 It's very close to Charles Dickens' house, if you know that. Okay, so sorry for making you late. No problem. It's actually... I'm actually very happy that I'm one of the last speakers, because I can try to integrate a couple of things I learned from all of you the last couple of days in my own talk, so that might explain why some of it may sound a bit improvised. It's because it is, I mean it would have been a different talk had I been one of the first speakers. But I guess that's a nice thing about it. One of the... some of the overlaps I think that I have with a lot of the earlier presentations. First of all is this whole dilemma which is inherited vocabulary and borrowed forms, right, and how it shapes a lot of our debates that we've been having. And the other one is what to do with the philological attestations you may have in a sort of border version of a language, and how can they relate to reconstruction. That's another one. But I would say the main point that I want to talk today about is loanwords, what to do with them. And that's also because of my own discipline. I don't really work in a linguistic department or institution. I've always been the language guy in interdisciplinary teams, right? And then so loanwords are important because people more or less have an idea of what's going on and people looking at cultural context from a non-linguistic perspective can do something with them, right? So that's basically my PhD and a nutshell as well, which I did at the School of Archaeology in Oxford, and that was an interdisciplinary Indian Ocean project. So my task was to look at language context in pre-modern times between Southeast Asia and everybody else, which in most cases is just loanwords, right? You can't really tell much about grammatical influence if there's not too much data. So that's where I come from. I work at an institute which I can see as the little sister of SOAS. It's the Royal Mendelins Institute of Satisfaction Caribbean Studies. It shares with SOAS its rather strange labyrinth-like architecture, colonial past and also potentially interesting ways of looking at non-Western countries. And my own background in that is, say, Malay and Javanese, which are two Austronesian languages as you probably all know. And so I studied those. The reason I got interested in historical linguistics was because of that PhD in which I had to basically learn about the phonological histories of the languages involved. Of course, when you talk about loanwords, you're dealing with two possibly three phonological histories of languages that in many cases aren't really well described. There isn't one book of, say, the Malay phonological history, right? So you're dealing with a lot of indirect evidence as well, which makes it very nice to do. And it's basically one of the ways to gauge the time depth of lexical transmissions. Of course, the best way to see how old a word is in a certain language is philology. Specifically, if you have a dated inscription, which in Southeast Asia is often the case, you would have the shaka, the sort of Indic way of counting, and then you could tell exactly how old something is. If that year isn't in your inscription, you basically have to trust a philologist, and they can do paleographic dating and basically say how old something approximately is. So they have to trust philologists for that. And so basically along the way, I learned about all of these loanwords, and one of the things that struck me was that a lot of them were reconstructed to quite high-order levels of Orsonitian, say, subgrouping. So, of course, if you have attestations or reconstructions across different phylogenetic family trees and they're not things like onomatopoeia or kinship terms, that is something interesting. I mean, the chances of that aren't really high. And yet, when I ought to put it a bit, Kras came up with sort of debunked protoforms then people at first were a bit indifferent because in a lot of cases, the sound laws, the sound correspondences did what they expected, did what they were expected to look like. So you could argue that in terms of sound laws they were doing nothing unexpected, hence the reconstruction would be legitimate. But then, of course, the reconstruction would also not really tell that much in terms of the proto-language and all of the things you can do with a proto-language, all of these things like talking about a proto-society, that archaeologists really like and they take linguistic evidence for that. So that was a bit of the intersection of disciplines that I was balancing myself on. And I think it works like this. So basically today I'd like to raise a couple of methodological points, looking again at the Austronesian language family. And basically it isn't my intention to show how other people are wrong or anything. I think in a lot of cases, Austronesian linguists have been the only people right about a certain topic when everybody else was wrong. A textbook example of that would be the colonization of Maragastar, which for three centuries, I mean linguists have been known as an Austronesian language. And over the past 10 years maybe, archaeologists and geneticists have come to similar conclusions. So that would be a nice example. But I do think there are a couple of basically issues I want to point out. First of all, looking at old texts. I think that's very important. I think for some language families like Indo-European, it's very well established that