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As part of his field work, Blust studied 97 Austronesian languages spoken in locations such as Sarawak, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. In Taiwan, he performed field work on Formosan languages such as Thao, Kavalan, Pazeh, Amis, Paiwan and Saisiyat. His dictionary of the highly endangered Thao language, at over 1100 pages, is one of the most ...
Each vocabulary list in the database has 210 basic words. The list was originally from a set of printed 200-item word lists developed by Robert Blust as a lexicostatistical aid for classifying the Austronesian languages. 10 more numerals were added after the original 200th item, 'four', giving the word list its present 210-item inventory.
Subsequently, the position of the Formosan languages as the most archaic group of Austronesian languages was recognized by Otto Christian Dahl (1973), [26] followed by proposals from other scholars that the Formosan languages actually make up more than one first-order subgroup of Austronesian. Robert Blust (1977) first presented the subgrouping ...
According to American linguist Robert Blust, the Formosan languages form nine of the ten principal branches of the family, [6] while the one remaining principal branch, Malayo-Polynesian, contains nearly 1,200 Austronesian languages found outside Taiwan. [7]
The Greater North Borneo languages is a proposed subgroup of the Austronesian language family. The subgroup historically covers languages that are spoken throughout much of Borneo (excluding the southeastern area where the Greater Barito languages are spoken) and Sumatra , as well as parts of Java , and Mainland Southeast Asia .
It belongs to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian languages. It was reconstructed by Robert Blust in 1978 who showed that the languages form a subgroup within Oceanic. [1] It was mentioned in detail by Malcolm Ross in 1998, who theorized a link with the two St. Matthias languages (Mussau and Tenis).
According to Blust (2001, 2009), the fossilized morpheme *kali ~ *qali is used in various Austronesian languages to designate objects having a "sensitive connection with the spirit world." References [ edit ]
The Proto-Tsouic language was reconstructed by Japanese linguist Shigeru Tsuchida in 1976, and is supported by Blust (1999), Li (2008), and Sagart (2014). However, Chang (2006) [ 2 ] and Ross (2009) [ 3 ] deny that Tsouic is a valid group; Ross places Southern Tsouic within Nuclear Austronesian (the family of the various proto-Austronesian ...