Origins of linguistic zonation in the Australian Alps. part 1 - Huygens' principle

The hitherto poorly recorded boundaries of extinct traditional south-east-Australian Aboriginal languages can now be redetermined with greatly improved precision using an entropy-maximizing phonetic-signature calculated from existing data sources, including old word-lists and census forms, that have, until now, largely been considered informationally worthless. Having thus determined traditional Aboriginal language zones to a previously unimaginable degree of geographical precision, it is argued that these boundaries should not be viewed merely as a static 'snapshot' but, instead, as the end-product of a knowable dynamic process (Gillieron wave propagation) governed by well-known physical rules (such as Huygens' principle and Snell's Law) and operating over 'deep' time-scales more familiar to the archaeologist than the linguist. Although this initial study is limited to south-eastern Australia, the new methodology provides the first real hope of obtaining a detailed understanding of language dispersal throughout the entire continent over the past 60,000 years.     

Origins of Linguistic Zonation in the Australian Alps. Part 2 - Snell's Law

In this second paper, analysing archival SE-Australian Aboriginal word/name lists, Snell's Law is used to deduce the likely minimal sound-systems of pre Ice-Age language superfamilies - some probably dating back beyond the first occupation of Australia by humans. The deduced 'Turuwal-like' ancestral sound-system is then used as a basis for reconstructing deictic forms apparently so ancient that they seem to even unify 'PamaNyungan' and 'non-PamaNyungan' language within a single system of formal logic which, having apparently provided the semantic basis for at least 60,000 years of speech throughout the entire Australian continent, deserves to be called proto-Australian regardless of whether or not it arose in SE-Asia tens of millennia before. Whatever the exact age of this reconstructed proto-Australian, presented here for the first time, it is an order of magnitude older than any known human language and, as such, a 'Rosetta Stone' for human languages worldwide. It also provides an unprecedented window into human consciousness and perception of the world up to 75,000 years ago, which is especially significant given that humans can only have engaged in finely controlled speech and fully modern language since chance mutation of our FOXP2 gene about 120,000 years ago. These truly ancient deictic forms dating halfway back to the beginning of modern human speech, retrieved only through modern statistical analysis, provide insight into our very origins and as such are perhaps amongst the most precious cultural treasures that humanity currently possesses.1     

Phono-genesis and the Origin of Accusative Syntax in Proto-Australian Language

It is claimed that a set of 62 known (Illert, 2003) ancient Aboriginal words constitute a representative sample of the original proto-Australian lexicon whose maximum likelihood (Fisher, 1912) 'power law signature' is determined and shown to precisely fit genetically related 'modern' lexicons from south-eastern-Australia. This measure of 'sameness' builds the confidence required to justify inter-lexicon diachronic word- frequency comparisons which provide a powerful new statistical tool capable of revealing important features of ancestral grammar. This paper supplies the first ever published modern translations of authentic traditional language documented in obscure literary and archival sources which have, until recently, been lost (Dawes, 1790b; Wood, 1924; Troy, 1992) or overlooked (Everitt et al., 1900; Illert, 2001) for centuries. These newly found examples of accusative syntax supported by word- frequency data may come as quite a surprise to some linguists (Dixon, 1980; Osmond, 1989; Troy, 1992; Nichols, 1993) who, in the absence of adequate evidence, seem to have long-imagined that language from this region—if not the entire continent— simply had to be inherently and at the core ergative. On the contrary we find that changing word-frequencies, from proto-Australian to modern times, supply overwhelming evidence of the emergence of ancient accusative prefixes which have even survived into recent centuries in the Sydney region. Additionally it is found that, over millennia, words die-off in a lexicon, replaced by others, according to the famous "mortality law' of Gompertz (1825) which also describes the likelihood of death of biological organisms within populations and is the basis for modern actuarial science (Bowers et al., 1997). Just as disease and epidemics can wipe out entire cohorts of creatures from a population, so too can syntactic change annihilate word-classes in an evolving lexicon.     

Lexigenesis in ancestral south-east Australian Aboriginal language

The 1/x frequency distribution is known to researchers ranging from economists and biologists to electronic engineers. It is known to linguists as Zipf's Law (Zipf, 1949) and has recently been shown not to be a consequence of the Central Limit Theorem (Troll & Graben, 1998)--leaving an "unsolved problem' in information theory (Jones, 1999). This 1/x distribution, associated with scale-invariant physical systems (Machlup & Hoshiko, 1980), is a special case of the general power law x^λ arising from the Lagrangian L(x,[Fdot](x)) = ½x^1-λ[Fdot]² and, as λ need not be an integer, some related research understandably involves fractals (Allison et al. , 2001). The present paper generalizes this Lagrangian to include a van der Waals effect. It is argued that ancestral Aboriginal language consisted of root-morphemes that were built up into, and often condensed within, subsequent words or lexemes. Using discrete-optimization techniques pioneered elsewhere (Illert, 1987; Reverberi, 1985), and the new morpho-statistics, this paper models lexeme-condensation in ancestral south-east Australian Aboriginal language.