Dravidian and Australian languages

[Ketsuban]

It's very difficult to say much about the time depth of Pama-Nyungan. There was a recent paper that suggested Proto-Australian was 10,000 years old, but I can't read it. There was lots of news coverage about it though.

Looks like either the BBC mangled the URL or John Benjamins fiddled with how their URLs work. This appears to be it, and that gave me the title so I was able to find a preproof version of the paper on Academia.

[So Haleza Grise]

I’m not sure that anyone accepts a unified ‘proto-Australian’ these days.

I don't think Dixon's opinions about Proto-Australian are very widely shared. There's a recent collection of Papers in Pacific Linguistics hosted by ANU open access that talks about a lot of the issues involved in reconstruction of non-Pama-Nyungan languages in particular (for some reason I can't link directly, but you can get to it if you google "non pama nyungan languages".)

Reconstruction is hard work, and Australian languages are difficult partly due to lexical replacement and rearrangements of things like pronoun systems

but also due to phonological processes such as very widespread lenition and a tendency to drop initials, sometimes whole initial syllables. It hasn't been helped by the fact that a lot of materials about non-PN languages were not as detailed or as high-quality as those detailing the PN languages.

Looks like either the BBC mangled the URL or John Benjamins fiddled with how their URLs work. This appears to be it, and that gave me the title so I was able to find a preproof version of the paper on Academia.

Great work, thank you!

[bradrn]

I’m not sure that anyone accepts a unified ‘proto-Australian’ these days.

I don't think Dixon's opinions about Proto-Australian are very widely shared. There's a recent collection of Papers in Pacific Linguistics hosted by ANU open access that talks about a lot of the issues involved in reconstruction of non-Pama-Nyungan languages in particular (for some reason I can't link directly, but you can get to it if you google "non pama nyungan languages".)

This one?

[So Haleza Grise]

I’m not sure that anyone accepts a unified ‘proto-Australian’ these days.

I don't think Dixon's opinions about Proto-Australian are very widely shared. There's a recent collection of Papers in Pacific Linguistics hosted by ANU open access that talks about a lot of the issues involved in reconstruction of non-Pama-Nyungan languages in particular (for some reason I can't link directly, but you can get to it if you google "non pama nyungan languages".)

This one?

That's it! Please don't tell anyone how bad I am at the internet.

[anteallach]

As far as phonology goes, I'm not sure how strong the resemblances actually are? Australian languages and Dravidian languages both typically have retroflex stops, fine - but Australian languages often have three coronal series and I'm not sure if Dravidian languages normally do. The retroflexes in some Australian languages might have been innovated from medial [r]+stop. I think there's still debate about how many stop series proto-Pama-Nyungan or proto-Australian had, although I'm admittedly a bit out of date.

I think that if you just look at the consonant inventories, and compare reconstructed proto-Dravidian (as per the version on the Wikipedia page, anyway; clearly there are debates about this) to modern Australian languages, the resemblance is indeed quite strong: a single series of six stops, with what looks like pretty much the same set of POAs as you get in a generic Australian inventory (Australian "palatal" is usually actually laminal postalveolar AIUI; is that also the case for PD?), nasals corresponding to all the stops (though Wikipedia shows the PD velar nasal as only allophonic), a handful of laterals and rhotics, /ʋ/ and /j/, and no fricatives except for a possible /h/. Apart from the possible /h/ and the /ʋ/ instead of /w/, I'd think that if someone wrote a paper on an obscure Australian language proposing that consonant inventory, no-one would see anything odd.

Of course, if there really is any actual connection behind this (which I think we should be very sceptical of) the comparison ought to be to reconstructions of the same age as PD, not to modern languages.

[Vijay]

Please. People try to connect Dravidian to all kinds of languages just because our (i.e. Dravidian) languages are typologically unusual in some ways. Get over it already. Even retroflexes are common in nonstandard varieties of European languages (as well as in some standard varieties e.g. in Scandinavia).