All,
For your information. Needless to say, comments would be very much appreciated from our in-house linguist(s).
Jacques Cinq-Mars
Whitehouse, Paul, Timothy Usher, Merritt Ruhlen, and William S.-Y. Wang. 2004. Kusunda: An Indo-Pacific language in Nepal. PNAS 101(15): 5692-5695.
Abstract:
The Kusunda people of central Nepal have long been regarded as a relic tribe of South Asia. They are, or were until recently, seminomadic hunter-gatherers, living in jungles and forests, with a language that shows no similarities to surrounding languages. They are often described as shorter and darker than neighboring tribes. Our research indicates that the Kusunda language is a member of the Indo-Pacific family. This is a surprising finding inasmuch as the Indo-Pacific family is located on New Guinea and surrounding islands. The possibility that Kusunda is a remnant of the migration that led to the initial peopling of New Guinea and Australia warrants additional investigation from both a linguistic and genetic perspective.
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