Alexander Adelaar

Austronesian Historical Linguistics and Culture History: A festschrift for Robert Blust

This book brings together new work on Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history to honour Robert Blust. The memoirs in Part 1 reflect on Blust’s groundbreaking contributions to these fields over the last 40 years. The remaining 26 chapters contain contributions by leading Austronesianists on a wide range of topics that broadly match Blust’s own research interests. The chapters in Part 2 (‘sound change’) examine issues in the historical phonology of Austronesian languages. Those in Part 3 (‘grammatical change and typology’) deal with morphological and syntactic reconstruction at various levels, from Proto Austronesian down. Methodological and substantive issues in the genetic classification of Austronesian languages are treated in Part 4 (‘subgrouping’) and in several chapters in other sections. Chapters in Part 5 (‘culture history and lexical reconstruction’) investigate ways in which the close analysis of lexicon, in conjunction with different kinds of non-linguistic evidence, can throw light on the history of Austronesian-speaking peoples.

Malagasy Genetic Ancestry Comes from an Historical Malay Trading Post in Southeast Borneo

Malagasy genetic diversity results from an exceptional protoglobalization process that took place over a thousand years ago across the Indian Ocean. Previous efforts to locate the Asian origin of Malagasy highlighted Borneo broadly as a potential source, but so far no firm source populations were identified. Here, we have generated genome-wide data from two Southeast Borneo populations, the Banjar and the Ngaju, together with published data from populations across the Indian Ocean region. We find strong support for an origin of the Asian ancestry of Malagasy among the Banjar. This group emerged from the long-standing presence of a Malay Empire trading post in Southeast Borneo, which favored admixture between the Malay and an autochthonous Borneo group, the Ma’anyan. Reconciling genetic, historical, and linguistic data, we show that the Banjar, in Malay-led voyages, were the most probable Asian source among the analyzed groups in the founding of the Malagasy gene pool.

Contrasting Linguistic and Genetic Origins of the Asian Source Populations of Malagasy

The Austronesian expansion, one of the last major human migrations, influenced regions as distant as tropical Asia, Remote Oceania and Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. The identity of the Asian groups that settled Madagascar is particularly mysterious. While language connects Madagascar to the Ma’anyan of southern Borneo, haploid genetic data are more ambiguous. Here, we screened genome-wide diversity in 211 individuals from the Ma’anyan and surrounding groups in southern Borneo. Surprisingly, the Ma’anyan are characterized by a distinct, high frequency genomic component that is not found in Malagasy. This novel genetic layer occurs at low levels across Island Southeast Asia and hints at a more complex model for the Austronesian expansion in this region. In contrast, Malagasy show genomic links to a range of Island Southeast Asian groups, particularly from southern Borneo, but do not have a clear genetic connection with the Ma’anyan despite the obvious linguistic association.

Much ado about di

1. Diis originally a cliticized form of the third person pronoun dia. 2. Dideveloped from a preposition di, which became cliticized to the root of the following passive verb. 3. Dideveloped from an earlier passive prefix *ni(still attested in seventh century Old Malay inscriptions) through denasalization of initial n-. 4. Old Malay had the verbal prefixes borand di-, but in the seventh-cen tury court language of the South Sumatran inscriptions, these had been replaced by respectively marand niwhich were Batak loan affixes; sub dialectally and in later inscriptions, however, borand diremained in use and eventually outlived marand ni(Aichele 1942-43; see also Mahdi 2005).

Malagasy Phonological History and Bantu Influence

In this paper I give a critical assessment of John Wolffs interpretation of the phonological history of Malagasy as it appears in his recent book on Proto-Austronesian phonology. The various aspects of Wolffs approach that I deal with include the development of final open syllables, the spirantization and fricativization of stops and semivowels, the reduction of *-ŋk- clusters, and Wolffs interpretation of the development of Proto-Austronesian *s (or *c in Wolffs notation). I also discuss the impact of Bantu languages on the development of Malagasy after the migration of its speakers to East Africa. This impact was a major one, although it is seriously underestimated in Wolffs perspective.

Malagasy Personal Pronouns: A Lexical History

This paper traces the history of pronouns in various regional forms of Malagasy and proposes a reconstruction of Proto-Malagasy pronouns. Four sets of pronouns are reconstructed for Proto-Malagasy: a default nominative set marked with Ø, a topicalized nominative set in which 1st person pronouns are marked with a form *i, a genitive set marked with *=n-, and an oblique set marked with *an=. The development of some pronouns is shown to provide clues for the internal classification of Malagasy varieties. The Proto-Malagasy pronouns are also compared with external references and higher-order reconstructions, namely pronouns from the closely related Southeast Barito languages in Borneo and Proto–Malayo-Polynesian. Finally, an attempt is made to reconstruct Proto-Southeast Barito pronouns.

Malagasy Dialect Divisions: Genetic versus Emblematic Criteria

This paper gives an overview of the literature on Malagasy dialect variety and the various Malagasy dialect classifications that have been proposed. It rejects the often held view that the way Malagasy dialects reflect the Proto- Austronesian phoneme sequences *li and *ti is a basic criterion for their genetic division. While the linguistic innovations shown in, respectively, central dialects (Merina, Betsileo, Sihanaka, Tanala) and southwestern dialects (Vezo, Mahafaly, Tandroy) clearly show that these groups form separate historical divisions, the linguistic developments in other (northern, eastern, and western) dialects are more difficult to interpret. The differences between Malagasy dialects are generally rather contained and do not seem to be the result of separate migration waves or the arrival of linguistically different migrant groups. The paper ends with a list of subgrouping criteria that will be useful for future research into the history of Malagasy dialects.

