Austric languages

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The Austric language superfamily is a large theoretical grouping of languages primarily spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the eastern Indian subcontinent. It includes the Austronesian language family of Taiwan, the Malay Archipelago, Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as the Austro-Asiatic language family of mainland Southeast Asia, Eastern India, and Bangladesh. The hypothesis of a genetic relationship between these two language families is not widely accepted among linguists.

The Austric superfamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological, morphological, and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric superfamily, but the lexical evidence was not accepted by the larger linguistic community. Due to this shortcoming, the Austric hypothesis has never gained general acceptance. In 1942, Paul K. Benedict proposed an Austric super family which included not only the Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages, but also the Tai-Kadai languages and the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages. This extension is much more tenuous, and is almost universally rejected today.

Despite missing lexical evidence, the relationship between Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages has many proponents to this day. Some believe that recently discovered morphological similarities between Nicobarese and Austronesian languages prove a genetic relationship. Other researchers are still searching for the missing lexical link between Austronesian and Austroasiatic. A good summary of the present state of the Austric hypothesis may be found in Reid 2005.

[edit] Relevant Papers

  • Benedict, Paul K. 1976. Austro-Thai and Austroasiatic. In: Philip N. Jenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta, eds., Austroasiatic Studies, Part I, pp. 1-36. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
  • Blazhek, Vaclav. 2000. Comments on Hayes "The Austric Denti-alveolar Sibilants". Mother Tongue V:15-17.
  • Blust, Robert. 1996. Beyond the Austronesian homeland: The Austric hypothesis and its implications for archaeology. In: Prehistoric Settlement of the Pacific, ed. by Ward H.Goodenough, ISBN 0-87169-865-X DIANE Publishing Co, Collingdale PA, 1996, pp. 117-137. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86.5. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).
  • Blust, Robert. 2000. Comments on Hayes, "The Austric Denti-alveolar Sibilants". Mother Tongue V:19-21.
  • Diffloth, Gerard F. 1989. What Happened to Austric? Mon-Khmer Studies XVI-XVII:1-9.
  • Diffloth, Gerard. 1994. The lexical evidence for Austric so far. Oceanic Linguistics 33(2):309-321.
  • Fleming, Hal. 2000. LaVaughn Hayes and Robert Blust Discuss Austric. Mother Tongue V:29-32.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 1992. On the Track of Austric, Part I: Introduction. Mon-Khmer Studies XXI:143-77.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 1997. On the Track of Austric, Part II: Consonant Mutation in Early Austroasiatic. Mon-Khmer Studies XXVII:13-41.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 1999. On the Track of Austric, Part III: Basic Vocabulary Correspondence. Mon-Khmer Studies XXIX:1-34.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. The Austric Denti-alveolar Sibilants. Mother Tongue V:1-12.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. Response to Blazhek's Comments. Mother Tongue V:33-4.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. Response to Blust's Comments. Mother Tongue V:35-7.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. Response to Fleming's Comments. Mother Tongue V:39-40.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2001. On the Origin of Affricates in Austric. Mother Tongue VI:95-117.
  • Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2001. Response to Sidwell. Mother Tongue VI:123-7.
  • Reid, Lawrence A. 1994. Morphological evidence for Austric. Oceanic Linguistics 33(2):323-344.
  • Reid, Lawrence A. 1996. The current state of linguistic research on the relatedness of the language families of East and Southeast Asia. In: Ian C. Glover and Peter Bellwood, editorial co-ordinators, Indo-Pacific Prehistory: The Chiang Mai Papers, Volume 2, pp . 87-91. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 15. Canberra: Australian National University.
  • Reid, Lawrence A. 1999. New linguistic evidence for the Austric hypothesis. In Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, ed. by Elizabeth Zeitoun and Paul Jen-kuei Li, pp. 5-30. Taipei: Academia Sinica.
  • Reid, Lawrence A. 2005. The current status of Austric: A review and evaluation of the lexical and morphosyntactic evidence. In The peopling of East Asia: putting together archaeology, linguistics and genetics, ed. by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas. London: Routledge Curzon.
  • Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1906. Die Mon-Khmer-Völker, ein Bindeglied zwischen Völkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens [The Mon-Khmer Peoples, a Link between the Peoples of Central Asia and Austronesia]. Archiv für Anthropologie, Braunschweig, new series, 5:59-109.
  • Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1930. Die Beziehungen der austrischen Sprachen zum Japanischen [The Connections of the Austric Languages to Japanese]. Wien Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik 1:239-51.
  • Shorto, H. L. 1976. In Defense of Austric. Computational Analyses of Asian and African Languages 6:95-104.
  • Sidwell, Paul. 2001. Comments on La Vaughn H. Hayes' "On the Origin of Affricates in Austric". Mother Tongue VI:119-121.
  • Van Driem, George. 2000. Four Austric Theories. Mother Tongue V:23-27.

[edit] External links