Toward a Proto-Pama-Nyungan Stem List, Part I: Sets J1-J25

Abstract

This tabular display of 25 Proto-Pama-Nyungan stems in * j- and their reflexes represents a small part of a Top Down type of study embracing ten of the thirteen initial consonants (i.e., all but velars, under which rubric 1,561 putative cognate sets are presented in Fitzgerald 1997a). Data from sixty languages are used; of these, about 30 figure prominently in the comparisons. Some cognates span the entire width of the Australian continent. The uncovering of such cognates-at-a-distance throws further useful light on the vast Pama-Nyungan language family, which occupied seven-eighths of the area of Australia. The degree of plausibility of each putative cognate is quantified on a scale from zero to five, in keeping, for example, with the Kluge etymological dictionary of German, which qualifies many etymologies with vielleicht' perhaps, unklar' unclear, and so forth. The work is conducted in the belief, contra Heath (1994), that the reconstructible lexicon of Proto-Pama-Nyungan will ultimately amount not to a mere few dozen, but rather to several thousand. This accords with Hale's (pers, comm., 1961) assertion that Pama-Nyungan is the largest coherent genetic linguistic construct in Australia. The tabulation of the 25 cognate sets is preceded by a discussion of a number of problems on the phonological, morphological, and semantic levels that arise in Pama-Nyungan comparative work. Interestingly, a number of these problems, such as sporadic word-initial nasal gradation, sporadic medial prenasalization, and sporadic vowel fronting, have parallels in Austronesian