The Proto-Austronesian language (PAN) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austronesian languages, one of the world's major language families. However, Ross (2009) notes that what may be the most divergent languages, Tsou, Rukai, and Puyuma, are not addressed by the reconstructions, which therefore cannot claim to be the protolanguage of the entire family. He calls the unit which has been reconstructed Nuclear Austronesian. Lower-level reconstructions have also been made, and include Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian. Recently, linguists such as Malcolm Ross and Andrew Pawley have built large lexicons for Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Polynesian.
Contents
Phonology
Proto-Austronesian is reconstructed by constructing sets of correspondences among consonants in the various Austronesian languages, according to the comparative method. Although in theory the result should be unambiguous, in practice given the large number of languages there are numerous disagreements, with various scholars differing significantly on the number and nature of the phonemes in Proto-Austronesian. In the past, some disagreements concerned whether certain correspondence sets were real or represent sporadic developments in particular languages. For the currently remaining disagreements, however, scholars generally accept the validity of the correspondence sets but disagree on the extent to which the distinctions in these sets can be projected back to proto-Austronesian or represent innovations in particular sets of daughter languages.
Blust's reconstruction
Below are Proto-Austronesian phonemes reconstructed by Robert Blust, a professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. A total of 25 Proto-Austronesian consonants, 4 vowels, and 4 diphthongs were reconstructed. However, Blust acknowledges that some of the reconstructed consonants are still controversial and debated.
The symbols below are frequently used in reconstructed Proto-Austronesian words.
The Proto-Austronesian vowels are a, i, u, and ə.
The diphthongs, which are diachronic sources of individual vowels, are:
Wolff's reconstruction
In 2010, John Wolff published his Proto-Austronesian reconstruction in Proto-Austronesian phonology with glossary. Wolff reconstructs a total of 19 consonants, 4 vowels (*i, *u, *a, *e, where *e = /ə/), 4 diphthongs (*ay, *aw, *iw, *uy), and syllabic stress.
The following table shows how Wolff's Proto-Austronesian phonemic system differs from Blust's system. Major differences without one-to-one correspondences are highlighted in bold.
Other reconstructions
According to Malcolm Ross, the following aspects of Blust's system are uncontroversial: the labials (p b m w); the velars k ŋ; y; R; the vowels; and the above four diphthongs. There is some disagreement about the postvelars (q ʔ h) and the velars g j, and about whether there are any more diphthongs; however, in these respects, Ross and Blust are in agreement.
The major disagreement concerns the system of coronal consonants. The following discussion is based on Ross 1992.
Dempwolff's reconstruction of Proto-Malayo-Polynesian from the 1930s included dental t d n l; retroflex ṭ ḍ ḷ; and palatal t' d' n'. He also included palatal k' g', which are an additional source of dispute.
Dyen, including data from the Formosan languages, expanded Dempwolff's set of coronal consonants. Dempwolff's ṭ was split into T C Z; ḷ was split into r S X x; t' was split into s1 s2; and l ḍ d' n' k' g' were renotated as L/N D z ñ c j.
Tsuchida, building on Dyen's system, further split d into D1 D2 D3 D4. He also believed that Dyen's c (Dempwolff's k') could not be reconstructed for Proto-Austronesian. (In addition, he split Dyen's w into w W and q into q Q, which were not accepted by later scholars.)
Dahl reduced Tsuchida's D1 D2 D3 D4 into d3 d2 d1 d3 (with the new d3 reflecting the combination of the old D1 and D4) and combined Dyen's S X x into a single phoneme S. He did accept Dyen's c but did not accept his T D. (He also renotated a number of phonemes in ways that were not generally accepted by later scholars.)
Blust based his system on a combination of Dyen, Tsuchida and Dahl, and attempted to reduce the total number of phonemes. He accepted Dahl's reduction of Dyen's S X x into S but did not accept either Tsuchida's or Dahl's split of Dyen's d; in addition, he reduced Dyen's s1 s2 to a single phoneme s. While accepting Dyen's c, he was hesitant about T and D. (More recently, Blust appears to have accepted D but rejected T, and also rejected Z.)