The Comoros Show the Earliest Austronesian Gene Flow into the Swahili Corridor

At the dawn of the second millennium, the expansion of the Indian Ocean trading network aligned with the emergence of an outward-oriented community along the East African coast to create a cosmopolitan cultural and trading zone known as the Swahili Corridor. On the basis of analyses of new genome-wide genotyping data and uniparental data in 276 individuals from coastal Kenya and the Comoros islands, along with large-scale genetic datasets from the Indian Ocean rim, we reconstruct historical population dynamics to show that the Swahili Corridor is largely an eastern Bantu genetic continuum. Limited gene flows from the Middle East can be seen in Swahili and Comorian populations at dates corresponding to historically documented contacts. However, the main admixture event in southern insular populations, particularly Comorian and Malagasy groups, occurred with individuals from Island Southeast Asia as early as the 8th century, reflecting an earlier dispersal from this region. Remarkably, our results support recent archaeological and linguistic evidence-based suggestions that the Comoros archipelago was the earliest location of contact between Austronesian and African populations in the Swahili Corridor.

Austronesians in Madagascar: A Critical Assessment of the Works of Paul Ottino and Philippe Beaujard

The history of contacts between East Africa and island South East Asia (henceforth ISEA) is a long one. Based on current research, this history is punctuated by at least three important events. The first of these is the beginning of any contacts between East Africa and ISEA, which dates from 300 BC or possibly earlier and involves the transfer of cultigens (including banana, yam, taro, and rice) as well as boat technology and several other elements. This transfer has usually been assumed to go from ISEA to East Africa, but it also went in opposite direction. A second event is the settlement of Madagascar by speakers of Austronesian languages. It covers a period probably beginning around the seventh-century CE, when people from the shores of the Barito River in South Borneo moved to East Africa, and ending with the settlement of Madagascar in the eighth century. A third event consists of contact that was maintained between ISEA and Madagascar after the latter’s settlement. It continued until after the arrival of Europeans in the Indian Ocean and brought about some important cultural influences on (at least) Madagascar’s southeast coast. In this chapter, I concentrate on the nature and extent of these influences in as far as they are reflected in the Malagasy language. More particularly, I critically evaluate the ideas of Paul Ottino and Philippe Beaujard, who both argue for a distinct Malay and Javanese influence leaving a heavy imprint on east and central Madagascar. Ottino uses evidence from origin myths and early literature to argue that the Malagasy descend from Sumatra Malays. Beaujard adduces linguistic and other evidence to claim that the Austronesian element in Malagasy culture is more multi-ethnic than previously assumed, involving a particularly strong Malay and Javanese influence, but also involving various elements from Sulawesi, Timor and the Philippines. It would also involve direct influence from South India. Here I use linguistic arguments to show that the sources of these influences were much less pluriform. Genetically, Malagasy clearly belongs to the South East Barito (henceforth SEB) subgroup of Austronesian languages in Borneo, and it also underwent significant influence from other Austronesian languages. However, these languages are few in number. These are Malay and Javanese (the hegemonic languages in ISEA at the time of the Malagasy migrations) as well as a few languages directly neighbouring the Malagasy homeland such as South Sulawesi languages and Ngaju (in Indonesian Borneo). It is obvious that contacts between Madagascar and the Malayo-Javanese world in Indonesia continued until the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. However, much of what Ottino attributes to Sumatran influence and Beaujard sees as general South East Asian and South Indian influence in Madagascar from between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries CE was in fact already part of the cultural make-up of the early Malagasy before they migrated to East Africa. They had already undergone Malay and Javanese influence while still in South Borneo, where a Hindu-Malay polity was established in or before the seventh century CE.

Proto-Siraya Phonology: A Reconstruction

In this paper I make a phonological comparison of Siraya dialects and reconstruct Proto-Siraya phonology applying the comparative method. Siraya is a dormant language with various dialects once spoken in Southwest Taiwan. The present reconstruction is largely based on 17th century liturgical texts and a wordlist, and to a lesser extent on wordlists of various dialects collected at the turn of the 20th century. An unexpected outcome of this comparison is that Proto-Siraya still had distinct reflexes of Proto-Austronesian *R and *S, although they subsequently merged in a palatal fricative in the individual dialects of Siraya. Dans cet article, nous effectuons une comparaison phonologique des dialectes du siraya, et reconstruisons la phonologie du proto-siraya en appliquant la methode comparative. Le siraya est une langue ‘en sommeil’ tres dialectalisee qui etait parlee autrefois au sud-ouest de Taiwan. Notre reconstruction est basee pour l’essentiel sur les textes liturgiques du 17eme siecle, et dans une moindre mesure sur des listes de mots de differents dialectes recueillis au tout debut du 20eme siecle. Cette comparaison a permis la decouverte inattendue de la preservation par le proto-siraya de la distinction entre les consonnes *R et *S du proto-austronesien, bien qu’elles se soient confondues en une fricative palatale dans les differents dialectes du siraya.