Austric languages

Template:Short description Template:Infobox language family

The Austric languages are a proposed language family that includes the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as Kra–Dai and Austroasiatic languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. A genetic relationship between these language families is seen as plausible by some scholars, but remains unproven.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp

Additionally, Hmong–Mien languages are included by some linguists, and even Japanese was speculated to be Austric in an early version of the hypothesis by Paul K. Benedict.Template:Sfnp

HistoryEdit

The Austric macrofamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological, morphological, and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric phylum consisting of Austroasiatic and Austronesian.Template:Sfnp Template:Efn Schmidt's proposal had a mixed reception among scholars of Southeast Asian languages, and received only little scholarly attention in the following decades.Template:Sfnp

Research interest into Austric resurged in the late 20th century,<ref>Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp.</ref> culminating in a series of articles by La Vaughn H. Hayes, who presented a corpus of Proto-Austric vocabulary together with a reconstruction of Proto-Austric phonology,<ref>Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp.</ref> and by Lawrence Reid, focussing on morphological evidence.<ref>Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp, Template:Harvp.</ref>

EvidenceEdit

Reid (2005) lists the following pairs as "probable" cognates between Proto-Austroasiatic and Proto-Austronesian.Template:Sfnp

Gloss	ashes	dog	snake	belly	eye	father	mother	rotten	buy
Proto-Austroasiatic	*qabuh	*cu(q)	*[su](l̩)aR	taʔal/tiʔal	*mə(n)ta(q)	*(qa)ma(ma)	*(na)na	*ɣok	*pə[l̩]i
Proto-Austronesian	*qabu	*asu	*SulaR	*tiaN	*maCa	*t-ama	*t-ina	*ma-buRuk	*beli

Among the morphological evidence, he compares reconstructed affixes such as the following, and notes that shared infixes are less likely to be borrowed (for a further discussion of infixes in Southeast Asian languages, see also Barlow 2022<ref>Barlow, Russell. 2022. Infix preservation and loss in Southeast Asia: Typological and areal factors. Presentation given at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 31), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, May 18–20, 2022. (slides)</ref>).Template:Sfnp

prefix *pa- 'causative' (Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian)
infix *-um- 'agentive' (Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian)
infix *-in- 'instrumental' (Proto-Austroasiatic), 'nominalizer' (Proto-Austronesian)

Below are 10 selected Austric lexical comparisons by Diffloth (1994), as cited in Sidwell & Reid (2021):<ref name="WOL-MSEA-15">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Diffloth, Gérard. 1994. The lexical evidence for Austric, so far. Oceanic Linguistics 33(2): 309–322.</ref>

Gloss	Proto-Austroasiatic	Proto-Austronesian
‘fish’	*ʔaka̰ːʔ	*Sikan
‘dog’	*ʔac(ṵə)ʔ	*asu
‘wood’	*kəɟh(uː)ʔ	*kaSi
‘eye’	*ma̰t	*maCa
‘bone’	*ɟlʔaːŋ	*CuqelaN
‘hair’	*s(ɔ)k	*bukeS
‘bamboo rat’	Khmu dəkən	Malay dəkan
‘molar’	Khmer thkìəm	Malay gərham
‘left’	p-Monic *ɟwiːʔ	*ka-wiʀi
‘ashes’	Stieng *buh	*qabu

Extended proposalsEdit

The first extension to Austric was first proposed Wilhelm Schmidt himself, who speculated about including Japanese within Austric, mainly because of assumed similarities between Japanese and the Austronesian languages.Template:Sfnp While the proposal about a link between Austronesian and Japanese still enjoys some following as a separate hypothesis, the inclusion of Japanese was not adopted by later proponents of Austric.

In 1942, Paul K. Benedict provisionally accepted the Austric hypothesis and extended it to include the Kra–Dai (Thai–Kadai) languages as an immediate sister branch to Austronesian, and further speculated on the possibility to include the Hmong–Mien (Miao–Yao) languages as well.Template:Sfnp However, he later abandoned the Austric proposal in favor of an extended version of the Austro-Tai hypothesis.Template:Sfnp

Sergei Starostin adopted Benedict's extended 1942 version of Austric (i.e. including Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien) within the framework of his larger Dené–Daic proposal, with Austric as a coordinate branch to Dené–Caucasian, as shown in the tree below.<ref>Cited in Template:Harvp</ref> Template:Clade Another long-range proposal for wider connections of Austric was brought forward by John Bengtson, who grouped Nihali and Ainu together with Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Hmong–Mien, and Kra–Dai in a "Greater Austric" family.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

ReceptionEdit

In the second half of the last century, Paul K. Benedict raised a vocal critique of the Austric proposal, eventually calling it an 'extinct' proto-language.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp

Hayes' lexical comparisons, which were presented as supporting evidence for Austric between 1992 and 2001, were criticized for the greater part as methodologically unsound by several reviewers.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp Robert Blust, a leading scholar in the field of Austronesian comparative linguistics, pointed out "the radical disjunction of morphological and lexical evidence" which characterizes the Austric proposal; while he accepts the morphological correspondences between Austronesian and Austroasiatic as possible evidence for a remote genetic relationship, he considers the lexical evidence unconvincing.Template:Sfnp

A 2015 analysis using the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) did not support the Austric hypothesis. In this analysis, the supposed "core" components of Austric were assigned to two separate, unrelated clades: Austro-Tai and Austroasiatic-Japonic.Template:Sfnp Note however that ASJP is not widely accepted among historical linguists as an adequate method to establish or evaluate relationships between language families.<ref>Cf. comments by Adelaar, Blust and Campbell in Template:Harvp.</ref>