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...

Cijeli opis

Bibliografski detalji
Glavni autori: Klamer, Marian., Holton, Gary., Kratochvil, Frantisek, Robinson, Laura C., Schapper, Antoinette.
Daljnji autori: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Format: Journal Article
Jezik:English
Izdano: 2013
Teme:
Online pristup:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/100781
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/18201
Opis
Sažetak: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.