Part of
In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory: Essays in the four fields of anthropologyEdited by John D. Bengtson
[Not in series 145] 2008
► pp. 287–307
The work of the Italian linguists Alfredo Trombetti and Riccardo Gatti on their hypothesis of genetic relationship between the languages of the Andaman Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, and the Dravidian languages is discussed in detail. It is shown that Trombetti and Gatti had formulated a coherent precursor of the “Indo-Pacific” hypothesis (Greenberg 1971) by 1906.