Re: Austronesian sound changes (was: Austronesian lexical categories & voice)

Ray Brown wrote:
(re my reply about AN "RGH", "RLD" et al.)
> Fascinating stuff. Where I can get more info?
Unfortunately, mostly in hundreds of journal articles and conference papers.

Specifically on the R/L/D problem, John Wolff is the main proponent of
realigning the correspondences; he started in 1975, but it's still
controversial and not widely accepted....

Most likely available journal: Oceanic Linguistics (Hawaii).
Conferences: The various proceedings of the "Intl. Conference on AN
Linguistics" (ICAL) of which there have been 8 or 9 since 1975. Mostly publ.
by the ANU (Pacific Ling. series) but all out of print and findable in
libraries with difficulty-- obviously, tiny press runs. In England, I
imagine the SOAS (SAOS?) would have them, and Oxbridge too, one would think.
In the US, certainly U.Hawaii, perhaps Cornell, perhaps Yale. Whether the
big public libraries like NYC or Boston etc. or the Libr. of Congress are
willing, or financially able, to stock such arcana, I do not know.

Otherwise, two little books by Otto Chr. Dahl provide nice summaries, and
attempts to clarify unclear things:

-- _Proto-Austronesian_, 1973, Scand. Inst. of Asian Studies Monograph
Series No. 15, Lund  ISBN 91-44-09751-5

-- _Early phonetic and phonemic changes in Austronesian_, 1981, Inst. for
sammenlignende kulturforskning, Oslo ISBN 82-00-09530-4, ISSN9332-5217

Good bibliographies too, but of course 25-30 years old.

Needless to say, I could go on at great length about the PAN sound-system,
and the changes in our thinking about it since Dempwolff's first
formalization of it in the late 30s (but Dahl does a good job of that, and
I'm not up to date, sad to say). So I won't here, but will be happy to share
info if asked.

By the way, the basis of it all: Dempwolff, Otto: Vergleichende Lautlehre
des Austronesischen Wortschatzes. Zeitschift für Eingeborenen Sprachen,
Beiheft 15, 17, 19 (1934-37-39 resp.) Probably widely available; and there
was a reprint by Kraus in 1969. (Good, clear German, lots of repetitive
formulaic writing, easily readable with the aid of a good dictionary-- and
motivation.)

The 1st volume reconstructed "Proto-Indonesian" using Toba-Batak, Tagalog
and Javanese. Vol 2 expanded this by comparing Malay, Ngaju-Dayak and Hova
(Malegasy); Melanesian Fijian and Sa'a/Ulawa; Polynesian Tonga, Samoa,
Futuna. (Of course he was familiar with a great many AN languages, but this
handful served to illustrate all the correspondences-- and with minor
exceptions, that's still true.). Vol III is a list of some 2000
reconstructions, with the evidence.

The upshot of all this was his conclusion (1) that the Oceanic languages
descended from a common source (he didn't reconstruct it, but could have),
which in turn derived (2) from his "PIN", which he in turn equated with
"PAN". Nowadays, his PIN/PAN equates only to "Proto-Malayo-Polynesian", and
forms can be termed "PAN" only if there are witnesses from Formosan
languages, known but all but unresearched until well after WW II.

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