Towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond)

该项目的主要目标将是确定南亚的史前语言接触，方法是检查该地区不同语系，尤其是南亚中东部地区的语言的形态句法模式的分布情况，并检查这些语言的潜在区域和谱系趋势，不断在该地区和整个南亚已知历史的背景下观察这一信息。为了实现这一目标，该团队将编制一个细粒度的形态句法数据库，涵盖核心区约150种语言和整个南亚地区的精选语言。最后，该项目将通过开展关于该地区几种鲜为人知的语言的实地工作，极大地促进我们目前对该地区语言的了解。

The primary goal of the project will be to determine prehistoric language contacts in South Asia by examining the distribution of morphosyntactic patterns in languages of the region from different families, above all in eastern-central South Asia, and checking these for potential areal and genealogical trends, constantly viewing this information against the backdrop of what is known of the history of this region and South Asia in general. To achieve this goal, the team will compile a fine-grained morphosyntactic database on up to ca. 150 languages from the core area and selected languages from throughout South Asia. Finally, the project will contribute considerably to our present knowledge of the languages of this region by conducting field work on several languages of the region on which very little is known.