- Indo-Pacific languages
The Indo-Pacific language family proposed by
Joseph Greenberg in 1971 consists of the non-Austronesian languages ofNew Guinea and neighboring islands, the languages ofTasmania , and the languages of theAndaman Islands .upport
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 or the reconstruction of aprotolanguage and has therefore not been widely accepted by linguists.An additional difficulty is the fact that the languages of Tasmania are extinct and so poorly attested that most historical linguists regard them as unclassifiable. The greatest controversy concerns the geographic outliers, Tasmanian and Andamanese.
Typology
The languages in the group are primarily
tone language s and feature nouns marked for case, but not necessarily for number, with the SOVword order being most common. [Contemporary linguistics, p400. O'Grady, Dobrovolsky, Katamba. 1997: ISBN 058224691 1 Ppr.]ubdivision
According to Greenberg, the family consists of fourteen families. He suggested a tentative sub-classification into seven groups, listed in bold below. He presented no evidence for this subgrouping.
*Tasmanian
**Tasmanian languages
*Andamanese
**Andamanese languages (perhaps only theGreat Andamanese languages )Fact|date=November 2007
*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 (seeEast Papuan languages )
**New Britain languages (seeEast Papuan languages )
**Central Melanesian languages (seeEast Papuan languages )
***Central Solomons languages
***Santa Cruz languagesThis classification was never widely accepted, and has largely been supplanted by that of
Stephen Wurm (seePapuan 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.References
ee also
*
Trans-New Guinea languages
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