Ross Malcolm, Pawley Andrew, Osmond Meredith (eds). The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic. The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society: 1 Material culture

Canberra, Australia: Pacific Linguistics and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 1998. — xvii + 350 p. — (Pacific Linguistics C-152). — ISSN: 0078-7558, ISBN: 0-85883-507-X (v. 1).This is the first of a set of five volumes (as envisaged in 1996, now 7 volumes) bringing together the result of recent work on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic (POc) language. Volume 1 deals with material culture, volume 2 with the physical world including landscape and conceptions of location, meteorology, astronomy and time, volume 3 with flora and fauna (actually, animals are dealt with in volume 4 published in 2011), volume 4 with terminologies centring on human beings, including the body and basic human conditions and activities, and social organisation (actually, part of this topic - body and mind - appears in volume 5, published in 2016, because volume 4 is devoted to fauna), and volume 5 with grammatical (closed) categories including adjectives, pronouns, and number (actually, volume 7 will be devoted to such a topic!). Volume 5 (i.e. volume 7), as it is planned at the time of writing, will also include an index to POc and other reconstructions presented in the whole work, as well as an English-to-POc finderlist and a list of all languages cited together with their subgroup. Proto Oceanic is the immediate ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. This subgroup consists of all the Austronesian languages of Melanesia east of 136° E, together with those of Polynesia and (with two exceptions) those of Micronesia – more than 450 languages in all. Extensive arguments for the existence of Oceanic as a clearly demarcated branch of Austronesian were first put forward by Otto Dempwolff in the 1920s and the validity of the subgroup is now recognised by virtually all scholars working in Austronesian historical linguistics. The development and break-up of the POc language and speech community were stages in a truly remarkable chapter in human prehistory – the colonisation by Austronesian speakers of the Indo-Pacific region in the period after 3000 BC. The outcome was the largest of the world’s well-established language families and (until the expansion of Indo-European after Columbus) the most widespread. The Austronesian family comprises around 1,000 distinct languages. Its eastern and western outliers, Madagascar and Easter Island, are two-thirds of the world apart, and its northernmost extensions, Hawaii and Taiwan, are separated by 70 degrees of latitude from its southernmost outpost, Stewart Island in New Zealand. The present project aims to bring together a large corpus of lexical reconstructions for POc, together with supporting cognate sets, organised according to semantic fields and using a standard orthography for POc. This thesaurus will be a useful resource for culture historians, archaeologists and others interested in the prehistory of the Pacific region, The comparative lexical material should also be a rich source of data for various kinds of purely linguistic research, e.g. on semantic change and subgrouping in the more than 400 daughter languages.