Trans-New Guinea

Assembled from 31 blocks · 2 evidence · 31 related

1. Story
2. The largest proposed grouping among the Papuan languages of New Guinea and neighbouring islands, and the clearest illustration in this Journey of how much a family's security varies. New Guinea holds the densest concentration of languages on Earth — of the order of eight hundred to a thousand in a single large island — most of them spoken by small communities in terrain that isolates valley from valley. Trans-New Guinea was proposed in the 1970s on the basis of shared pronoun forms and lexical resemblances across the central cordillera, and it is now generally accepted that a large family exists there. What is far less settled is its membership and its internal structure: proposals have differed by hundreds of languages, many of the constituent groups remain thinly documented, and no reconstruction remotely comparable to Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Austronesian exists. Papuan is not a family at all but a residual term for the non-Austronesian languages of the region, covering many independent families and isolates. The contrast with Austronesian, whose speakers arrived in the same seas far more recently and whose tree is well resolved, is a lesson in what documentation and time depth do to evidence.
3. Knowledge
4. Indo-European
5. Austronesian
6. Trans-New Guinea
7. Connections
8. Austronesian
9. Indo-European
10. Taiwan
11. Trans-New Guinea
12. Malagasy
13. The Austronesian expansion
14. Dahl links Malagasy to Ma'anyan of southeastern Borneo
15. Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
16. A language tree is tested against a settlement chronology
17. Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
18. Lapita voyagers enter Remote Oceania
19. Proto-Indo-European
20. Uralic
21. Trans-New Guinea
22. Dravidian
23. Hittite
24. Sanskrit
25. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
26. Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
27. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
28. Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
29. Evidence
30. Supports the description of a conservative, bibliography-linked classification policy that treats isolates as top-level families, and thereby the point that published family counts differ by policy. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. glottolog.org returned EGRESS_BLOCKED in this session, so no version, family count or language count is quoted anywhere in this pack, and the editorial and institutional attribution is given from standing knowledge.
31. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.