ABSTRACT
The value of island groups in reconstructing the match of language and material culture can hardly be over-emphasised. Just as biogeographers study islands because they represent an ecosystem with arguably limited intrusions from external elements, so linguists can take the same approach. Tryon's study of the link between material culture and language distribution in the archipelago of Vanuatu is possible because all the languages of the archipelago are Austronesian and, with a few exceptions, form part of a single subgroup of Oceanic. Vanuatu also certainly has the greatest number of languages in relation to the size of its population of any nation-state, which - although possibly troublesome for administrators - is a boon to historical linguists. An early study of the material culture of Vanuatu was carried out by Speiser (1923), a German ethnographer working in the Kulturkreislehre tradition, and his distributions map remarkably well against the synchronic pattern of Vanuatu language subgroups. In Vanuatu, pottery was once widespread throughout the
One of the richest sources of partly-known ancient scripts and languages is the ancient circum-Mediterranean world. The present dominance of just two phyla, Indo-European and Afroasiatic, in the region can hardly reflect the situation three to four millennia ago. Ancient writers, especially Greek, often refer to unidentified peoples and cultures, and we know from the existence of Basque and Etruscan that the whole region must have once exhibited an ethnolinguistic diversity and complexity resembling present-day Central Asia. Fragments of inscriptions in partly decipherable languages continue to be discovered, and, as they are translated, the processes of assimilation and incorporation in ancient Europe will become more apparent. Although modern-day Indo-European languages are presumably rich in substrate phenomena, the process of identifYing and classifYing such phenomena has hardly begun. Indo-Europeanists and Semiticists generally seem happier with the analysis of personal names and toponyms - presumably because they believe they are less speculative. Beekes (1995) represents a broad overview of the recent findings in relation to Indo-European.
