Austronesian–Ongan languages
| Austronesian–Ongan | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Madagascar |
| Linguistic classification | Proposed language family |
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | None |
Austronesian–Ongan is a proposed connection between the Ongan and Austronesian language families, published in Blevins (2007). Ongan is a small family of two attested languages in the Andaman Islands, while Austronesian is one of the largest language families in the world, with a thousand languages spread across the Pacific.
Blevins (2007) proposes the following sound correspondences:
There is neutralization and sometimes loss of final nasals in Proto-Ongan, with final **n merged into Proto-Ongan *ŋ, and final **m and **ny partially merged into *ŋ. (The latter merger, and loss, may post-date Proto-Ongan.) Final (oral) stops are lost in multisyllabic words (unstressed syllables?) in Proto-Ongan.
Initial **b drops from Proto-Ongan before **u and perhaps before **i.
**qw and **kw become *kw in Proto-Ongan, and *q/k or *w in Proto-AN.
Proto-Ongan and Proto-AN share a typologically odd restriction against root-initial *m-.
Vowel-initial words in Proto-Ongan correspond to *q in Proto-AN; because the Austronesian forms often include doublets, Blevins believes this is due to epenthesis in Proto-AN.
Final **ay has become *e in Proto-Ongan. *e also derives from **a before palatals, word-finally, and when unstressed.
Proto-Ongan *o typically derives from **u in a checked syllable, or from assimilation as in **wa.
Proto-Ongan *ə is thought to have been an allophone of *e, found before coda nasals except after palatals.
Most derivational morphology and grammatical words are so short that the several resemblances between Proto-Ongan and Proto-AN may be chance. However, Ongan morphology does appear to explain an odd situation in Austronesian.
Proto-Austronesian has a limited set of reconstructed vowel-initial roots, all of which are kin terms, body parts, or other readily possessed nouns. Ongan languages have inalienable possession, and inalienably possessed nouns are all vowel initial. Elsewhere, vowel-initial roots in Proto-Ongan correspond to initial *q- in Proto-Austronesian. The complete list of vowel-initial Proto-AN roots reconstructed by Blust is as follows:
These are all the kinds of words expected in inalienable-possession systems. Blevins suggests that inalienable possession was lost from Proto-Austronesian, presumably after epenthetic *q- was added to vowel-initial words. There are many Proto-AN doublets like *wasu, *asu 'dog'; initial *w- has also been lost from *w-anaN 'right side' and *w-iRi 'left side' in Pazeh and other languages, from what Blust describes as "some now-obscured morphological process". Blevins suggests that in all three cases, the Proto-Austronesian *w- reflects the Proto-Ongan possessive prefix *gw- 'his, her', which remained as a fossil in some daughter languages. Thus proto-Austronesian–Ongan may explain some of the odd patterns found in proto-Austronesian.
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