionary biology has been fruitful in discovering the history of major language families because of similarities in evolutionary processes. Such work opens up new possibilities for language research on previously unsolvable problems, especially in areas where information from other sources may be lacking. I use phylogenetic methods to investigate Tasmanian languages. Existing materials are so fragmentary that scholars have been unable to discover how many languages are represented in the sources. Using a clustering algorithm which identifies admixture, source materials representing more than one language are identified. Using the Neighbor-Net algorithm, 12 languages are identified in five clusters. Bayesian phylogenetic methods reveal that the families are not demonstrably related; an important result, given the importance of Tasmanian Aborigines for information about how societies have responded to population collapse in prehistory. This work provides insight into the societies of prehistoric Tasmania and illustrates a new utility of phylogenetics in reconstructing linguistic history.
It has been recognized for a long time that languages across a broad sub-Saharan belt from the western end of the continent to the escarpment of the Ethiopian Plateau in the east display certain linguistic affinities. At the same time, it has been difficult to identify precisely the nature and range of these affinities and to provide a plausible explanation
Mitochondrial sequences were retrieved from museum specimens of the enigmatic Andaman Islanders to analyze their evolutionary history. D-loop and protein-coding data reveal that phenotypic similarities with African pygmoid groups are convergent. Genetic and epigenetic data are interpreted as favoring the long-term isolation of the Andamanese, extensive population substructure, and/or two temporally distinct settlements. An early colonization featured populations bearing mtDNA lineage M2, and this lineage is hypothesized to represent the phylogenetic signal of an early southern movement of humans through Asia. The results demonstrate that Victorian anthropological collections can be used to study extinct, or seriously admixed populations, to provide new data about early human origins.
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