An-lang Digest, Vol 45, Issue 5

[Ross Clark]

I compiled a Swadesh list of 18th-century Tahitian some years ago, which Blust used in his comparative study of retention rates in Austronesian. 
Tahitian of course is well documented today, and there are several independent sources from the late 1700s, so the early evidence is pretty secure. 
 
There's a facsimile of Parkinson at "Eighteenth Century Collections Online" (http://www.gale.com/EighteenthCentury/), but it requires a subscription.
 
One thing it clarifies from your examples is that the printed form for "To walk" is "Ta eaco", hence probably a transcription error for "Ta caco". This kind of error occurs all the time in early vocabls, especially in cases like Parkinson's, where the manuscripts were edited and printed after the writer's death. 
 
I'm not sure what you're counting as substantial change, but surely it would not imply the language originated from scratch just over 1000 years ago -- merely that all the words had undergone significant change in that time. I would expect similar results if looking at a sample of English vocabulary from that far back. 
 
Ross Clark

________________________________

From: an-lang-bounces at anu.edu.au [mailto:an-lang-bounces at anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Richard Parker
Sent: Sunday, 25 March 2007 12:47 p.m.
To: an-lang at anu.edu.au
Subject: [An-lang] Re: An-lang Digest, Vol 45, Issue 5 


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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