you would do that. You would have your Latin, your Sanskrit, your ancient Greek as a sort of control mechanism almost for the reconstructions that you make. In the Austronesian language family, I would say it's only old Japanese, which old Japanese basically means eighth century. So it's not really old when you compare it to some of the Indo-European languages, of course. But that would be the only thing and apart from that most of the languages that are being used for subgrouping are modern languages. So that is methodologically an important point to take into account when we talk about Austronesian languages. The other thing I would say is two important borderland regions. One is New Guinea as you can see here where the Papuan languages are spoken historically. And the other one here about is where historically there was a lot of language contact with also Asiatic languages. These are two things I will come back to. But for the time being, so I'll be looking at loanwords, language contact and basically the way that people from non purely linguistic backgrounds use these types of insights in, say, interdisciplinary projects. Like the one, by the way, that funded the conference. So that's how I know Nathan in the first place. I also want to make one point throughout the talk about the archipelagic nature of the Austronesian language family and how that may or may not shape the way we look at it. I mean, it's the most insular, I would say, language family. And I will argue along the way that that basically also shapes the way that the languages work in a very sort of, well, poorly understood form, at least by me. But first, let's have a look at the philology in sort of the broadest sense of the word and what are some of the issues that I come across in my work. So first of all, as we know from some of the Indo-European Afro-Asiatic languages, we have copper plates, religious scriptures, basically all of these, let's say, old texts, texts in the broadest sense of the word that give us a very good insight in the, say, not really what people would have spoken on the marketplace, but would have been a sort of literized version of the Daeglosic spectrum of those languages. And these exist for Southeast Asia as well, for the Austronesian languages. As I said, we have Old Japanese, which is pretty well done. There are some other languages as well, on which we have epigraphic data. But for some reason, well, for the reason of the absence of a dictionary, primarily, you don't see them back at all in Austronesian reconstructions. I'll talk about that a bit later. One of the other things that is really nice, I think, about, say, early dated texts in these Austronesian languages is that we can learn a lot about other language families as well, in particular Indo-Aryan, because of loanwords, and because the Indo-Aryan script, well, the Indic scripts to put it that way, often don't really give as much phonological information as you would have liked. For example, you wouldn't be able to tell how to short vowels. The Graspar would have been pronounced at a specific region in a specific time. Other things, you wouldn't know if there was interfocalic voicing in certain, say, Prakritz. And you get all of this information by looking at, for example, Old Japanese, which has borrowed a lot of vocabulary from these languages. And I suppose you could make a similar argument if you go west and look at Prakritz borrowings in Persian, for example, Middle Persian. You could get similar, say, additional puzzle pieces about the historical phonology. Although, you know, a bit strangely to me, nobody has really done that. So that would be a thing, or maybe something else, maybe a gap in the literature that at least I have come across. And then, of course, there is the earliest European descriptions, which in a lot of cases, a couple of centuries, 300 years, of a number of Austronesian languages, which, for most of them, will be the earliest extant descriptions in the first place. And there's nice things that could be done with those as well. One of my favorite examples is my colleague, Alexander Aghala, who has used, say, missionary, well, archives to make a complete reconstruction of the extinct Siraia language for most Austronesian languages that's spoken even north of Taiwan. Basically, using almost corpus linguistics and making a grammar of this language. So that's interesting as well. And I always wondered why couldn't something like that be done from a lay as well, with so many old word lists that basically tell you a very early stage of language development as well, which would be interesting for Austronesian linguistics, I would say. And my favorite example is the Chiang language, which is the oldest epigraphically, say, available Austronesian language spoken in Vietnam and Cambodia, what is now Vietnam and Cambodia, still spoken. It behaves in a very Montclair-like way, but it's evidently phylogenetically Austronesian, quite closely related to Malay as well. And that has been reconstructed as well. There is one book which is the reconstruction of Proto-Cham. The problem is that old epigraphic Cham isn't taken into account. So what you rather get is not necessarily Proto-Cham, but a type of early medieval, you could say, vulgar Cham, which in its phonological development is much more recent, seems to be much more recent than what you get in old texts. So that's important as well. Something that is called Proto might actually