A Festschrift for Robert Blust
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Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past Robert Blust University of Hawai‘I, Honolulu, Hawai‘I, [email protected]
Human Biology Volume 85 Issue 1 Special Issue on Revisiting the "Negrito" Article 18 Hypothesis 2013 Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past Robert Blust University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu, Hawai‘i, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Biological and Physical Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Blust, Robert (2013) "Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past," Human Biology: Vol. 85: Iss. 1, Article 18. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol/vol85/iss1/18 Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past Abstract Within recorded history. most Southeast Asian peoples have been of "southern Mongoloid" physical type, whether they speak Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, or Hmong-Mien languages. However, population distributions suggest that this is a post-Pleistocene phenomenon and that for tens of millennia before the last glaciation ended Greater Mainland Southeast Asia, which included the currently insular world that rests on the Sunda Shelf, was peopled by short, dark-skinned, frizzy-haired foragers whose descendants in the Philippines came to be labeled by the sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers as "negritos," a term that has since been extended to similar groups throughout the region. There are three areas in which these populations survived into the present so as to become part of written history: the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, and the Andaman Islands. All Philippine negritos speak Austronesian languages, and all Malayan negritos speak languages in the nuclear Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic, but the linguistic situation in the Andamans is a world apart. -
The Austronesian Languages of Taiwan, with Special Reference to Siraya
1 Paper in progress: please do not quote without permission of the author The Austronesian languages of Taiwan, with special reference to Siraya Alexander Adelaar Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies The University of Melbourne 1. Introduction This paper discusses the indigenous or Formosan (indigenous) languages of Taiwan, with special attention to Siraya. In Section 2, it provides a survey of these languages detailing their numbers of speakers, and in Section 3 it explains their genetic affiliations (vis-à-vis each other as well as within the wider context of Austronesian languages elsewhere). In Section 4, the paper explains the great importance of these languages for Southeast Asian archaeology, and in Section 5 the increasing relevance of the Formosan population for Taiwanese politics and nationalism. One of the Formosan languages, Siraya, is now extinct, although it was once one of the most widely spoken languages in south western Taiwan. Some indications on the location of this language are given in Section 6, and notes on the history and ethnography of its speakers are given in Section 7. Section 8 reports on the efforts that are being made for the revival of Siraya. Section 9 gives an overview of the linguistic data of Siraya. Finally, Section 10 discusses some unusual characteristics of Siraya grammar. 2. Formosan languages: numbers of speakers and vitality In the seventeenth century there were at least 25 indigenous languages spoken on Taiwan, and they were all Austronesian. Today, ten of these have become extinct1, and at least five others are on the verge of extinction2; languages that are not under immediate threat of extinction are those spoken by the Amis (168,548), Atayal (87,649), Bunun (46,783), Paiwan (79,497), Puyuma (1,090), Rukai (11,263), Saisyiat (5,477), Truku (7,844), Tsou (6,049) and Yami (3,572); (Council of Indigenous Peoples 2005)3. -
Research Note
Research Note The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary: A Work in Progress Robert Blust and Stephen Trussel UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA AND TRUSSEL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT The Austronesian comparative dictionary (ACD) is an open-access online resource that currently (June 2013) includes 4,837 sets of reconstructions for nine hierarchically ordered protolanguages. Of these, 3,805 sets consist of single bases, and the remaining 1,032 sets contain 1,032 bases plus 1,781 derivatives, including affixed forms, reduplications, and compounds. His- torical inferences are based on material drawn from more than 700 attested languages, some of which are cited only sparingly, while others appear in over 1,500 entries. In addition to its main features, the ACD contains sup- plementary sections on widely distributed loanwords that could potentially lead to erroneous protoforms, submorphemic “roots,” and “noise” (in the information-theoretic sense of random lexical similarity that arises from historically independent processes). Although the matter is difficult to judge, the ACD, which prints out to somewhat over 3,000 single-spaced pages, now appears to be about half complete. 1. INTRODUCTION. 1 The December 2011 issue of this journal carried a Research Note that described the history and present status of POLLEX, the Polynesian Lexicon project initiated by the late Bruce Biggs in 1965, which over time has grown into one of the premier comparative dictionaries available for any language family or major subgroup (Greenhill and Clark 2011). A theme that runs through this piece is the remark- able growth over the 46 years of its life (at that time), not just in the content of the dictio- nary, but in the technological medium in which the material is embedded. -