Ross likewise attempted to reduce the number of phonemes, but in a different way:
Ross also reconstructs the coronals somewhat differently. He believes that C S l d3 were all retroflex (respectively, /tʂ/; /ʂ/ or /ʃ/; /ɭ/ or /ɽ/; /ɖ/), and s and L (Blust's N) were dental /s/ and /l/, as opposed to Blust's reconstruction as dental and palatal, respectively. According to Ross, this is based on their outcomes in the Formosan languages and Javanese; although their outcomes as dental/palatal is geographically more distributed, it occurs only in the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which represent a single clade with respect to the Formosan languages.
Sound changes
As Proto-Austronesian transitioned to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian, the phonemic inventories were continually reduced by merging formerly distinct sounds into one sound. Three mergers were observed in the Proto-Austronesian to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian transition, while nine were observed for the Proto-Oceanic to Proto-Polynesian transition. Thus, Proto-Austronesian has the most elaborate sound system, while Proto-Polynesian has the fewest phonemes. For instance, the Hawaiian language is famous for having only eight consonants, while Māori has only ten consonants. This is a sharp reduction from the 25 consonants of the Proto-Austronesian language that was originally spoken in Taiwan or possibly South China.
Blust also observed the following mergers and sound changes between Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian.
However, according to Wolff (2010:241), Proto-Malayo-Polynesian's development from Proto-Austronesian only included the following three sound changes.
Proto-Oceanic merged even more phonemes. This is why modern-day Polynesian languages have some of the most restricted consonant inventories in the world.
Unusual sound changes that occurred within the Austronesian language family are:
Word order
Proto-Austronesian is a verb-initial language (including VSO and VOS word orders), as most Formosan languages, all Philippine languages, some Bornean languages, all Austronesian dialects of Madagascar, and all Polynesian languages are verb-initial. However, most Austronesian (many of which are Oceanic) languages of Indonesia, New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Micronesia are SVO, or verb-medial, languages. SOV, or verb-final, word order is considered to be typologically unusual for Austronesian languages, and is only found in various Austronesian languages of New Guinea and to a more limited extent, the Solomon Islands. This is because SOV word order is very common in the non-Austronesian Papuan languages.
Voice system
The Austronesian languages of Taiwan, Borneo, Madagascar and the Philippines are also well known for their unusual morphosyntactic alignment, which is known as the Austronesian alignment. This alignment was also present in the Proto-Austronesian language. Unlike Proto-Austronesian, however, Proto-Oceanic syntax does not make use of the focus morphology present in Austronesian-aligned languages such as the Philippine languages. In the Polynesian languages, verbal morphology is relatively simple, while the main unit in a sentence is the phrase rather than the word.
Below is a table of John Wolff's Proto-Austronesian voice system from Blust (2009:433). Wolff's "four-voice" system was derived from evidence in various Formosan and Philippine languages.
Interrogatives and case markers
The following table compares Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian question words.
Currently, the most complete reconstruction of the Proto-Austronesian case marker system is offered by Malcolm Ross. The reconstructed case markers are as follows:
Important Proto-Austronesian grammatical words include the ligature *na and locative *i.
Morphology
Morphology and syntax are often hard to separate in the Austronesian languages, particularly the Philippine languages. This is because the morphology of the verbs often affects how the rest of the sentence would be constructed (i.e., syntax).
Affixes
Below are some Proto-Austronesian affixes (including prefixes, infixes, and suffixes) reconstructed by Robert Blust. For instance, *pa- was used for non-stative (i.e., dynamic) causatives, while *pa-ka was used for stative causatives (Blust 2009:282). Blust also noted a p/m pairing phenomenon in which many affixes have both p- and m- forms. This system is especially elaborate in the Thao language of Taiwan.
