Dear Roger,
Many thanks for these
references. It's great to have a "resident Austronesianist" on the
list!
Piotr
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2001 6:58
AM
Subject: [tied] Re: *dan-
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