--- In
cybalist@egroups.com, "Torsten Pedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
> As for Proto-Austronesian: As far as I could determine from local
> Lingistics library, PA has only been tentatively reconstructed,
> precisely for the reasons you cite. So I didn't try to find PA
> forms.>
Let this retired (and never very active) Austronesianist de-lurk for
a moment. The reconstruction of Proto Austronesian (usually
abbreviated PAN) is far from tentative; it's just that most of the
work of the past 25-30 years is hidden away in journal articles,
conference papers etc. The vast majority of correspondences were
established by Otto Dempwolff's _Vergleichende Lautlehre des
Austronesiches Wortschatzes_ (1934-37), then somewhat revised after
good descriptions of the Taiwanese languages began to appear around
the 1960s (and ongoing). Much of this is summed up in two fine books
by Otto Chr. Dahl, _Proto Austronesian_ (Lund and London 1973/76) and
_Early Phonetic and Phonemic changes in Austronesian_ (Oslo 1981).
Scheduled for publication last year but still not out, is Robert
Blust's _The Austronesian Languages_ (in the Cambridge series). Since
1975 there have been 8 or 9 International Conferences on AN
Linguistics, whose proceedings have all been published but are,
admittedly, hard to find.
We are not at the level of IE studies-- there is as yet no fully
codified AN comparative grammar, though good work has been done in
some subgroups. And there are major and minor squabbles over
subgrouping and phonological details-- but that's hardly news, even
in IE studies, is it?
My compliments to Cybalist and all members for your constantly
stimulating and instructive discussion. How I wish we AN-ists had a
comparable forum! (There is at least one, but it comes and goes....)
Roger F. Mills