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How about Australia and Tasmania? The indigenous languages on each side of the Bass Strait have at least one feature in common (initial Cr- clusters) that's rar
by 80386 8y ago
How about Australia and Tasmania? The indigenous languages on each side of the Bass Strait have at least one feature in common (initial Cr- clusters) that's rare elsewhere in Australia. (There might be more, but information is pretty hard to come by, and the Tasmanian languages are sparsely attested.) That may or may not be indicative of continued contact; it might even be a coincidence, but if it's not, I wouldn't expect the shared feature to stick around for thousands of years.
(If Wikipedia is right about the time of Tasmania's separation from the Australian mainland and Tasmania was already populated at the time, the feature would've had to have been preserved on both sides of the Bass Strait for about twice the time between modern English and Proto-Indo-European.)
- gpdpocketer 8y agoGiven that the indigenous Australian languages hold the record for the longest-running oral traditions (70,000 years worth of story-telling), it would be no surprise to me to hear that there was such an influence...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> Given that the indigenous Australian languages hold the record for the longest-running oral traditions (70,000 years worth of story-telling) It isn't possible to verify a claim like this (and therefore, it also isn't possible to honestly make a claim like this...) - there are plenty of traditions that claim to draw on 70,000 years of history, but no reason to believe that they actually do. Some versions of the Sumerian king list document that a single king reigned for 36,000 years.