Indo-Pacific

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Indo-Pacific is a macro family proposed by Joseph Greenberg in 1971 , which, in addition to the Papua languages ​​of New Guinea and the surrounding islands, also includes the Andaman 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 was established by Joseph Greenberg in his 1971 article The Indo-Pacific Hypothesis after completing his successful classification of African languages. He summarized the following language groups as Indo-Pacific :

  • Indo-Pacific
    • Andaman: the languages ​​of the Andaman indigenous people
    • West Indo-Pacific: Papuan languages ​​from Halmahera, Timor, and West New Guinea
    • Nuclear New Guinea: Papuan languages ​​from North, Southwest, South, Central, and East New Guinea
    • Northeast New Guinea: Papuan languages ​​from Northeast New Guinea
    • Pacific: Papuan languages ​​of the archipelagos of New Britain, Bougainville, Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz
    • Tasmanian: the extinct languages ​​of the Tasmanian indigenous people

The Australian languages joined Greenberg from the Indo-Pacific explicitly out. He justified his Indo-Pacific hypothesis with eleven extensive grammatical arguments and a total of 84 Indo-Pacific word equations , which, however, mainly use the Papua languages, while the Andamanic component is only taken into account to a small extent and the Tasmanian component is hardly taken into account.

Problem and lack of acceptance

One problem with Greenberg's theory was that he based it less on common linguistic features than on contemporary ethnological theses. The decisive factor here were the works of Griffith Taylor (Environment and Race, 1927), according to which Tasmanians and Negritos (including the Andamans) formed the first class of the population, followed by the Australians, the Papuans, the Melanesians and finally the Polynesians. At Greenberg's time, different population wave models were developed on the basis of Taylor's theses, with Greenberg supporting the thesis that Tasmanians, Negritos and Papuans belong to the same class.

The Indo-Pacific hypothesis therefore found almost no support or acceptance in the professional world, although it was described and represented in detail in the widespread book by Greenberg student Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages from 1987. There are several reasons for this.

The approximately 800 so-called Papua languages (4 million speakers) are only negatively defined as non- Austronesian languages ​​of New Guinea and the surrounding island groups; In the opinion of almost all experts, they do not form a genetic unit , but are broken down into at least 12 separate units, which according to current knowledge are not genetically related to each other, and five isolated languages ​​(see the detailed description in the article Papuan languages ).

The Andaman languages form a small language family of 13 languages ​​(nine of which are extinct), which are still spoken by a maximum of 500 Andaman indigenous people. The Tasmanian languages were already extinct in the 19th century, more precisely: the approximately 5,000 Tasmanian natives were exterminated by the English colonizers within 80 years, in 1888 the last pure-blood Tasmanian died and with him the Tasmanian language. The records for the twelve or so languages ​​are so poor and flawed that it is impossible to even determine whether they belong to one or more language families.

In his hypothesis, Greenberg unites completely inhomogeneous language groups that are geographically distant. In addition, knowledge of the Papua languages ​​was still relatively poor in 1971, that of the Andaman languages ​​was still far less and knowledge of the Tasmanian languages ​​was scarce for the reasons mentioned. The description of Tasmanian in Greenberg's work mentioned consists of only five lines of around 30 pages. Greenberg, of course, did not have the opportunity to use reconstructed proto-languages ​​of his groups, but instead chose arbitrarily similar-looking words with similar meanings from the many languages ​​of the individual groups for his word equations. All in all, it is not surprising that the Indo-Pacific hypothesis found no support or even attention and would probably have been forgotten by now if Ruhlen had not popularized it in the book he cited. Of all the macro-groupings proposed by Greenberg, the Indo-Pacific had the least success.

literature

  • Joseph Greenberg: The Indo-Pacific Hypothesis. In Thomas A. Sebeok (Ed.): Current Trends in Linguistics Vol VIII: Linguistics in Oceania. Mouton, Den Haag 1971. (Reprinted in Greenberg 2005.)
  • Joseph Greenberg: Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method. Edited by William Croft. Oxford University Press 2005.
  • Merritt Ruhlen: A Guide to the World's Languages. Edward Arnold, London 1987. (Expanded paperback edition 1991.)
  • John Lynch: Pacific Languages. An Introduction. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 1998.