Historical query

[Fay Wouk]

I'm posting this message for Vince Sarich, who does not subscribe to this
list. He is interested in getting a comparison of retention rates of PAN
vocabulary in a variety of modern Austronesian languages, so as to get an
idea of the existing range. He wants to get some idea about whether
retention rates vary significantly between language families as compared to
within language families. He has some I-E estimates, and would like to see
how the PAn figures would compare.

To that end, he asks any interested historical linguists to refer to
Blust's 200 word basic vocabulary list, in Appendix 1 of his paper PAn
subgrouping, p. 82-87, in Selected Papers from the Eighth International
Conference on Austronesian Linguistics. This list contains 164 PAn
reconstructions.

For the language of your choice, could you say how many of those 164 proto
terms have reflexes in the modern language?  Could you further say how many
of those modern reflexes have undergone radical semantic shifts. The
determination of what constitutes a reflex and what is a radical semantic
shift will be based on your expertise on the history of the language and
knowledge of regular (and accepted irregular) sound changes that have
occurred.

Please send the information (language name and the 2 numbers requested)
directly to Vince at v.sarich at auckland.ac.nz.  A summary of results will be
posted to the list.

thanks,

Fay Wouk
Fay Wouk
Institute of Linguistics
University of Auckland
ccu1 at auckland.ac.nz