Comments on: No country for old tongues

By: Popular Linguistics » India loses one language, gains another

Popular Linguistics » India loses one language, gains another — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:04:54 +0000

[...] on Boa’s death http://www.andamanese.net/ – Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese http://glossographia.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/no-country-for-old-tongues/ – Criticism of age claims of Bo language [...]

By: Bisaro « One Peppercorn

Bisaro « One Peppercorn — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:20:14 +0000

[...] Since breeds were first systematically categorized in the nineteenth century, it’s rather hard to say just how much the modern version of the breed resembles the pig-boars known to what would have been Asterix’s companions. (Had he, y’know, been real.) As a living, breeding creature, however, odds are it has developed and changed over the intervening centuries quite a bit, if not as much as languages do. [...]

By: gaston umlaut

gaston umlaut — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:22:21 +0000

As you say, we don’t know how long they’ve been there, it could be much less than 70,000 years. And yes, while positing two language families seems less likely than one, we don’t know, so we can’t say. I think it’s fair enough to say it’s possible that they’re related, but the work hasn’t been done to demonstrate it (and probably won’t be). Re this issue Blevins (2007) says:

‘…there remains no persuasive evidence that of a family relationship between Jarawa-Onge and the Great Andaman languages.’

Re the ‘ancient’ business, as a linguist I find that kind of thing very frustrating. All the more so because I find so many fellow specialists (eg in anthroplogy, archaeology, sociology…) have no more knowledge about language than non-specialists, and that includes ideas such as this ‘ancient language’ business.

By: schrisomalis

schrisomalis — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:20:40 +0000

The only source I know is the Blevins 2007, which you mention. However, my understanding is that it was generally agreed that the two branches were related – otherwise, don’t we have two 70,000 year old language families hanging around on the Andamans? In any case, I absolutely agree that the issue of limited data coupled with the issue of borrowing makes establishing specifics very difficult.

With regard to the ‘ancient’ label, I do think that any linguist would understand what is meant, but any layperson or journalist is not likely to reach that conclusion. For that matter, the 70,000 figure is basically made up – there is no linguistic evidence whatsoever to support it. Given the frequently racist history of the discipline and the assumption that ‘primitives’ are unchanging relics of deep prehistory, we (as specialists) need to address the problem.

By: gaston umlaut

gaston umlaut — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:05:24 +0000

You say:

‘The ten Great Andamanese and three South Andamanese languages are all related to one another’

Can you provide a source for that? I thought there had been virtually no serious historical/comparative work on these languages, largely due to lack of data and the huge problem of separating out inheritance from borrowing. There is Blevins (2007), which claims to provide evidence of proto-Ongan, a postulated ancestor to Jarawa, Onge and sibling to proto-Austronesian, but most researchers feel it’s highly dubious.

I agree with your feelings about the misleading statements about Bo being so many 1000′s of years old, but I think they’re trying to say that the language lineage has been isolated for that long. There is no word that I know of for ‘a language and all of its ancestors back to when it was a common ancestor to something else’-maybe we could talk about the Andaman clade being so many 1000′s of years old (if they do form a clade).