Dating the final IE unity

[Ross Clark]

>>> Hans Holm <Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de> 02/02 8:19 AM >>>

JS>This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in pre-
JS>Celtic across thousands of miles, ...

>.. I propose "little change". And there are much more examples.

JS>, ... for 4000 years.  Which is in blatant violation of everything we know
JS>about languages and how they develop.

>. Is it? This is an IE group, but if we take a look beyond our IE nose,
>e.g. to Australia, we find about 70 % covered by speakers of Pama-Nyungan,
>the languages/dialects of which are regarded as very closely related. And
>archeologists now redate the first settlements back to more than 50.000
>years (for a up-to-date overview see Stringer in Antiquity 73/99:876). Of
>course these must not be the direct predecessors of Pama-Nyungan.

I think you mean "may not" or "cannot", and indeed it is most unlikely that
the common ancestor of Pama-Nyungan dates to the period of the earliest human
occupation of Australia. In fact we have hardly any idea of the time depth of
this family. And "very closely related" is a very misleading way to describe
these languages. They may sometimes be described as closely related, but only
by way of contrast to the other language families in the north and west of
Australia, which are lexically and typologically highly diverse. Consider the
immediate neighbours of Dyirbal, as described by Dixon (1972): Yidin (27%
common vocabulary), Mbabaram (18%), Warungu (47%) and Wargamay (60%). Only the
last shows any structural similarity to Dyirbal, and Dixon is uncertain
whether this is the result of a relatively close genetic relationship or a
long period of contiguity and convergence. All this is within Pama-Nyungan, in
fact within a 100 km radius in one small corner of Queensland.

Ross Clark