Indo-Pacific languages
Indo is a 1971 proposed by Joseph Greenberg macro family, except the Papuan New Guinea and surrounding islands also includes the Andamanese and Tasmanian languages. This Indo-Pacific hypothesis found very little support and was rejected by most researchers.
Components of the Indo-Pacific
The Indo-Pacific macro family established Joseph Greenberg in his article The Indo- Pacific Hypothesis of 1971, after he had completed his successful classification of African languages. He summarized as Indo following language groups:
- Indo-pacific Anda Manic: the languages of the Andamanese indigenous peoples
- Western Indo-pacific: Papua languages of Halmahera, Timor and West New Guinea
- Nuclear New Guinea: Papua New languages from North, West, South, Central and Ostneuguinea
- West New Guinea: Papua New Guinea languages from Northeast
- Pacific: Papua New Britain languages of the archipelago, Bougainville, Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz
- Tasmanian: the extinct languages of the Tasmanian aborigines
The Australian languages closed Greenberg from the Indo-Pacific from explicitly. He explained his Indo-Pacific hypothesis by eleven extensive grammatical arguments and by a total of 84 Indo-Pacific word equations, which however mainly use the Papuan, while the Andaman component only to a small extent, the Tasmanian is hardly taken into account.
Problems and lack of acceptance
The Indo-Pacific hypothesis found in the professional world, almost no support or acceptance, although it has been described in detail in the popular book of the Greenberg - Ruhlen Merritt student A Guide to the World's Languages in 1987 and represented. This has several reasons.
The approximately 800 so-called Papuan (4 million speakers ) are only negatively as non- Austronesian languages of New Guinea and surrounding islands defined; they form by almost all experts considers that no single genetic unit, but divided into at least 12 separate units, which are not genetically related to each other according to current knowledge, and five isolated languages (see the detailed discussion in the article Papuan ).
The Andamanese languages form a small language family of 13 languages (of which nine extinct) that are still spoken by more than 500 Andamanese indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands. The Tasmanian languages have become extinct in the 19th century, more precisely, which is approximately 5000 Tasmanian aborigines were exterminated by the English colonizers within 80 years, died in 1888, the last full-blooded Tasmanian, and with him the Tasmanian language. The records of about twelve languages are so poor and flawed that you can not even tell if they belong to one or several language families. In particular, can not be excluded - by other researchers, it is even more likely - that the Tasmanian languages are more closely related to the geographically and culturally neighboring Australian languages than with the thousands of kilometers away in Papua languages. The Australian joined Greenberg but explicitly from the Indo-Pacific from.
So Greenberg united in his hypothesis very far geographically spaced, fully inhomogeneous language groups. For this purpose, the knowledge about the Papuan 1971 was still relatively poor, still far lower and knowledge of the Tasmanian languages for the reasons mentioned hardly present on the Andamanese languages. The description of the Tasmanian includes in the work referred to Greenberg's only five lines totaling approximately 30 pages. Greenberg, of course, did not have the possibility to rely on reconstructed proto languages of his groups, but chose arbitrarily for his word equations from the many languages of each group similar-looking words with similar meanings from. All in all, it is not surprising that the Indo-Pacific hypothesis found no support or even attention and would now probably forgotten when Ruhlen she had not popularized in his book cited. Of all the macro groupings proposed by Greenberg, the Indo-Pacific had the least success.