Reception
The Indo-Pacific proposal was based on rough estimation of lexical similarity and typological similarity and has not reached a stage where it can be confirmed by the standard comparative method, including the reconstruction of a protolanguage. The greatest controversy concerns the geographic outliers, Andamanese and Tasmanian. The Ongan languages may form part of a family with Austronesian, and thus not be part of Indo-Pacific (Blevins, 2007). The languages of Tasmania are extinct and so poorly attested that many historical linguists regard them as unclassifiable. Roger Blench calls Indo-Pacific "one of the more improbable macrophyla hypotheses in linguistics", observing that while it "purported to be a purely linguistic exercise...it conveniently swept up all the languages of the crinklyhaired populations in the region that were not clearly Austronesian." He writes that despite decades of further research into Papuan languages and prehistory, Indo-Pacific still has "almost no assent from specialists in the field" and that it "only exists in the eye of the believer."
Since Greenberg's work, the languages of New Guinea have been intensively studied by Stephen Wurm. Ruhlen writes that Wurm's Trans–New Guinea languages family includes about 70 percent of the languages Greenberg included in Indo-Pacific, though the internal classification is entirely different. Wurm states that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese, the West Papuan languages (which are not part of Trans–New Guinea), and certain languages of Timor "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity in a number of instances", but considers this to be due to a linguistic substratum rather than a direct relationship.
Read more about this topic: Indo-Pacific Languages
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