Austro-Tai Languages - The Evidence

The Evidence

The first proposal of a genealogical relationship was that of Paul Benedict in 1942, which he expanded upon through 1990. This took the form of an expansion of Wilhelm Schmidt's Austric phylum, and posited that Tai–Kadai and Austronesian had a sister relationship within Austric, which Benedict then accepted. Benedict later abandoned Austric but maintained his Austro-Tai proposal. This remained controversial among linguists, especially after the publication of Benedict (1975) whose methods of reconstruction were idiosyncratic and considered unreliable. For example, Thurgood (1994) examined Benedict's claims and concluded that since the sound correspondences and tonal developments were irregular, there was no evidence of a genealogical relationship, and the numerous cognates must be chalked up to early language contact.

However, the fact that many of the Austro-Tai cognates are found in core vocabulary, which is generally resistant to borrowing, continued to intrigue scholars. There were later several advances over Benedict's approach: Abandoning the larger Austric proposal; focusing on lexical reconstruction and regular sound correspondences; including data from additional branches of Tai–Kadai, Hlai and Kra; using better reconstructions of Tai–Kadai; and reconsidering the nature of the relationship, with Tai–Kadai possibly being a branch (daughter) of Austronesian.

Sagart (2005a) cited a core of regular sound correspondences relating words belonging to the basic vocabulary in Benedict’s work. He pointed out the lack of a substantial body of shared cultural words. He took these facts as indications that Benedict’s Austro-Tai cannot be explained as a contact phenomenon. He further listed a number of specifically Malayo-Polynesian features in the vocabulary shared by Tai-Kadai and Austronesian, concluding that Tai-Kadai is a subgroup within, rather than a related group of, Austronesian.

Ostapirat (2000) reconstructed proto-Kra, one of the least-well attested branches of Tai–Kadai. In (Ostapirat 2005) he presents fifty core vocabulary items found in all five branches of Tai–Kadai, and demonstrated that half of them—words such as child, eat, eye, fire, hand, head, I, you, louse, moon, tooth, water, this, etc.—can be related to proto-Austronesian by regular sound correspondences, a connection which Reid (2006) finds convincing.

Austronesian is characterized by disyllabic roots, whereas Tai–Kadai is predominantly monosyllabic. It appears that in Tai–Kadai, the first vowel reduced and then dropped out, leaving a consonant cluster which frequently reduced further to a single consonant. For example, the proto-Austronesian root *qudip "live, raw" corresponds to proto-Kra (k-)Dep > Laha ktʰop and Tai dip "id." (the *-D- consonant is Ostapirat's voiced plosive of undetermined quality, probably alveolar as opposed to dental articulation).

In proto-Tai–Kadai, there appear to have been three tones in words ending in a sonorant (vowel or nasal consonant), labeled simply A, B, C, plus words ending in an stop consonant, D, which did not have tone. In general, Austronesian words ending in a sonorant correspond to A, and words ending in a stop correspond to D. This accounts for most of the words. There are also a few cognates with B and C tone. From Indic borrowings it appears that tone B was originally a final h in Tai–Kadai, and some of the corresponding Austronesian roots also end in h, such as AN *qəmpah "chaff", Kam–Sui paa-B (Mulam kwaa-B), though there are few examples to go on. Tone C seems to have originally been creaky voice or a final glottal stop. It may correspond to *H, a laryngeal consonant of uncertain manner, in proto-Austronesian (AN *quluH "head", Thai klau-C), but again the number of cognates is too low to draw firm conclusions.

Sagart (2004) presented data from a newly described Kra language, Buyang, which—like many other Kra languages—retains the disyllabic roots characteristic of Austronesian. Some examples are:

Root	Buyang	Proto-MP
"to die"	matɛ́	*matay
"eye"	matá	*mata
"head"	qaðù	*quluH
"eight"	maðû	*walu
"bird"	manùk	*manuk
"flower"	maŋà	*buŋah

The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database project included both Buyang and Old Chinese. It found what it identified in Buyang as 16 retentions in common with Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and 21 retentions in common with Proto-Oceanic (as opposed to five loans) out of a sample of 181 etyma. Old Chinese was identified as having 11 retentions in common with Proto Malayo-Polynesian and 10 retentions in common with Proto-Oceanic out of a sample of 197 Old Chinese etyma.