An-lang Digest, Vol 45, Issue 5

[Richard Parker]

More on early vocabularies 
   
  I suspect that some of these early vocabularies have been compared with later ones, but I wonder if anyone has used them to estimate a very rough rate of change for some Austronesian languages with a view to doing a bit of glottochronology?
   
  I recently found a wordlist of Savu, compiled by Sydney Parkinson, Capt Cook's naturalist's draughtsman, in 1773, and compared it with the modern Savu list compiled by Robert Blust.
   
  Their were several regular S>H changes:
  soofoo (breast) huhu 
  sivànga (nose) huwaŋa 
  sillaèo (to see) héléo 
  lasilai (sand) laha lae 
   
  some V>W
  vooe (fruit) wue 
  raee, vorai (earth/soil) rai[wawa] 
  vàva (below) wawa
   
  and some other word changes that I'm not so sure about, like:
teaco (to walk) ta-kako
racäee (skin) kuri
   
  Out of 80 words that I was able to compare, I estimated there were 37 that had changed substantially (though I may have made some non-professional gaffes).
   
  Nevertheless, it's an astonishing rate of change. (Using a simple calculation, it would imply that the language originated from scratch just over 1000 years ago).
   
  Both Savu wordlists are on the AVBD database at:
  http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian
   
  regards
   
  Richard Parker
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