Re-evaluating Shorto's Austroasiatic Reconstructions ("Will the Real Austroasiatic Etyma Please Stand Up?" (original) (raw)

Re-evaluating Shorto's Austroasiatic Reconstructions (or "Will the Real Austroasiatic Etyma Please Stand Up?") Paul Sidwell and Mark Alves In 2006, Sidwell, Cooper, and Bauer edited and published Harry Shorto's A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary (MKCD), which assembles more than 2,000 etymological groupings and reconstructions. Shorto compiled the MKCD in the 1960s to 1970s, aggregating earlier comparative works of Schmidt, Blagden, and Pinnow, with (then) newly available lexicons and reconstructions of Austroasiatic languages. As we understand it, the 2006 publication was of a second draft prepared sometime after the 1973 ICAAL meeting; the latest marginal notes in the manuscript relate to sources published in 1980. While extensive, Shorto's work was tentative and realistically should be regarded as a very useful but unfinished set of provisional notes. The work has been utilized by researchers from various disciplines, often relying upon the reconstructions as proxies for proto-Austroasiatic lexicon and etymologies. However, this is fraught with risk as users are not always in a good position to critically assess the materials and Shorto’s analyses, sometimes undermining well intentioned work. With the creation of digital databases in the 2000s and diverse additional digital lexical resources in hand, we decided to re-evaluate these lexical comparisons and reconstructions and provide an updated version, with the larger goal of incorporating such updates into a prospective Austroasiatic Etymological Dictionary and Reconstruction. We consider several categories: (a) Proto-Austroasiatic etyma sufficiently supported by available data to likely date to the Austroasiatic dispersal; (b) Later-stage innovations in Austroasiatic, including inter-branch loanwords; (c) External loanwords or areal Wanderwörter; (d) Invalid entries due to problematic data (e.g., single branch attestations, inconsistent correspondences in phonology and/or semantics, etc.). In this talk, we will discuss our working methods and progress as we re-assess the complete Shorto data set. Provisional revised proto-Austroasiatic reconstructions, phonological and semantic, will be offered, plus various key observations arising from this project related to the re-assessed phonological and semantic reconstructions, quantities of the categories noted above, semantic/cultural domains of the lexicon, and others.