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Southern Austronesian (master post)

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Within Puluqish, the Malayo-Polynesian (MP) and Kra-Dai (KD) languages form a southern clade,  consisting of all Austronesian languages spoken south of Taiwan. I use the term ‘Southern Austronesian’ (SA). Although its modern descendants are all spoken outside of Taiwan, there are reasons to think that Proto-Southern Austronesian was spoken in southern Taiwan.  Shared innovations cannot be grammatical since KD preserves morphology indirectly at best and grammar has aligned on Chinese, but they can be phonological or lexical.

phonological innovation

Puluqish linker *atu ‘and’ reduced to *at after *sa-puluq in numbers 10 to 19 (here)

politeness shift in the PAN 2pl pronoun

PAN *-mu 2pl > 2sg (here)

Lexical innovations (here)


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Laurent Sagart (April 13, 2020). Southern Austronesian (master post). Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian. Retrieved November 4, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ukco


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