Malayo-Polynesian: New Stones in the Wall

Abstract

Some linguistic subgroups are established by exclusively shared innovations that affect scores or even hundreds of lexical items. This is true of the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian, where the merger of PAN *p and *b, of the palatal obstruents *c, *z, *s (plus *j in all but the languages of the Admiralty Islands), and of *e (schwa) and the diphthong *-aw left effects that are widely attested in the lexicon. The preliminary (and now very much dated) list of roughly 700 POc forms in Grace 1969, for example, contains at least 93 items reflecting pre-POc *p or *b, and at least 18 reflecting pre-POc *mp or *mb. There are thus over Ioo lexical items in this list alone that exemplify the loss of the voicing distinction between *p and *b or their prenasalized equivalents in Proto-Oceanic. The number of lexical items in the Grace list that are affected by the merger of the palatals (79) and of *e and *-aw (82) is smaller, but nonetheless substantial. The phonological evidence for a Malayo-Polynesian subgroup containing all of the Austronesian languages spoken outside the island of Taiwan differs fundamentally from that for Oceanic in that most of the exclusively shared phonological innovations found in MP languages are either sporadic, or apply under very restricted conditions. There are at least two exceptions to this statement. First, many of the Formosan languages distinguish *C from *t or *N from *n (or both), and no non-Formosan language does. The apparent merger of *C with *t and of *N with *n in MP languages affects a fairly large number of lexical items, but it has been argued that these segmental distinctions are historically secondary products of earlier stress contrasts (Wolff 1991).' Second, although PAN *S is reflected as a sibilant in nearly all Formosan languages (Blust 1999:43), it invariably appears as h,