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Austronesian Homeland: a Critique1
W O R K I N G P A P E R S I N L I N G U I S T I C S The notes and articles in this series are progress reports on work being carried on by students and faculty in the Department. Because these papers are not finished products, readers are asked not to cite from them without noting their preliminary nature. The authors welcome any comments and suggestions that readers might offer. Volume 43(4) September 2012 DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA HONOLULU 96822 An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution Working Papers in Linguistics: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Vol. 43(4) DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS FACULTY 2012 Victoria B. Anderson Andrea Berez Derek Bickerton (Emeritus) Robert A. Blust Lyle Campbell Kenneth W. Cook (Adjunct) Kamil Deen Patricia J. Donegan (Co-Graduate Chair) Katie K. Drager Emanuel J. Drechsel (Adjunct) Michael L. Forman (Emeritus) John H. Haig (Adjunct) Roderick A. Jacobs (Emeritus) William O’Grady Yuko Otsuka Ann Marie Peters (Emeritus, Co-Graduate Chair) Kenneth L. Rehg (Chair) Lawrence A. Reid (Emeritus) Amy J. Schafer Albert J. Schütz, (Emeritus, Editor) Jacob Terrell ii MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON THE AUSTRONESIAN 1 HOMELAND: A CRITIQUE NALA HUIYING LEE Linguistics, archaeology, and genetics have been used to reconstruct the past. Where findings differ, there is a tendency to rely on a hierarchy of reliability in the sciences. With regard to the Austronesian homeland, it has been asserted that linguistics and archaeology rely on each other’s evidence for postulating an Out-of- Taiwan hypothesis. -
R. Blust Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian Vocatives In
R. Blust Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian vocatives In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 135 (1979), no: 2/3, Leiden, 205-251 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:30:17AM via free access ROBERT BLUST PROTO-WESTERN MALAYO-POLYNESIAN VOCATIVES1 The initial problem 1. In comparing the kinship terminology of Austronesian (AN) languages it is not unusual to find apparent cognates which differ in the presence of a synchronically unanalyzable initial or final segment that has thus far resisted historical explanation, as with Sediq tdma?, but Thao ?d : ma?, 'father'.2 That Thao does not regularly reflect the sources of Sediq t (i.e. PAN *G, *t, *T) as zero is clear from é.g. Thao thd : qi? < *Caqi, 'feces', tü : ru? < *telu, 'three'. Because it is repre- sentative of a large class of facts to be considered below, the preceding example may serve as a paradigm case for all those that follow in sect. 1; that is, in none of these cases is the explanation for such segmental disagreements to be sought in regular phonological change, nor — so far as the published sources indicate — in synchronic morphology. It will be convenient to refer to terms of the type Sediq tdma? as long forms (LF) and to terms of the type Thao ?d : ma? as short forrns (SF). Since LF and SF kinship terms can be reconstructed at an equivalent historical level, the explanation of the segments that distinguish them poses a problem of greater than ordinary interest for systematic recon- struction. -
Issues in Austronesian Historical Linguistics
JSEALS Special Publication No. 1 Issues In Austronesian HIstorIcAl LinguIstIcs Edited by Hsiu-chuan Liao 1 © 2017 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved OPEN ACCESS – Semiannual with periodic special publications E-ISSN: 1836-6821 http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52405 Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. JSEALS publishes fully open access content, which means that all articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. Non-commercial use and distribution in any medium is permitted, provided the author and the journal are properly credited. Cover photo courtesy of Alexander Smith. i JSEALS Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Editor-in-Chief Mark Alves (Montgomery College, USA) Managing Editors Nathan Hill (University of London, SOAS, UK) Sigrid Lew (Payap University, Thailand) Paul Sidwell (Australia National University, Australia) Editorial Advisory Committee Marc BRUNELLE (University of Ottawa, Canada) Kamil DEEN ( ) Gerard DIFFLOTH (Cambodia) Rikker DOCKUMUniversity (Yale University of Hawai‘i, USA at Mānoa,) USA San San HNIN TUN (INALCO, France) Kitima INDRAMBARYA (Kasetsart University, Thailand) Peter JENKS (UC Berkeley, USA) Mathias JENNY (University of Zurich, Switzerland) Daniel KAUFMAN (Queens College, City University of New York & Endangered Language Alliance, USA) James KIRBY (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) Hsiu-chuan LIAO (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) Alexis MICHAUD -
