The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia's largest family of Aboriginal languages

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Kraut
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The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia's largest family of Aboriginal languages

Postby Kraut » Thu Mar 15, 2018 12:31 pm

The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia's largest family of Aboriginal languages
March 13, 2018 by Claire Bowern, The Conversation


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-pama-nyun ... l.html#jCp





The approximately 400 languages of Aboriginal Australia can be grouped into 27 different families. To put that diversity in context, Europe has just four language families, Indo-European, Basque, Finno-Ugric and Semitic, with Indo-European encompassing such languages as English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi.

Australia's largest language family is Pama-Nyungan. Before 1788 it covered 90% of the country and comprised about 300 languages. The territories on which Canberra (Ngunnawal), Perth (Noongar), Sydney (Daruk, Iyora), Brisbane (Turubal) and Melbourne (Woiwurrung) are built were all once owned by speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages.

All the languages from the Torres Strait to Bunbury, from the Pilbara to the Grampians, are descended from a single ancestor language that spread across the continent to all but the Kimberley and the Top End.
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Re: The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia's largest family of Aboriginal languages

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Mar 15, 2018 7:34 pm

Kraut wrote:To put that diversity in context, Europe has just four language families, Indo-European, Basque, Finno-Ugric and Semitic...

A nitpick, but I wonder what kind of definition of Europe the author was using. Going by the most widely accepted definition of Europe's boundaries, the number should be more than double that with the addition of Turkic, Mongolic (via Kalmyk), South Caucasian (via the tiny bits of Georgia to the north of the Greater Caucasus ridge), Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian (plus we'd have to refer to "Uralic" rather than "Finno-Ugric", since we have to include Nenets). If we use the definition often used in Russian sources that places the boundary way to the north of the Caucasus, that still leaves us with Turkic and Mongolic. If we expressly exclude all transcontinental countries we're still left with several Turkic languages like Crimean Tatar and Gagauz. And if we only talk about the languages of the EU countries we'd still have to include Turkic due to Turkish being de jure official in Cyprus and there being long established Turkish and Karaim minorities in Bulgaria and Lithuania, respectively (not to mention a few other EU countries recognizing certain Turkic languages as officially designated minority languages). And finally, if it's just about the official languages of the EU itself, then Basque shouldn't count.

Granted, 5-9 is still a far cry from 27, but still, that seems like a rather arbitrary definition of "Europe" (if there even is such a thing as a non-arbitrary definition of "Europe", but now I reeeally digress :D ).
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Re: The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia's largest family of Aboriginal languages

Postby nooj » Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:15 pm

It doesn't really matter, as you said, Australian language diversity trumps European several times over (blame Latin and especially proto Indo European).

Perhaps Turkic is considered too recent to count - that doesn't explain why Semitic (presumably Maltese) is counted as well, otherwise we'd just have three language families represented. Maltese came about during the early Middle Ages, but so did Turkic languages to the European scene around this time.
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