From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From ancient Cham to modern dialects: Two thousand years of language contact and change by Graham Thurgood Edward J. Vajda From ancient Cham to modern dialects: Two thousand years of language contact and change. By Graham Thurgood. (Oceanic linguistics special publication 28.) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 407. ISBN 0824821319. $48. Austronesian is one of the world’s most geographically dispersed families, with an internal diversification that has provided a showcase for the application of traditional historical-comparative methodology. This is because many branches of Austronesian came to occupy previously uninhabited islands or areas only sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers, thereby developing in situations where contact-induced change was of minimal significance. The Chamic subgroup that established itself about two millennia ago on the southern coast of present-day Vietnam, by contrast, entered into a long-term interaction with significant numbers of Mon-Khmer-speaking farmers. This eventually yielded radical phonological changes in every modern Chamic language vis-à-vis its more distant Malayo-Polynesian relatives. In this pioneering book, Graham Thurgood produces the first thorough diachronic analysis of these developments by exploring the complex historical interplay between processes of internal drift and externally induced language change. T links each linguistic development to historical events, such as the Vietnamese sacking of Champa’s northern capital in 982 and southern capital in 1471. These disasters, along with the inexorable push southward along the coast by Vietnamese wet rice farmers, led directly to the overseas dispersal of Chamic speakers to northern Sumatra (Acehnese) and Hainan (Tsat) and to the marginalization of those remaining on the mainland, who retreated to the inland portions of southern Vietnam and Cambodia where most Chamic languages are spoken today. Along the way, each language developed new contacts with different Mon-Khmer subgroups that produced a unique set of phonological effects. T’s success in chronologizing these historical and linguistic changes allows an unprecedented opportunity to document an intense, long-term series of contact-induced changes involving two language families with radically different phonological typologies (Malayo-Polynesian and Mon-Khmer). The book consists of ten chapters, two appendices, a bibliography (379–94), an author index (395–98), and a topic index (399–407). Appendix 1 (261–75) provides a thumbnail sketch of the phonemic inventory of each modern Chamic language accompanied by the transliteration devices used by major researchers; exhaustive commentary on competing language names is also included. Appendix 2 is a lengthy Chamic-English lexicon with concomitant discussion of loanwords and their probable origins (277–378) followed by a general English-Chamic index (365–78). The book’s main discussion begins with an introduction (Ch. 1), an overview of the relevant geography and history (Ch. 2) including maps showing the modern distribution of Chamic languages (23, 28), and an overview of Chamic internal classification (Ch. 3). T demonstrates beyond all doubt that Acehnese, despite its modern dialectal complexity, is simply another Chamic language without any special genetic closeness to the geographically contiguous Malayic languages. The next five chapters examine specific facets of phonological change, with careful attention to the individual variations that arose within each of the modern Chamic languages: The development of basic monosyllabicity from an original disyllabic word type (Ch. 4), changes in Chamic consonants (Ch. 5), vowel quality (Ch. 6), nasality in vowels (Ch. 7), and the origin of registers and tones from an originally nontonal Proto-Chamic (Ch. 8). Ch. 9 describes select aspects of Proto-Chamic morphology, and Ch. 10 returns to the role played by multilingualism in the linguistic accommodation of a Malayo-Polynesian language to mainland Southeast Asia. The most salient feature of all of these developments seems to be that, in addition to the expected role of loanwords in introducing new phonotactic combinations, much of the phonological restructuring of Chamic represents a case in which familiarity with a significantly different phonological and morphological language type has radically affected the outcome of language-internal drift. Under the influence of neighboring Mon-Khmer languages, the evenly-stressed disyllabic form of Proto-Chamic shifted to a strongly end-stressed ‘iambic’ word type. This led to the steady erosion of phonemic contrasts in the unstressed syllable and...