R. Blust Austronesian Sibling Terms and Culture History In
R. Blust Austronesian sibling terms and culture history In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 149 (1993), no: 1, Leiden, 22-76 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 07:40:38AM via free access ROBERT BLUST AUSTRONESIAN SIBLING TERMS AND CULTURE HISTORY* 1. The problem Although language families such as Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan have more speakers, the Austronesian language family is the world's second- largest in number of languages, with well over 900 members (Ruhlen 1987). These languages have a wide geographical distribution in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, portions of mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and a variety of Pacific nations located within the broad geographical regions of Mclanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. As with any large and widely distributed collection of languages or cultures, there is a great deal of linguistic and cultural diversity among the Austronesian- speaking peoples. Since they reflect a common ancestral tradition, the differences among these various languages and cultures must have arisen through an accumulation of gradual linguistic and cultural changes over many generations. It is the task of the comparative linguist to reconstruct as much as can be recovered of the language which existed before these changes. Because language and culture are interconnected in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways, the reconstruction of particular linguistic features may under favourable circumstances also entail the reconstruction of interconnected features of culture. Somewhat over a decade ago I argued on the basis of comparative linguistic evidence that early Austronesian (AN) society had ancestor- oriented kin groups (descent groups), matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (hereafter simply 'matrilateral cousin marriage'), dual divisions and some * ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am indebted to Alice Dewey, Gregory Forth, Rodney Needham and Andrew Pawley for critical comments which led to improvements in an earlier version of this paper. -
Monguor; Sketch Grammar of the Karlong Variety
SKETCH GRAMMAR OF THE KARLONG VARIETY OF MONGGHUL, AND DIALECTAL SURVEY OF MONGGHUL A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIT IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS DECEMBER 2007 By Burgel R.M. Faehndrich Dissertation Committee: Alexander Vovin, Chairperson Robert Blust Kenneth Rehg David Stampe Virginia Bennett Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3302132 Copyright 2007 by Faehndrich, Burgel R.M. All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3302132 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway PO Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © 2007, Burgel R.M. Faehndrich iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The number of people who helped me in the course of my research, providing language information, translation, advice, and practical support is too great for me to list everyone individually. -
Jason Lobel's Dissertation
PHILIPPINE AND NORTH BORNEAN LANGUAGES: ISSUES IN DESCRIPTION, SUBGROUPING, AND RECONSTRUCTION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS MAY 2013 BY JASON WILLIAM LOBEL Dissertation Committee: Robert A. Blust, Chairperson Michael L. Forman Kenneth L. Rehg R. David Zorc Ruth Elynia S. Mabanglo © Copyright 2013 by Jason William Lobel IMPORTANT NOTE: Permission is granted to the native speakers of the languages represented herein to reproduce this dissertation, or any part thereof, for the purpose of protecting, promoting, developing, or preserving their native languages, cultures, and tribal integrity, as long as proper credit is given to the author of this work. No librarian or other holder of a copy of this dissertation in any country shall have the right to require any additional proof of permission from this author in order to photocopy or print this dissertation, or any part thereof, for any native speaker of any language represented herein. ii We certify that we have read this dissertation and that, in our opinion, it is satisfactory in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics. ____________________________________ Chairperson ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ iii iv ABSTRACT The Philippines, northern Sulawesi, and northern Borneo are home to two or three hundred languages that can be described as Philippine-type. In spite of nearly five hundred years of language documentation in the Philippines, and at least a century of work in Borneo and Sulawesi, the majority of these languages remain grossly underdocumented, and an alarming number of languages remain almost completely undocumented. -
