Austronesian Phonological Change

Abstract

The paper «Austronesian phonological change» is a short description of the regular correspondences between the phonemes in Proto-Austronesian, as reconstructed by Dempwolff and Dahl, inter alii, and several modern languages in the Austronesian family. In the paper, differing reconstructions of various phonemes are compared, and arguments are in each case given in support of one or the other of the hypotheses -howeier, uvular and glottal phonemes are totally ignored, the correspondences in these cases not being sufficiently regular. Finally, a tentative chronology of Austronesian phonological changes is presented (in part based upon the theories of Dahl), and compared, as far as possible, with known historial evidence concerning the migrations of the Austronesian peoples -and a phonological «pseudo-classification» of Austronesian languages is given, thereby demonstrating the dangers which lie in relying solely upon phonological evidence when working with linguistic classification.