Maju: &quot;I do think it is lack of rigor on your...

Maju: "I do think it is lack of rigor on your side to insist on such correlation when the evidence is so weak and contradictory."

The problem, Maju, is that you are the one who is continually insisting, not me. I am sorry to have offended you, especially because your contribution to this blog has been so great and so frequently positive. I would rather have you here nitpicking than have you go off in a huff because even when you nitpick I learn something of value.

But you (and German also) continually assume I am taking certain positions when I am not. I see the correlation between tone language and music as a clue that could be extremely fruitful and if I insist on anything, it is on the importance of pursuing such a possibility.

You seem to feel that if it's not 100% then it can't be right and can safely be dismissed -- and to me that is nitpicking, sorry. I see no need to prove something at a point when I am simply exploring it as a possibility.

Face it. There are significant instances of tone language in greater SE Asia. There is no denying it. And while it is true that there are many non-tonal languages as well, we know that the most widespread of these, Austronesian, is recent and must have supplanted many of the languages that had been in place earlier. I'll be having more to say about this issue in future posts and you can snipe at me then if you like, but I see no point in using Austronesian as a counter-example when we have no way of knowing what the picture was before its expansion in this region. When you use it as a counter-example anyway, then you give yourself away, Maju, as someone who is simply looking for whatever couter-example you can find, instead of seriously thinking through the problem. And by the way this is not just my problem but a problem for anyone genuinely interested in understanding why there is such a huge cultural (not only musical) gap between Africa and greater South East Asia.