Parallel Histories in Rote-Meto

Abstract

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. 5. Jonker (1908) does not record the phonetic differences in the realization of voiced plosives. No variety of Rote is known to contrast plain voiced stops and imploded voiced stops.

Rote-Meto Comparative Dictionary

“…The reconstructed PRM phoneme inventory is given in Table 3.1. This is the same as the inventory posited in Edwards (2018a), with the addition of PRM *ʤ and *w for both of which evidence has since been adduced. Both these proto-phonemes are marginal, with only two attestations each.…”

“…Most of these correspondences have been discussed in full detail in Edwards (2018a), and I do not repeat that discussion in the following sections. Since the publication of that paper, however, my understanding of some correspondence sets is better developed, which has led to a number of minor adjustments.…”

“…The cross-references between the labels in each work for initial *k-are as follows (label in this dictionary = label in Table 22 of Edwards 2018a:383): k-1 = set 2, k-2 = set 1, k-3 = set 3, k-4 = set 4. Set 5 in Edwards (2018a) is now considered irregular (marked k-irr). The patterns identified for medial *-k-in this dictionary are more fine-grained than those identified in Edwards (2018a).…”

“…Set 5 in Edwards (2018a) is now considered irregular (marked k-irr). The patterns identified for medial *-k-in this dictionary are more fine-grained than those identified in Edwards (2018a). As a result, the two sets of patterns and their members do not exactly match.…”

“…Slightly earlier versions of the sound correspondences and internal subgrouping, along with detailed discussion, can be found in Edwards (2016Edwards ( , 2018aEdwards ( , 2018c. In this chapter I only discuss those parts of my analysis that have been revised since the appearance of these publications.…”