Dear All,

Re: Blench et al. (below) on a South-East Asian origin of Munda (and other Austroasiatic languages), the opposite position has been argued by P. Donegan and D. Stampe (U. Hawai’i, Mānoa) :

P Donegan, D Stampe. Rhythm and the synthetic drift of Munda. The yearbook of South Asian languages …, 2004

The polarity of Munda vs Mon-Khmer recalls that of ancient vs modern Indo-European:
synthetic head-last vs analytic head-first (Lehmann 1974). But Munda and Mon-Khmer are
far more divergent. Indo-European was never/w/ysynthetic, but many Munda languages are...

The Munda (South Asian) and Mon-Khmer (South-East Asian) branches of the Austroasiatic
language family are so exactly opposite at every level of structure that Sir George Grierson
in his Linguistic Survey of India remarked that if they were descended from a common ...

http://www.rogerblench.info/Ar chaeology/SE%20Asia/Blench%20A A%20prehistory%20final.pdf

Munda people expansion is said to be only from 3500 BP.

Reconstructing Austroasiatic prehistory

by Roger Blench,

Chapter in Jenny, M. & P. Sidwell (eds.) 2015. Handbook of the Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.

Dear All,

Re: Blench et al. (below) on a South-East Asian origin of Munda (and other Austroasiatic languages), the opposite position has been argued by P. Donegan and D. Stampe (U. Hawai’i, Mānoa) :

P Donegan, D Stampe. Rhythm and the synthetic drift of Munda. The yearbook of South Asian languages …, 2004

P Donegan, D Stampe. South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages: Evidence for the analytic-to-synthetic drift of Munda Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual …, 2002.