Age of various language families

[Blaine Erickson]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Sasha Vovin brought up some very good points about the non-correlation
between primary branches and language family age. I'd just like to point
out that although Robert Blust is an outstanding scholar and an expert in
Austronesian linguistics, his account of the branching of Austronesian is
not the only one out there. The late Stanley Starosta, another true expert
in the field, held that Austronesian had just two primary branches, and
that all the Formosan languages split of from one or another of these.
Malayo-Polynesian, also known as extra-Formosan, is quite a ways down on
the tree in his scheme, and is not even necessary for reconstructing
proto-Austronesian.

I attended a presentation of his on this a few years ago, so my memory is a
little fuzzy on details, but I do remember his data and analysis were quite
convincing. Two branches, or four, or ten, I am in no position to say.
Perhaps Austronesian is a family for which we don't yet have a consensus on
the number of primary branches. The age, however, is generally agreed to be
about 6000 years BP.

One more thought on the possible correlation between number of branches and
language family age. If Ainu is the descendant of the language originally
spoken in the Japanese archipelago, just as the people themselves appear to
be the descendants of the original inhabitants, then it is a single-member
family that goes back at least 10,000 years. (Sasha, please correct me if
I'm wrong about the number of members in Ainu--I don't have your
reconstruction handy.)

Best wishes,

Blaine Erickson
erickson at piercingsuit.com

At 12:00 AM -0400 02.10.6, vovin at hawaii.edu wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>I couldn't agree more with Jens Rasmussen, Scott DeLancey, and others
>who voiced their opposition to the connection between the number of
>primary branches in a family and its age. First of all, I am sorry to
>say, I believe that Johanna Nichols calculations of a number of primary
>branches in many cases are either fundamentally flawed, or are based on
>some outdated material. Thus, e.g., Japanese (or rather Japonic as we
>call it nowadays), certainly is not just one primary branch, but two,
>with quite obvious split between Japanese proper and Ryukyuan. Having
>just two primary branches, this family is *definitely* much older than
>Slavic that has three. Austronesian does not have just 4 branches, as
>JN asserts, there are 9 *primary* branches on Taiwan alone as cogently
>demonstrated by Blust 1997, + the Malayo-Polynesian branch, altogether
>totaling 10 primary branches.