Reduplication
CV (consonant + vowel) reduplication is very common among the Austronesian languages. In Proto-Austronesian, Ca-reduplicated (consonant + /a/) numbers were used to count humans, while the non-reduplicated sets were used to count non-human and inanimate objects. CV-reduplication was also used to nominalize verbs in Proto-Austronesian. In Ilocano, CV-reduplication is used to pluralize nouns.
Reduplication patterns include (Blust 2009):
Other less common patterns are (Blust 2009):
Pronouns
The Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian personal pronouns below were reconstructed by Robert Blust.
In 2006, Malcolm Ross also proposed seven different pronominal categories for persons. The categories are listed below, with the Proto-Austronesian first person singular ("I") given as examples.
- Neutral (e.g., PAN *i-aku)
- Nominative 1 (e.g., PAN *aku)
- Nominative 2 (e.g., PAN *=ku, *[S]aku)
- Accusative (e.g., PAN *i-ak-ən)
- Genitive 1 (e.g., PAN *=[a]ku)
- Genitive 2 (e.g., PAN *(=)m-aku)
- Genitive 3 (e.g., PAN *n-aku)
The following is from Ross' 2002 proposal of the Proto-Austronesian pronominal system, which contains five categories, including the free (i.e., independent or unattached), free polite, and three genitive categories.
Nouns
Proto-Austronesian vocabulary relating to agriculture and other technological innovations include:
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian innovations include:
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian also has several words for house:
Colors and directions
Below are colors in reconstructed Proto-Austronesian, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian. The first three have been reconstructed by Robert Blust, while the Proto-Polynesian words given below were reconstructed by Andrew Pawley. Proto-Polynesian displays many innovations not found in the other proto-languages.
The Proto-Austronesians used two types of directions, which are the land-sea axis and the monsoon axis. The cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west developed among the Austronesian languages only after contact with the Europeans. For the land-sea axis, upstream/uphill and inland, as well as downstream/downhill and seaward, are synonym pairs. This has been proposed as evidence that Proto-Austronesians used to live on a mainland, since the sea would be visible from all angles on small islands.
Interestingly, in Kavalan, Amis, and Tagalog, the reflexes of *timuR mean "south" or "south wind," while in the languages of the southern Philippines and Indonesia it means "east" or "east wind."
In Ilocano, dáya and láud respectively mean "east" and "west," while in Puyuma, ɖaya and ɭauɖ respectively mean "west" and "east." This is because the Ilocano homeland is the west coast of northern Luzon, while the Puyuma homeland is located on the eastern coast of southern Taiwan. Among the Bontok, Kankanaey, and Ifugaw languages of northern Luzon, the reflexes of *daya mean "sky" due to the fact that they already live in some of the highest elevations in the Philippines (Blust 2009:301).
Also, the Malay reflex of *lahud is laut, which means "sea", used as directions timur laut (means "northeast", timur = "east") and barat laut (means "northwest", barat = "west"). Meanwhile *daya only performs in barat daya, which means "southwest".
On the other hand, the Javanese reflex of *lahud, lor, means "north" since the Java Sea is located to the north of the island of Java.
Numerals
Below are reconstructed Proto-Austronesian, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian numbers from the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database.
The Proto-Austronesian language had different sets of numerals for non-humans ("set A") and humans ("set B") (Blust 2009:279). Cardinal numerals for counting humans are derived from the non-human numerals through Ca-reduplication. This bipartite numeral system is found in Thao, Puyuma, Yami, Chamorro, and various other languages (however, Paiwan uses ma- and manə- to derive human numerals). In many Philippine languages such as Tagalog, the two numeral systems are merged (Blust 2009:280-281).
Proto-Austronesian also used *Sika- to derive ordinal numerals (Blust 2009:281).
Verbs
Below are reconstructed Proto-Austronesian, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian verbs from the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database.
Monosyllabic roots
The following are monosyllabic Proto-Austronesian roots reconstructed by John Wolff (Wolff 1999).