be relatively recent. And then again, the sort of philological evidence becomes a cross-check mechanism. And my point is that, I mean, this could happen more in Austronesian historical linguistics. See if there's anything. Oh, the other thing that is really fun is Old Sundanese. It's one of the languages of Java. There are manuscripts being found quite old ones, even now in these sort of modern times when families don't really know what to do with the boxes they have in their attic. And basically they turn out to be of enormous linguistic value as well. It's just that nobody can read them anymore. So that's also something that could be quite high on the agenda of Austronesian historical linguistics but as far as I know isn't really at this point. So, you know, that sort of avenue of potential collaboration. Now to move on to the second point which is language contact. And these are all from my earlier work, by the way, but basically first to contextualize them a bit. Language contact is quite complicated when we talk about Austronesian languages because first of all we have these two areas of language mixing. One of them with what we call Papuan languages but they're actually quite distinct families as well. You just don't know the exact history yet. There's an area called Wallacea named after Alfred Russell Wallace, the zoologist who worked in Eastern Indonesia and discovered how the zoology was quite unique in that region. Well the languages are as well because they're all, I mean if you believe in the concept mixed languages so they take over each other's features. It doesn't really make sense anymore in that area to talk about Austronesian versus Papuan languages because people should go to each other's conferences and they often do. The other one which is I think a bit less thoroughly understood is the sort of Monkmer or Zonesian say mixed area, so Cham we talked about as well, but there's also languages in Sumatra, in Kalimantan that have distinct sort of also Asiatic features and even low words. One of my students, my first PhD student has just finished a book on Karimti, which is a Malayic language but it has this fascinating phenomenon, a phrasal alternation in which every word has a different ending whether or not it's sort of contextualized fracially or standing as an independent form. And the sound those use for that aren't Austronesian at all. It much more resembles something like Khmer or the Monkmer language is spoken now presently on the mainland. So these are the language context of a sort of more of a deeper time depth. But I've been looking at the Indian or Indic language context as well making a list of words that I thought weren't really sort of real protoforms to begin with or there may have been real protoforms if you expect a sound loss, you expect a sound loss, but they were borrowed. It's my point. From different places, from the Arian languages, but also from Dobilian languages in which Tamil seems to have been quite important. And also, I mean Hindi isn't really the right word because Hindi itself wasn't really used as a term at the time of context, but a sort of medieval prakrit I would say. So those are some of the basically things that I came across and what was interesting is that a lot of them were reconstructed to proto-wesse Malaya Polynesian which, depending on who you believe is a bit of a tricky sound family to begin with it happens to be the case that proto-Malaya Polynesian involves all of the languages historically in contact with a Indian Ocean world to begin with. Not the Pacific, not Taiwan but basically what is now Indonesia and the Philippines precisely the area where you would have expected loan words from Indian Ocean languages in. So that's interesting as well because the next question then would become how legitimate is the sub-family if it's full of things that can be demonstrated to be loan words. I don't have the answer to that one as well but it is something to take into account especially if for example they do unexpected things like the Malay R corresponding to an L in Philippine languages which would have been a G, a good if it were inherited these kind of things. So there's a couple of red flags there as well and thus far I haven't been publicly executed in the process was published in Oceanic Linguistics. I think that's fine also because you can revert the logic and say I'm going to use Austronesian linguistics to debunk some of the fake loan words scenarios that are being promulgated in the wider literature not necessarily by linguists but by social media experts it seems to be that a lot of people want things that are also niche to be from other parts of the world and then historical linguistics and linguistic reconstruction can actually be a corrective mechanism there as well to say for example these words aren't really from Sanskrit, from Tamil or from Arabic but they can be reconstructed quite regularly and there's a bit of a problem with the linguists who are obviously interested in language I get a lot of questions through email as well about where does a word really come from so there is some sort of societal interest in that as well but there are a lot of people who really want a lot of western Austronesian words to come from India which reminded me of the popular 1990s character from the BBC show Goodness Gracious Me you should watch it, it's really funny but even in a European context there will be this stereotypical Greek uncle