F. de Carvalho on the Relationship between the Arawakan and Arawan Languages of South America
On June 11, at the regular meeting of the Nostratic Seminar Fernando O. de Carvalho (Universidade Federal do Amapá, Brazil) will present his talk “On the relationship between the Arawakan and Arawan families of South America: A (so far) unwritten chapter in Western Amazonian language history”
Hypothesized long-range relationships, no matter how contentious or controversial, are usually anchored to an established set of core data, in the form of proposed etymologies or other presumed evidence, whose existence is accepted by all sides in the debate, with most of the controversy concerning the best interpretation of these patterns (that is, whether diffusion, shared ancestry or sheer accidental similarity accounts for these data; see e.g., Evans 2005 on Pama-Nyungan; and Georg et al. 1999 on Altaic). In South America, however, this is seldom the case. In recent history, many hypothesized relationships have been dismissed based only on the selective criticism of the weakest comparisons found in pioneering proposals, the strength of opinion of a few influential linguists being arguably another significant factor. An undesirable consequence of these evaluations - which are often brief and perfunctory - is that research on the claimed relationships is often stalled, as if the attested similarities had been successfully explained away as either accidental convergences or the result of historically late loanword diffusion.
REFERENCES
Dixon, R. M. W. 2004. Proto-Arawá phonology. Anthropological Linguistics 46 (1): 1-83.
Ehrenreich, Paul. 1897. Materialen zur Sprachenkunde zumals Brasiliens: Vokabulare von Purus Stämme. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 29: 59-71.
Evans, Nicholas. 2005. Australian languages reconsidered: A review of Dixon (2002). Oceanic Linguistics 44 (1): 216-260.
Georg, Stefan, Peter Michalove, Alexis Manaster Ramer and Paul Sidwell. 1999. Telling general linguists about Altaic. Journal of Linguistics 35 (1): 65-99.
The seminar will take place online on June 11, 2021, at 8.30pm (Moscow time)