This is a reply to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nostratic/message/819 , viz:

> Have you gleaned any further information on the web concerning

Austric?

which is itself a reply to the original of
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Nostratica/message/2 .

Dear Gerry,
There isn't a great deal available on the web. However, I
have yet to check out Starostin's 'Tower of Babel' at
http://starling.rinet.ru/babel.htm . It may hold more than first
meets the eye, which is already a great deal.

The best sources of information I've found are at or linked to from
the Mother Tongue web site, at
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/aslip.html . In particular,
there is a comparative Austro-Asiatic Austronesian glossary at
http://home.att.net/~lvhayes/Langling/langpg3.htm . On the relations
of Tai-Kadai to the group, there is an interesting news article at
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mt25g.html . There are
tales of a very informative reconstruction of Proto-Tai-Kadai by Weera
Ostapirat, but it seems to buried in Weera's thesis. He believes
Tai-Kadai's part of Austric. Maybe there's a book on the way, but
we've not heard of it. See the thread starting at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/austric/message/204 for what I can glean
on this topic.

I think I can see why Austro-Tai has been built on a comparison of Tai
and Austronesian, rather than Tai and Austro-Asiatic. Austric words
in Proto-Austronesian (PAN) typically have a structure C1VC2VC3 where
C1V is a fossilised prefix in many ways comparable to a Semitic or
Indo-European root extension. In Austro-Asiatic, there are many
alternative prefixes for a given C2VC3 root, and clearly there may
well have been others that are not preserved. It is common for the
few prefixes observed in PAN not to be attested with the same root in
Austro-Asiatic. In Proto-Tai, at least in Benedict's re-construction
of Austro-Tai, the form collapses to C12'VC3', where C12' is largely
dependent on C1 and may be of the form CR or C (R = l, r, w, possibly
y), and C3' is one of about 8 permitted finals. Given C12'VC3', there
are then many possible choices for C2VC3, so one can easily propose
false cognates. The PAN options for C1VC2VC3 are far fewer, so one
can have greater confidence in the reconstruction if one finds a
match.

It's not quite as simple as this. An Austric root C2VC3 can produce a
C2VC4VC3 or C2VC3VC5 word, but this doesn't seem as common, and I
think C4 and C5 are more tightly constrained.

If I've got this wrong, please post the criticism on the Austric
group. Austric is largely off-topic here.

Torsten Pedersen and I are planning to examine Paul Manansala's
Austric-PIE links, which Torsten thinks extend to Afro-Asiatic, on the
Austronesian list (kick-off message
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/austronesian/message/373 ). Everyone's
thinking in terms of loans (or coincidence). You'd have to join this
group to watch the fun, which hasn't started yet. The group has a
couple of big names in it, and Piotr's acting as the local expert on
Sanskrit and net-usage.

Richard.