Crossing the Pacific

[jess tauber]

Dixon went into comparison of Australian and Dravidian phonotactics, IIRC, in his older book on the former. Lots of parallels, but some things are different.

I recently took another look at my collection of verb roots and stems in Australian languages (culled from numerous mostly more recent publications) and have been working on Dravidian for several weeks now, especially with regard to the primary derivational affixes.

Despite superficial similarities (more typological than anything else it would seem), roots and stems in the two groups are rather different in their phonosemantics.

Hey, I'd love to be the 'discoverer' of a new connection, but the evidence seems to be against it. OTOH, some of the things reconstructed for Dixon's Proto-Australian remind me a lot of things I've seen in American languages. A bit of an even longer stretch, eh? For making such a suggestion, I may well end up 'roo'ing this day....

In the meantime, though, now I'm sorry that I seem to have sidetracked serious discussion of the situation in Tibet. It wasn't my intention. Many countries have treated involuntary minorities cruelly, but the wound there is still fresh and bloody. Marxist idealism- it still boils down to racist imperialism. Welcome to the club, PRC.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net