Numbers -Austronesian

[Richard Parker]

Many thanks for your e-mail, Malcolm.
 
I published the two maps a little prematurely, in a fit of euphoria, after I had FINALLY solved yet another almost insuperable technical design problem (one of the published maps was version no 29, and both still need more tweaking). I should have waited until my full paper was completed, but that's proved to be a monster, and will have to be assembled, and published, bit by bit.
 
It was that fit of euphoria that led me to the mistake of claiming Meso-Melanesian were WMP languages. They definitely aren't, but certain bits of them might be.
 
The striking correlation between usage of certain parts of the POc number system and the Meso-Melanesian Cluster only really revealed itself during the process of mapping. 
 
If the Oceanic languages inherited a ready-made working set of proto-Oceanic numbers (virtually identical to the proto-Austronesian ones) then that would imply that the decimal set was lost in almost all of the Near Oceanic languages, and later, replacements were created in various idiosyncratic ways. 
 
It would seem more parsimonious to assume that they had no ready-made number system to start with, and that some terms were imported from elsewhere.
 
The strongest evidence for this is the word for 10. Where the word is apparently a cognate of *sa nga puluq, which has an apparent, and logical, meaning of 1-ten, it seems to be used throughout Near Oceania as a quite meaningless term that can be multiplied as a whole. 
 
In Nakanai (Willaumez), for example, 10 = savulu sa, and 20 = savulu lua.  It's this that persuades me that the word has been borrowed from a Western Malayo-Polynesian source, where it is used logically as 1-10. (Ma'anyan - sapuluh, ruam pulu)
 
Similarly, proto-Oceanic cognates for 6-9 are restricted almost entirely to some languages 
in New Ireland, two in the Willaumez chain, most of the Northern Solomons, and just two others (Nimowa and Sud-Est) in the Louisiades, where the terms have also 'leaked over' to nearby Yele, a Papuan isolate, whose numbers from 4-9 are entirely Austronesian (but whose higher numbers are exuberantly Yelean). 
 
I thought that Misima, another Louisiades language, also had them, fossilised. Ray reported counting of tens by proto-Oceanic terms back in the 1890s, and modern Misimans use the same terms in counting from 6-9. But the right words in the wrong places. 6-9 in modern Misima (and in Ray's tens) are: esiwa, ewon, epit, ewata.
 
Calquing from Papuan doesn't seem to work very well, either. I'm going through every isolated 'strange' set of Near Oceanic number systems, and comparing them with contiguous 'Papuan' systems, and what I'm finding is, mostly, quite the opposite.
 
Sarmi-Jayapura - Base 4 systems leaked from An - Yotafa, Ormu and Kayupulau into nearby non-An Sko languages (Nafri, Wutung, Vanimo) but not to others of the same Sko family.

 
Same again in the An Manam family, further east, where Wogeo and Biem have 4-base number systems, and so do the non-An island Boikens.  The mainland Boikens don't, and the Manam islanders themselves don't either.
 
On Sera/Sissano, I wasn't aware, when I piped up last year on An-Lang, of Sidney Ray's and Don Laycock's earlier elicitations. Those number systems are very 'primitive' indeed. Mark Donohue has pointed at Sissano '5 = tartar' as 'many', and Don Laycock showed Sera 'pingari =5" as a steal from modern Tok Pisin 'finger'. 
 
It's very possible that when you elicited words in those same places, the people gave you what you 'wanted to hear'. An-speakers usually don't want to deny, or state a negative position. They also don't make racial (Irish/Polish) jokes about others, which makes them quite exceptional.
 
Enough. I'll be posting bits and pieces of my 'grand paper' at: 
 
Austronesian Counting
http://smallislandnotesan.blogspot.com/
now in the process of moving over to:
http://austronesiancounting.wordpress.com/
 
Please tap into it, and blast me out of the water when I'm wrong.
regards
 
Richard
 
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