Austronesian thesis

Preliminary descriptions exist only for Buli of Halmahera and Numfor-Biak and Waropen of western New Guinea; most of the languages are known only from short word lists.

Benedict initiated the Austro-Tai hypothesis, a proposed connection between the Tai languages and various minority Kadai languages on the mainland of Southeast Asia.

The Eastern Formosan peoples Basay, Kavalan, and Amis share a homeland motif that has them coming originally from an island called Sinasay or Sanasay Li The Amis, in particular, maintain that they came from the east, and were treated by the Puyuma, amongst whom they settled, as a subservient group.

The settlement history of Micronesia is more complex: Written documents Preth century Preth century The earliest written documents in an Austronesian language are three Old Malay inscriptions from southern Sumatra dating to the late 7th century.

In addition, some 18 Polynesian-speaking societies, the above-mentioned Polynesian Outliers, are found in Micronesia and Melanesia.

Much of the early epigraphic material in Cham and Malay is heavily interlaced with Sanskrit, and some inscriptions from Champa and southern Sumatra are entirely in Sanskrit. At the end of the 20th century almost all Austronesian languages were written in a roman scriptalthough the Arabic script called Jawi in Malay is still used in certain contexts in Malay, Acehnese, and some other languages of western Indonesia.

The Austronesian languages tend to use reduplication repetition of all or part of a word, as in wiki-wiki or agar-agar. Prehistoric inferences from subgrouping The view, current from roughly tothat Melanesia is the area of greatest linguistic diversity in Austronesian and that the Austronesian homeland therefore must have been in Austronesian thesis has been shown to be inconsistent both with the comparative method of linguistics and with archaeological indications that Austronesian speakers entered the western Pacific from island Southeast Asia about bce.

The first true systematizer in the Austronesian field was the Swiss scholar Renward Brandstetter, whose work in the period —15 led to the reconstruction of a complete sound system for what he called Original Indonesian and the compilation of a very preliminary comparative dictionary.

The phenomenon has frequently been referred to as focus not to be confused with the usual sense of that term in linguistics. In the American linguist Paul K. The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database gives word lists coded for cognateness for approximately Austronesian languages.

The historical importance of both Tagalog and Malay probably was favoured by geographic considerations. Yapeselong considered unplaceable, now appears to be Oceanic, although its place within Oceanic remains obscure.

Rather, it is a collective term for a highly diverse collection of languages, most of which share broad typological similarities with languages in the Philippines and some other areas such as Madagascar. With few exceptions the Austronesian languages of Melanesia tend to be spoken in coastal areas and on small offshore islands.

Classification[ edit ] The internal structure of the Austronesian languages is complex.

The German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt is generally credited with coining the name Malayo-Polynesianalthough the word first appeared in print in an publication of his contemporary, the German linguist Franz Bopp.

Indonesian, Melanesian, Micronesianand Polynesian. Other studies have presented phonological evidence for a reduced Paiwanic family of PaiwanicPuyuma, Bunun, Amis, and Malayo-Polynesian, but this is not reflected in vocabulary.

The original hypothesis, first proposed in by Wilhelm Schmidt and long neglected by most linguists, has been greatly strengthened by more recent research. We next present the results of an investigation of domestication genes in a collection of traditional rice landraces maintained by the Formosan aborigines over a hundred years ago.

Of all Austronesian languages, Malay—which is native to the Malay Peninsula, adjacent portions of southern and central Sumatra, and some smaller neighbouring islands—probably has had the greatest political importance. Malay was spoken on both sides of the strategic Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.

We trace this suite of cereals to northeastern China in the period — BCE and argue, following earlier proposals, that the precursors of the Austronesians, expanded south along the coast from Shandong after c.

External relationships Speculation concerning the external relationships of Austronesian languages has ranged far and wide.

Moreover, each of the other geographically defined groups turns out to be a heterogeneous collection of languages that belong to more than one linguistically defined group.

In contrast, the more innovative Indonesian-type languages, which are particularly represented in Malaysia and western Indonesia, have reduced the voice system to a contrast between only two voices actor voice and "undergoer" voicebut these are supplemented by applicative morphological devices originally two: Your satisfaction is our top priority.

Tagalog forms the basis of Pilipinothe national language of the Philippines, and the Merina dialect of Malagasy, which is spoken in the highlands around the capital of Antananarivo, forms the basis for standard Malagasy.

When representatives of the Dutch East India Company arrived in Indonesia at the beginning of the 17th century, they discovered that Malay served as a lingua franca in major ports throughout the archipelago; the language has retained that role to the present day.

The Eastern Formosan peoples Basay, Kavalan, and Amis share a homeland motif that has them coming originally from an island called Sinasay or Sanasay Li The remaining Austronesian languages are about equally divided among Indonesia including the western half of the large island of New Guinea and the Pacific islands of MelanesiaMicronesiaand Polynesia.

Chow, Rachel Anne, "The genetic characterization of populations comprising the Austronesian language family" (). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. The Kelabit Language, Austronesian Voice and Syntactic Typology.

Charlotte Hemmings. Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD Department of Linguistics. Many Austronesian languages have very few speakers, but the major Austronesian languages are spoken by tens of millions of people and one Austronesian language, Malay (including both Indonesian and Malaysian variants), is spoken by million people, making it the 8th most spoken language in.

Gunnar Holmberg BACHELOR THESIS Japanese, Austronesian and Altaic A study of possible connections Centre for Language and Literature, Japanese Studies Supervisor: Lars Larm.

Abstract The question of the origin of Japanese is a mystery still unsolved, proven by the academic. Early Austronesian morphemes reconstructed under the Uniform-Root thesis Note: Subscript numbers indicate that the roots may be identical.

Underlining indicates that the morpheme may be identical with, rather than derived from, the other morpheme which it. >Austronesian languages, and the unrelated languages lumped together within the Paleo-Siberian areal category. Also spoken on the western bounds of Asia are Arabic and Hebrew (both Afro-Asiatic languages) and the Caucasian languages, consisting of at least two unrelated families.

Austronesian thesis