Indo-Pacific languages

Indo-Pacific is a language family proposed in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg. It groups all of the languages of New Guinea into a single language family, except for those belonging to the Austronesian family. These languages were previously believed to belong to a large number of different language families. It also includes languages spoken on several other islands in the region. In addition, it includes the languages of the Andaman Islands and the languages of Tasmania, at a very great distance from New Guinea. Greenberg explicitly excludes from Indo-Pacific the languages of Australia (1971:808).

Support

The proposal was based on rough estimation of lexical similarity and typological similarity and has not reached a stage where it can be confirmed by the standard comparative method, including the reconstruction of a protolanguage, and has therefore not been widely accepted by linguists.

The greatest controversy concerns the geographic outliers, Andamanese and Tasmanian. The languages of Tasmania are extinct and so poorly attested that many historical linguists regard them as unclassifiable.

Since then, the languages of New Guinea have been intensively studied by Stephen Wurm.

Typology

The languages in the group are primarily tone languages. They feature nouns marked for case but not necessarily for number. SOV word order is the most common. (O'Grady et al. 1997:400.)

Subdivision

According to Greenberg, the family consists of fourteen families. He suggested a tentative sub-classification into seven groups, listed in bold below.

• Tasmanian
  • Tasmanian languages
• Andamanese
  • Andamanese languages (perhaps only the Great Andamanese languages)^{[citation needed]}
• Nuclear New Guinea
  • Central New Guinea languages
  • Kapauku-Baliem languages
  • Highlands
  • Huon
  • North New Guinea languages
  • South New Guinea languages
  • Southwest New Guinea languages
• West Papuan
  • West New Guinea languages
  • North Halmahera languages
  • Timor-Alor languages
• East New Guinea
  • East New Guinea languages
• Northeast New Guinea
  • Northeast New Guinea languages
• Pacific
  • Bougainville languages (see East Papuan languages)
  • New Britain languages (see East Papuan languages)
  • Central Melanesian languages (see East Papuan languages)
    • Central Solomons languages
    • Santa Cruz languages

This classification was never widely accepted, and has largely been supplanted by that of Stephen Wurm (see Papuan languages). They do not generally agree well. For example:

• Greenberg's North New Guinea family corresponds to four of Wurm's families, Sko, Sepik-Ramu, Torricelli, and the Northern branch of Trans–New Guinea;

• Greenberg's West New Guinea family corresponds to four of Wurm's, East Bird's Head, Geelvink Bay, the South Bird's Head and West Bomberai branches of Trans–New Guinea, and the Bird's Head branch of West Papuan.

The few similarities are retentions from earlier linguists' work:

• Greenberg's Northeast New Guinea family closely matches Wurm's Madang-Adelbert Range branch of Trans–New Guinea
• Greenberg's Eastern New Guinea family and Wurm's Eastern Main-Section branch of Trans–New Guinea both preserve Tom Dutton's Southeast New Guinea family.

Although the details differ greatly, Greenberg's proposal that the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea form a single language family has been partially validated by Wurm's work (see Trans–New Guinea languages).

References

• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1971. "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis." In Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 8: Linguistics in Oceania, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 808-71. The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted in Greenberg, Genetic Linguistics, 2005, 193-275.)

• Greenberg, Joseph H. 2005. Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• O'Grady, Dobrovolsky, Katamba. 1997. Contemporary Linguistics.

• Usher, Timothy. "A comparison of Greenberg's and Wurm's classifications." In Greenberg, Genetic Linguistics, 2005, 261-269. (Systematic tabulation of the two sets of results.)

• Wurm, Stephen A. 1982. The Papuan Languages of Oceania. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

See also

• Papuan languages
• Trans–New Guinea languages

External links

• Map of Indo-Pacific
• Kusunda: An Indo-Pacific language in Nepal by Paul Whitehouse, Timothy Usher, Merritt Ruhlen, and William S.-Y. Wang (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (2004), 5692–5695)