Mark Donohue

Multidisciplinary perspectives on banana (Musa spp.) domestication

Original multidisciplinary research hereby clarifies the complex geodomestication pathways that generated the vast range of banana cultivars (cvs). Genetic analyses identify the wild ancestors of modern-day cvs and elucidate several key stages of domestication for different cv groups. Archaeology and linguistics shed light on the historical roles of people in the movement and cultivation of bananas from New Guinea to West Africa during the Holocene. The historical reconstruction of domestication processes is essential for breeding programs seeking to diversify and improve banana cvs for the future.

Farming and Language in Island Southeast Asia Reframing Austronesian History

Current portrayals of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) over the past 5,000 years are dominated by discussion of the Austronesian “farming/language dispersal,” with associated linguistic replacement, genetic clines, Neolithic “packages,” and social transformations. The alternative framework that we present improves our understanding of the nature of the Austronesian language dispersal from Taiwan and better accords with the population genetics, archaeological evidence, and crop domestication histories for ISEA. Genetic studies do not demonstrate that the dispersal of Austronesian languages through ISEA was associated with large‐scale displacement, replacement, or absorption of preexisting populations. Linguistic phylogenies for Austronesian languages do not support staged movement from Taiwan through the Philippines into Indo‐Malaysia; in addition, the lexical and grammatical structure of many Austronesian languages suggests significant interaction with pre‐Austronesian languages and cultures of the region. Archaeological evidence, including domestication histories for major food plants, indicates that ISEA was a zone of considerable maritime interaction before the appearance of Austronesian languages. Material culture dispersed through ISEA from multiple sources along a mosaic of regional networks. The archaeological evidence helps us to shape a new interpretative framework of the social and historical processes that more parsimoniously accounts for apparent discrepancies between genetic phylogenies and linguistic distributions and allows for more nuanced models of the dispersal of technologies and societies without reference to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis.

Yet More on the Position of the Languages of Eastern Indonesia and East Timor

The line dividing the Austronesian languages into Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP) and Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (CEMP) is drawn east of Sulawesi and through the middle of Sumbawa. A number of phonological or semantic changes are claimed as forming the basis of this distinction, as well as the typological profile of the languages to the east being different from those to the west, and a number of lexical items being attested only east of the line. We examine the phonological and semantic innovations, as well as the erratic morphological ones, showing that none of them define the CEMP line, but indicate that (a) the Central Malayo-Polynesian (CMP)–area languages do not convincingly meet the criteria commonly accepted for a subgroup or even a linkage, (b) some of the WMP-area languages exhibit more of the same features found in at least some of the CMP-area languages than do others, and (c) many of the traits ascribed to the CMP- or CEMP-area languages can be found in more conservative WMP-area or Formosan languages as well.

Typology and Linguistic Areas

A closer look shows that rather than constituting a linguistic area on its own, the region between Lombok and Papua is simply part of a typological continuum that runs from the northern Austronesian languages in Taiwan and the Philippines through Malaysia and western Indonesia east toward Melanesia, without any linguistically definable borders on either side.

Complexities with restricted numeral systems

Abstract The cognitive advantages to retaining a restricted counting system (without exponentiation) even as a more complicated one is being developed are not immediately obvious, but follow from the information about upcoming complexity that is implicit in the use of distinct numerals. Kanum, a language from the south of New Guinea, where “systems with limited extent” are widely reported, has base-6 counting systems with full use of exponentiation in one system, and no possibility of extension in another. The evidence suggests the more complex systems were internally motivated, yet the simpler systems have not been abandoned.

Word Order in New Guinea: Dispelling a Myth

It has been claimed that the appearance of SVO order in a non-Austronesian language of New Guinea and its environs is evidence of contact and influence from Austronesian languages. I suggest that, because SVO is an innovative order in Austronesian languages as well, the influence might well be in the other direction, from a period before the popularization of SOV in New Guinea.

Does phoneme inventory size correlate with population size

Atkinson 2011 finds a significant positive correlation between population size and phoneme inventory size (confirming Hay & Bauer 2007) and explains it by migration: phoneme sizes are largest in Africa, and as societies spread out of Africa and around the world they went through population and cultural bottlenecks and underwent phonological simplification as a consequence. We believe the correlation is artefactual if it exists at all, and it probably does not exist. To test it we surveyed 1,350 languages with excellent genealogical and geographical coverage and distribution. We used the Autotyp areal breakdown (Bickel & Nichols 2002). Population size figures were taken, where possible, from grammars, ethnographies, and/or recent census data, and attempt to give population figures for the entire ethnic group (and not just speakers of the language, since most of the world’s languages are losing speakers to large national and international languages); where we did not have this information we used figures from Lewis (ed.) 2009. Language shift has increased rapidly in recent decades, so that the size of the ethnic group is a better measure of the size of the speech community in which the oldest and most fluent speakers grew up, and it is these speakers’ competence that grammars usually describe. The log of population size was coded for each language. Since ethnic groups and speech communities of under a few hundred individuals are ordinarily unstable (not impossibly, but the languages of such communities are frequently undergoing shift and death), all population sizes reported in units or tens were coded as 499 (treating these speech communities as though they still had the sizes reported for them in the early to mid-twentieth century). For each sample language we surveyed the total number of consonant phonemes (excluding phones found only in unassimilated foreign loans), the total number of phonemic vowel qualities, and the number of tone oppositions. AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR

The Language of Lapita: Vanuatu and an Early Papuan Presence in the Pacific

The languages of Vanuatu are uniformly Austronesian, but have long been described as “aberrant.” Blust (2005) points out a number of morphosyntactic features of the Vanuatu languages that might provide evidence for a Papuan element in their history. We add to that argument, presenting phonological evidence that links the languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia with the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea. Accepting that the earliest archaeological sites in Vanuatu are Lapita sites, we suggest that this implicates non-Austronesian speaking Melanesians in the earliest occupancy of the islands, calling into question assumptions that the Lapita expansion in the Pacific can be unproblematically associated with the expansion of Austronesian languages of the Oceanic subgroup.

Typology, Areality, and Diffusion

Dunn et al. (2007) state that their typological comparisons do not demonstrate genealogical relatedness in the usual sense, but that the technique does accurately recapitulate trees established by the comparative method. We demonstrate that the signal picked up by their method is areal, rather than genealogical, and suggest that the method, when tested on known language families, will also show a high sensitivity to the effect of diffusion.

The Papuan Language of Tambora

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.