Re: Language family trees

Roger Mills wrote:
> I regret to say I've never read that (and must), but I can imagine some of
> his arguments.  Compared with mainland areas, Australia enjoyed _relative_
> isolation for a very long time; the climate for the most part was not
> conducive to large agglomerations of people, but rather, necessitated the
> constant splitting-up of small tribal groups once they became too numerous
> to support themselves in a given area.
> While that would tend to cause fairly rapid language diversification, it
> could be mitigated by almost certain ongoing contact between groups.
Actually, his argument was that in teh Australian case, areal diffusion
has obliterated genetic relationships.  Altho presumably there was
splitting up of tribal groups in the early days, after Australia was
settled, there was little movement of tribes, but plenty of contact
between tribes and movement of individual.  Linguistic changes tended to
originate in one area, and diffuse outward.  Since there was no major
splitting events for tens of millennia, similarities and differences are
primarily due to diffusion of traits, not to splitting of people.

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