Pacific Linguistics

The papers in this volume have been presented to Andrew K. Pawley in honour of his extensive work on Austronesian and Papuan languages and cultures. They cover a wide range of topics, from language description to historical linguistics and from archaeology and population genetics to the anthropology of performance and the typology of poetic meter. The book provides a fascinating snapshot of current work across the fields of Austronesian and Papuan linguistics and culture history and the papers in it will be important reading for anyone working in these fields.

This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto Hmong-Mien, the ancestor language of the modern Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. It also contains discussion of selected topics in the history of Hmong-Mien: phonological change, tonogenesis and tone development, ancient morphology, numerals and pronouns, language contact, and the ancient Hmong-Mien world.

The Old Khmer Grammar has been brewed from memoranda and citations accumulated over long years of teaching Old Khmer to a succession of able graduate students. It is meant to serve the immediate needs of readers embarking on the study of the inscriptions, and assumes that they have some acquaintance with modern Khmer. Designed for easy reference, it addresses the main points of grammar and style in the great majority of the texts. It can be considered a companion volume to Prof. Jenner's A Dictionary of pre-Angkorian Khmer and A Dictionary of Angkorian Khmer (Pacific Linguistics 2009).

Buyang is a Tai-Kadai language, spoken in Yunnan and northwestern Guangxi. In this sketch the Paha dialect (western) is described. It is a much revised and reworked translation of of materials published in Chinese by Li Jinfang, and fills a gap in the descriptive sources available in English. Its publication now is especially welcome as Buyang shows various morphological parallels with Austronesian, which have been noted in recent discussions about the linguistic prehistory of SE Asia. Paha also possesses a number of lexical items and structural features that are shared by surrounding Miao-Yao, Mon-Khmer and Tibeto-Burman languages. The work includes a selection of texts and a substantial lexicon, in addition to the grammatical sketch and detailed geographical and social information.

The Koiarianfamily, part of the putative Trans New Guinea group of Papuan languages, stretches from around Port Moresby on the southern coast of southeast Papua almost to the sea on the north coast at the eastern end of the Hydrographers’ Ranges. The author here enlarges on his lexicostatistically based 1969 work and applies the comparative method of historical linguistics to the Koiarian languages, identifying shared innovations that define subgroups within the family and reconstructing the protophonology and about 120 lexical items of Proto Koiarian. He provides similar reconstructions for Proto Koiaric and Proto Bariaic, the languages ancestral to the two major subgroups within Koiarian.

This is the first single-authored book that attempts to describe the Austronesian language family in its entirety. Its topics include: physical and cultural background, official and national languages, largest and smallest languages, speech levels and respect language, male/female speech differences, vituperation and profanity, secret languages, ritual languages, language contact, a survey of sound systems, numerals and numeration, colour terms, demonstratives, locatives and directions, pronouns, metaphor, language names, greetings, semantic change, lexical change, linguistic paleontology, morphology, syntax, the history of scholarship on Austronesian languages, a critical assessment of the reconstruction of Proto Austronesian phonology, sound changes, claims about the external relations of the Austronesian languages, subgrouping, Austronesian scholarship, and an extensive list of references to the published literature.