Re: retroflex consonants

> > From what I remember about Indian languages (in India; not Native
> > American languages! ;) ,
>
> The disambiguation trick is to call those of India 'Indic'
> and those of America 'Amerindian'
The problem with that is that both _Indic_ and _Amerindian_
have specialized uses that do not simply mean "relating to
India" or "relating to the aboriginals of the Americas".
Specifically, they respectively refer to the Indo-European
subbranch of Indo-Aryan spoken in India or the set of Sanskrit
and its descendents, and the macrofamily proposed by Greenberg that
excludes only Eskimo-Aleut and Nadene languages in the Americas.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637