I got this from a forum and thought it may be relevant to what's discussed here.
Swamy
‘Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese, is an unique project being
led by Dr. Anvita Abbi, Professor of Linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University to study the language of this threatened community. It has
been suggested that the Andamanese languages might be the last
representative of South East Asia's ancient pre-Neolithic languages.
Dr. Abbi’s project has created considerably new understanding of the
Great Andamanese community – giving us a descriptive grammar of the
language, a socio-linguistic description, an archive of their folklore,
oral texts and video recordings and also a trilingual dictionary. “The
biggest breakthrough,†says Dr. Abbi, “is that we been able to identify
the Great Andamanse as the Sixth language family of India while Onge and
Jarawa (the other two indigenous communities of the Andamans) constitute
a different family altogether. No other Indian language has even a
slight resemblance to the verb structures of the Great Andamanese langauge."
Another aspect of the language that fascinates Dr. Abbi is its
terminology of the body. “The body,†she explains, “is divided into four
basic zones. These are (1) the mouth and its semantic extension (2) the
major external body parts (3) the extreme ends of the body like toe and
fingernails etc and (4) the bodily products. A detailed study of the
possessive constructions in Great Andamanese shows that ethnoanatomy and
kinship share the same level of categorization and there is a parallel
between certain body parts and kin relations.â€
In the language therefore there is a parallel between major body parts
of an individual and his/her spouse. Similarly parents and younger
siblings are compared to one’s mouth cavity whereas a child and sweat
are both considered products from the body.
Time is categorized as the honey calendar which is itself based on the
name of the blooming flowers at that particular time. Honey,
significantly occupies a special place in the pattern of subsistence and
movement of the Great Andamanese and also the other communities like the
Onge of Little Andaman Island.
An excellent benchmark of the status of a people is the status of their
language; the converse is just as true and we get an excellent
illustration of this when we look at the Great Andamanese people. “Only
four of the original Great Andamanese languages are spoken today,†says
Dr. Abbi and “there are only a handful of these people who can speak
their ancestoral language today.†The number was eight a few months ago
and is now down to six with the passing away of two of them. The
language and the people are both on the brink.
You can hear sound recordings of more than 40 songs of the Great
Andamanese online at
http://www.andamanese.net/songs/htm