everything comes from Greek so it's not really unique or anything okay then which is I suppose the last point of some of the issues that I come across and this has been mentioned yesterday as well during the keynotes is the problem of doublets in Austronesian languages in general but specifically a Western Malaya Polynesian these are just a couple that I found in the paper by Robert Bluss but there are hundreds and hundreds more I think the Austronesian language family may be one of the most, I mean has the highest fecundity of the reconstruction of potential doublets, you can see there's different types as well, some actually share a morphological unit or a morphemic unit others are basically throughout all of the languages that have been reconstructed you find these two forms coexisting now what does that mean does it say something about the language family, does it say something about the people doing reconstructions probably a bit of both, remember we're talking about a lot of violence that won't really isolate this was an archipelago archipelago sorry, where people were coming back and forth where people were maritime in their orientation so there is a bit of a sort of continuous tradition of going back and forth if you remember your paradigmatic Austronesian family tree branches off in like eight different things and then one of these sub-branches goes again in eight and then one in eight as well suggests that there was a multi or mono directional movement but of course people were going all over the place and secondary borrowing and these kinds of things seems to be quite the norm one of the things where I think protoforms could really give a wrong impression is one of the case studies I got an email by an anthropologist looking into what's a taboo in Austronesian basically languages and what you find going through the Austronesian comparative dictionary is that it reconstructs really, really high up but the only legitimate reconstruction here is the oceanic one which makes it a Pacific sort of thing whereas the other attestations and these are basically varieties of the same language are only attested in one tiny corner of Indonesia and they also mean something different so that is a bit of a problem for the sort of non-linguists who want to use Austronesian reconstructed data for their own work because some reconstructions maybe shouldn't be there or shouldn't be made but of course who decides these things, right? There's no high supreme court of historical linguistics or anything like that so it's also one of the things I come across I think I'm slowly moving to a number of concluding remarks which is first of all the earlier pointed it might be a bit of a problem for Austronesian linguistics specifically not necessarily the Pacific or Taiwan but specifically say the Indonesian archipelago which people say is a cradle of globalization and people are moving back and forth for the past three millennia that there seems to be little collaboration yet between say the historical linguists working on the region philologists that is one of the points that I think could be could get some attention in the future and so yeah it kind of makes me a bit jealous if I look at some of the Indo-European stuff in which there seems to be, I mean it might be that the grass is always greener but there seems to be more attention for people looking at philologically attested old languages versus what we can do in terms of reconstruction maybe the same with the Semitic branch and the other thing is I think the really cool computational stuff that happens for example for Sino-Tibetan is not really the norm either yet in Austronesian linguistics although there are people doing it now so that's nice then again the good thing about the Austronesian languages is that there is of course a lot of data and that a lot of people are working on it some regions are pretty well done others such as East in Indonesia, I mean very very little actually makes it even to the Austronesian comparative dictionary so that is a bit of a problem now in terms of knowing where the field is moving and what reconstructions are there and basically that is a bit data deprived now at this moment I would say so finally and this is where my earlier research sort of comes in, is how these things then resonate with other people who have an interest in old languages to put it that way but aren't historical linguists or the archaeologists that I work with historians, I mean archaeology is nice because these people are interested in all sorts of data, zoology genetics language, plant, science all of it historians I would say less so even though they could learn a lot from people like all of you for example in terms of what a region looks like prior to the appearance of the earliest documents and descriptions that's not really happening I suppose too much in Southeast Asia, some do it but it's exceptional so I think this might end up being a bit of a plea for closer collaboration as well between all of these disparate fields maybe over cocktails and pizza I'm not sure but one of the things I was interested as well and maybe that could be talked about during Q&A is also how some of this resonates to the fields that you're working on and how it's completely different or similar what are some of the problems maybe also what are some of the solutions about all of this so I guess that's it thanks for not sure if I made it in the right time slot or thank you