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Proto-Austronesian (commonly abbreviated as PAN or PAn) is a proto-language. It is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austronesian languages, one of the world's major language families. Proto-Austronesian is assumed to have begun to diversify c. 4000 BCE – c. 3500 BCE in Taiwan.
- c. 4000 BCE – c. 3500 BCE
Proto-Austronesian language. Central Malayo-Polynesian languages. (Show more) Austronesian languages, family of languages spoken in most of the Indonesian archipelago; all of the Philippines, Madagascar, and the island groups of the Central and South Pacific (except for Australia and much of New Guinea); much of Malaysia; and scattered areas of ...
The Austronesian language family has been established by the linguistic comparative method on the basis of cognate sets, sets of words from multiple languages, which are similar in sound and meaning which can be shown to be descended from the same ancestral word in Proto-Austronesian according to regular rules. Some cognate sets are very stable.
- One of the world's primary language families
Reconstructions for ‘boat,’ ‘sail,’ and ‘paddle’ can be attributed to Proto-Austronesian, but terminology specific to the outrigger can be assigned only to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, a language that was probably spoken somewhere in the northern Philippines in the period 3500–3000 bce.
Under such circumstances very small subgroups or even single languages provide an independent line of evidence for the nature of Proto-Austronesian that is theoretically equivalent to the entire Malayo-Polynesian branch of some 1,180 member languages.
Oct 25, 2022 · Proto-Austronesian (commonly abbreviated as PAN or PAn) is a proto-language. It is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austronesian languages, one of the world's major language families. Lower-level reconstructions have also been made, and include Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian.
Proto-Austronesian, the ancestral language from which all other Austronesian languages descended, is considered by most scholars to have been spoken on the island of Taiwan something in the order of 5000 years ago.
