The historical relations of the papuan languages of alor and pantar
The historical relations of the Papuan languages scattered across the islands of the Alor archipelago, Timor, and Kisar in southeast Indonesia have remained largely conjectural. This paper makes a first step toward demonstrating that the languages of Alor and Pantar form a single genealogical gro...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/100781 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/18201 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | The historical relations of the Papuan languages scattered across the islands of
the Alor archipelago, Timor, and Kisar in southeast Indonesia have remained
largely conjectural. This paper makes a first step toward demonstrating that
the languages of Alor and Pantar form a single genealogical group. Applying
the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled
across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago, we use form-meaning
pairings in basic cognate sets to establish regular sound correspondences that
support the view that these languages are genetically related. We reconstruct
97 Proto‒Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping
based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan
languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that
there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages
in the Trans-New Guinea family. |
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