Bulletin

Issue: October 2004

News

Languages, Genes, and Prehistory

How did the English language arrive in Great Britain? How does 'language' develop among any of the diverse cultures that inhabit this planet today?'

Few people in the world have made as much sense of this 'tower of babble' as Bernard Comrie - a man described by his colleagues as the 'Linguists' linguist'.

Extending linguistics into archaeology and psychology - and exploring its connection with genetics - Professor Comrie recently visited La Trobe University's Research Centre for Linguistic Typology where he gave a public lecture titled: Languages, Genes, and Prehistory.

Professor Comrie said one of the most important tasks facing linguists today is the preservation of endangered languages - which is also one of the main roles of La Trobe University's Research Centre for Linguistic Typology.

Professor Comrie is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Research Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, US. He said inter-disciplinary research was bringing together linguists, geneticists, and archaeologists and is throwing new light on 'hitherto intractable questions relating to prehistoric human population movements'.

To illustrate, he used four case studies: the origin of the Haruai people of Papua New Guinea; the arrival of Turkic languages in Azerbaijan; the Indo-Europeanisation of Europe; and possible scenarios for the arrival of the English language in Great Britain.

While at La Trobe, Professor Comrie was also awarded the degree Doctor of Letters (honoris causa). Head of La Trobe University's Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, Professor Bob Dixon, said for several decades now the first name linguists think of in connection with linguistic typology is Bernard Comrie.

'No one has done more to advance our understanding of the nature of the human language and its cognitive basis. No other linguist has exhibited such breadth of interest or made such incisive contributions to the field,' Professor Dixon said.

Professor Comrie has written nine books, and his texts are key reference works for linguistics the world over. A leading expert on Russian and other Slavic languages, Professor Comrie wrote The Languages of the Soviet Union for the Cambridge Language Survey series, outlining main features of Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Uralic, Indo-European, Caucasian and Paleo-Siberian languages.

In Leningrad, he worked with speakers of Chukchee and other minority languages of the old Soviet Union. He has undertaken extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea on Haruai, and most recently he has done field work on Tsez, from the north-east Caucasian family.

Other languages on which he has published include Finnish, Tatar, Turkish, Basque, German, Dutch, Polish, Macedonian, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Hindi, Armenian, Yiddish, Maltese, Arabic, Yukaghir, Kamchadal, Ket, Gokana, Huichol, Piaiwi, Khmer, Malayalam, and Kalaw Lagaw Ya, the language of the Western Torres Strait.

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