Re: CHAT: YAC: or more exactly: yet another conlang sketch

John Cowan wrote:

>Robert Hailman wrote:
>> Of course, this raisis the question of how Rinyi and Nakiltipkaspimak
>> (dear God, that's a long time) came to be spoken on the same island, if
>> the two languages aren't related at all.
>
>Not really different from the case of English and Welsh being spoken
>on the same island; although there is a relation, the time-depth is
>such that it's not obvious to anyone but specialists.  In addition,
>on the island of New Guinea there are ~ 1000 languages spoken, many
>of which may be quite unrelated.>
It's no big deal to have two or more unrelated langs spoken in a quite small
territory-- one or the other must probably be viewed as an interloper,
however. (And if the interloper is big enough, the pre-existing language
tends to go extinct, but that's another matter.)  Several islands of eastern
Indonesia have pockets of non-Austronesian-- Alor/Pantar, Halmahera, even
large-ish Timor (the eastern part-- heaven knows what the situation is
nowadays).  Insofar as these non-AN langs. have been reported, it's quite
difficult to see how they may be related to each other, even if one assumes
they are relics of some """Papuan""" phylum, which may or may not exist.

As Daniel Andreasson suggests in his original post, a sprachbund in such
situations is very much a possible development.