Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"

[Katachumen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a message dated 5/10/98, 3:29:50 PM, mcv at wxs.nl writes:
<<
 
        It is likely that the whole of Australia was populated within
        a few thousand years of the first colonisation, about 50,000
        BP.  Many scholars believe that all Australian languages
        belong to one linguistic family.  Assuming this hypothesis
        there are two alternative scenarios:
 
        (i) Proto-Australian, the putative ancestor of all the modern
        languages, was spoken by some of the first people in
        Australia, about 50,000 years ago.
 
        (ii) Modern Australian languages are descended from a proto-
        langugae that was spoken much more recently -- say, 10,000 or
        5,000 years ago. >>
 
In regards to Australia  we should remember that the continent was not in fact
isolated from the rest of Indo-Asia until the end of the last Ice Age, when
the strait between the continent and New Guinea once again became submerged.
Until then the continent was open to migration from New Guinea (which would
explain the possibility that Tasmanian was an Indo-Pacific language, since
Tasmania was also linked to Austrailia). and New Guinea itself was accessible
from the rest of the Indonesian "peninsula".
For the Australian languages linguistic maps show the region of greatest
diversity to be on the northwest coast (only here are the non-Pamanyungen
languages found), and this area was relativity isolated during the
Paleolithic, since the Outback, during the Ice Ages, was a hyperarid desert\,
like the Rub'al-Khali today. I think it's at least possible that the
Australian proto-language could have evolved in this isolated setting, largely
separated from the rest of the continent (and from New Guinea), and after the
end of the Ice Age, when the continent became isolated, the Pamanyungen
speakers gradually spread across the rest of the continent (since the Outback
became somewhat wetter and able to support human life). The hypothetical other
inhabitants of Australia, related to the Papuans, would have gradually become
absorbed into the Australian population, or may also have been decimated by
diseases introduced to them by the long-isolated Australians and the stress of
climate change (except for newly-isolated Tasmania, where an Indo-Pacific-
speaking population survived until modern times.)