2007/12/01 by Mark Donohue · 3 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Linguistics #Phonology #History #Population #Sociology #Philosophy #Demography
paper · doi:10.1353/ol.2008.0014
openalex publication_date 2007/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
I present data from Tambora, a now extinct language of central Sumbawa, and argue from the lexical data and the inferred phonology, compared with areal norms, that it was a Papuan language spoken by a trading population of southern Indonesia. The existence into historical times of a large and nonreclusive Papuan political entity this far west forces a major revision of our ideas about the linguistic macrohistory of Eastern Indonesia.