2012/06/01 by Gary Holton, Marian Klamer, František Kratochvíl +2 · 144 citations
Social Sciences · #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Language and cultural evolution #Linguistics #Archipelago #Comparative method #New guinea #Cognate #Meaning (existential) #Vocabulary #Computer science #History #Ethnology #Philosophy #Epistemology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1353/ol.2012.0001
published in Oceanic Linguistics 51(1), 86-122 (University of Hawaii Press)
openalex publication_date 2012/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/08
The historical relations of the Papuan languages scattered across the islands of the Alor archipelago, Timor, and Kisar in southeast Indonesia have remained largely conjectural. This paper makes a first step toward demonstrating that the languages of Alor and Pantar form a single genealogical group. Applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago, we use form-meaning pairings in basic cognate sets to establish regular sound correspondences that support the view that these languages are genetically related. We reconstruct 97 Proto[&mdash]Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages in the Trans-New Guinea family.