On Wed, 07 Mar 2001 10:24:42 -0000,
tgpedersen@... wrote:
>Because of my wild claims of Sundaland I've had to read some of the
>Proto-Austronesian reconstruction stuff, and they all seem to agree
>that it is impossible to construct neat family trees for Austronesian
>such as are known from Indo-European studies.
There's Austronesian and Austronesian. It's possible to construct a
neat family tree at the highest level, between the Taiwanese groups
(I'm to lazy to look up the names: Tsouic, Atayalic and Paiwanic?) and
all the rest (Malayo-Polynesian). It's easy to set up a neat family
tree dividing Oceanic from the rest of MP, but it's diffcult to
subclassify that "rest". Within Oceanic, the family tree for
Polynesian is crystal clear, but it's hard to subclassify the
so-called "Melanesian" and "Micronesian" groups.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...