By K Alexander Adelaar, Nikolaus Himmelmann
Some 800 Austronesian languages are spoken within the zone extending from Madagascar to japanese Indonesia and to the north to Taiwan and the Philippines. they range vastly in nearly each attainable admire, together with the scale and social makeup of the speech groups and their typological profiles. This e-book is designed to function a reference paintings and in-depth advent to those languages, supplying a resource of uncomplicated details for linguists and different execs excited by this region. It highlights the cultural and linguistic variety of this crew of languages whereas even as keeping an eye on their universal heritage.
Five introductory articles on linguistic heritage, language politics, language endangerment, ritual speech and distinct registers, and significant typological positive aspects have the whole region of their scope and supply a balanced and updated dialogue of the most important concerns. The middle of the amount involves grammatical sketches of twenty languages plus 3 chapters facing diversified elements of Malay (Old Malay, Malayic kinds and Colloquial Indonesian), representing an exceptional cross-section of the linguistic range present in the area.
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Extra resources for The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar
Example text
However, the obvious merit of Blust’s classification is that it is more systematic and provides a better working hypothesis for further research than Ferrell (1969) and other classifications involving Formosan languages (see below). (2) Dyen (1963) and Tsuchida (1976) suggested that the Formosan languages together form a primary branch of Austronesian. Blust’s classification of Formosan languages into nine primary branches clearly precludes the existence of such a unitary branch. The idea of one primary branch reappears in the nineties in an expanded form (including Philippine languages, see below).
Their overlapping distribution shows that CMP languages must have developed from a linkage, and not from a (basically uniform) protolanguage. But, as implied in Ross (1995:82), the partly overlapping distribution of various innovations does weaken the argument for CMP. According to Blust, CEMP is easier to demonstrate than CMP. Nevertheless, the morphosyntactic evidence for CEMP is also problematic. Blust adduces two innovations: (1) the use of proclitic subject markers on the verb; and (2) a morphologically marked distinction between alienable and inalienable possession.
Dyen and Tsuchida (1991) conclude that Formosan and Philippine languages do form a single primary branch on account of the large amount of vocabulary that these languages share. Wolff (1995) reaches the same conclusion on the basis of shared vocabulary as well as of some striking typological similarities in verbal morphosyntax. Others (Blust 1995, 1999, Ross 1995) reject a Philippine-Formosan branch. Blust is able to show that part of the lexical evidence amassed by Dyen, Tsuchida and Wolff is not exclusively shared between Formosan and Philippine languages and is therefore not critical for a subgrouping (Blust 1995:606–616), nor is there lexical evidence for a Formosan primary branch (Blust 1995:594–606).
