I make a bottom-up reconstruction of the historical phonology and a portion of the lexicon of the Rote-Meto languages of western Timor.The regular sound correspondences of these languages necessitate reconstruction to Proto-Rote-Meto of a large amount of material that cannot be fully explained by Austronesian inheritance.The nature of this material indicates that it is substrate retention from pre-Austronesian languages of the region.This substrate can be detected by application of the comparative method alone.The bottom-up reconstruction also provides evidence for subgrouping Meto with both West Rote and East Rote and I propose that this is because Meto has shared a period of common development with both groups that involves a synthesis of the tree model and wave model of historical linguistics. TOP-DOWN: PMP TO ROTE-METO.In Edwards (2018), I provide a full discussion of Rote-Meto historical phonology from a top-down perspective.This work compares preexisting Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) reconstructions with reflexes in the Rote-Meto languages and identifies the sound changes that have occurred.The main sound changes between PMP and the Rote-Meto languages are summarized in table 2. TABLE 2. ROTE-METO REFLEXES OF PMP † † Where multiple correspondence sets attest the same protophoneme, this is indicated by an additional row with any environment conditioning each set.Repeated environments indicate unconditioned splits.Thus, PMP *k has undergone an unconditioned split word initially.PMP env.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.