The Mystery of Austronesian Final Consonant Loss
The Mystery of Austronesian Final Consonant Loss Blevins, Juliette. Oceanic Linguistics, Volume 43, Number 1, June 2004, pp. 208-213 (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: 10.1353/ol.2004.0003 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ol/summary/v043/43.1blevins.html Access Provided by City University of New York at 12/06/12 4:39PM GMT Squib The Mystery of Austronesian Final Consonant Loss Juliette Blevins university of california, berkeley Within Evolutionary Phonology, recurrent sound patterns are argued to be a direct consequence of recurrent types of phonetically based sound change. Common phonological alternations like ²nal obstruent devoicing, place- assimilation, intervocalic consonant lenition, and unstressed vowel deletion are shown to be the direct result of phonologization of well-documented articulatory and perceptual phonetic effects. Synchronic markedness con- straints of structuralist, generativist, and optimality approaches are aban- doned, and replaced, for the most part, with historical phonetic explanations that are independently necessary. Under the general Evolutionary Phonology approach, any recurrent sound pattern, like Austronesian final consonant loss, that does not lend itself to phonetic explanation is problematic. In this squib, I re-examine Austronesian ²nal consonant loss from the perspective of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, to appear). Final consonant loss as sound change is schematized in (1), and appears to have occurred as an independent sound change at least fourteen times in the history of Austronesian, as summarized in table 1, with per- haps the best-known and best-studied cases being those in Central Paci²c and Nuclear Micronesian.1 (1) final c-loss *C > Ø/ __## Because Proto-Austronesian is reconstructed with ²nal oral stops, affricates, frica- tives, nasals, rhotics, and glides, the sound change in (1), as formulated, targets all of these segments. -
Berkeley Linguistics Society 42Nd Annual Meeting Berkeley, California 5–7 February 2016
Berkeley Linguistics Society 42nd Annual Meeting Berkeley, California 5–7 February 2016 Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................... 1 Schedule ..................................................................................... 2 Abstracts ..................................................................................... 6 Conference Venue ........................................................................... 23 Nearby Dining and Attractions ............................................................. 24 Notes ........................................................................................ 27 Invited Speakers Joe Pater ..............................................................................9 Learning in typological prediction: Grammatical agent-based modeling Liina Pylkkanen¨ .......................................................................7 Constructing meaning: A view from MEG Joseph Sabbagh ........................................................................8 Syntactic and prosodic adjunction in Tagalog Meghan Sumner .......................................................................6 The benefit of idealized word pronunciations: How are forms we rarely hear, understood so easily? Judith Tonhauser ....................................................................10 Speaker commitment in English and Paraguayan Guaraní attitude reports Papers Maayan Abenina-Adar &Nikos Angelopoulos ......................................17 On root modality and -
North Borneo Sourcebook(Lobel-2016).Pdf
North Borneo Sourcebook PALI Language Texts: Southeast Asia Social Science Research Institute University of Hawai‘i Robert A. Blust Series Editor North Borneo Sourcebook Vocabularies and Functors collected and edited by Jason William Lobel University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2016 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lobel, Jason William, compiler, editor. Title: North Borneo sourcebook : vocabularies and functors / collected and edited by Jason William Lobel. Description: [Honolulu] : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016 | Series: PALI Language Texts | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Identifiers: LCCN 2015030175 | ISBN 9780824857790 paperback : alk. paper Subjects: LCSH: Austronesian languages—Malaysia—Sabah. | Austronesian languages—Malaysia—Sarawak. | Sabah (Malaysia)—Languages. | Kalimantan Utara—Languages. | Brunei—Languages. | Borneo— Languages. Classification: LCC PL5026.L63 2016 | DDC 499/.2—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030175 Print-ready copy has been provided by the author. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. To the people of northern Borneo, that they may be successful in all of their attempts to preserve and promote their wonderful languages and cultures; and to my son, Pietro, that languages such as these may survive long enough for