Gondawanaland BhAsha?

[witzel at HUSC3.HARVARD.EDU]

Thanks for another comic relief!

Someone seems to have taken the geographical designation of the 
pre-continental shift, jurassic Gaia seriously...

Dravidian (Gondi) of course has no relation with the Australian languages 
-- unless you believe the new trend, "Mother Tongue" linguists with the 
African Eve speaking "gondwani"...

Just take a brief look at, e.g. S.W. Wurm,(ed.),  Australian Linguistic 
Studies, = Pacific Linguistics,Series C- No. 54, Austr. National University
1979. (or ask our Indological colleague at Canberra, Dr. Hercus 
who studies these languages as well).

Of course some of the Austr. languages have retroflex (cerebral) sounds
(Wurm, p.  452 sqq.) , -- but so do some Scandinavians, Dutch -- and
Americans... 

Though the chaotic carnival is over since ASH WEDNESDAY, there still are 
3 weeks to go until the FIRST of APRIL!!!

Cheers, M. Witzel.


On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Yvette C. Rosser wrote:

> I read that the language spoken by some tribal groups in central India
> (Gonda?) is related to the language spoken by Aborigines in Australia.  If
> this is true--would someone please cite some research on this topic?  [If
> it is not true, it it certainly a facinating bit of academic folklore.]
> 
> Thank you,
> Yvette Rosser
> 
> 
> 
>