Saturday, February 12, 2005

Lien du jour: Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database

I recently borrowed Dr. Zorc's Core Etymological Dictionary of Filipino, which Sauvage Noble mentioned in his blog. Fascinating read and quite a refreshing change from poking my nose in non-linguistics textbooks for school. ;-) There are some Tagalog words that I hadn't realized were foreign borrowings via Malay (though can't remember them offhand...).

Anyway...

Here's today's link of the day (or at the frequency I post, perhaps link of the month!):

http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz

I saw it mentioned in an AN-LANG post by Simon Greenhill. It is the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database. Even if it just opened up, it seems to be very comprehensive!

It is basically a database of common vocabulary words of Austronesian languages such as Philippine languages like Tagalog & Ibanag to non-Philippine ones like Madurese, Paiwan, and Hawaiian. Heck there's even Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Central Malayo-Polynesian.

The full list is here and as of now there are 282 languages, though there are new languages being added regularly. I hope it grows some more! Apparently many of the sources were culled from works by Drs. Bob Blust, Laurie Reid, David Zorc, and other Austronesian linguists.

And just for a start, you can see what the word for day is in other Austronesian languages.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow, thanks for that link. It's a great project and resource. Their family tree (JAVA) will be cool.

Anonymous said...

Thankyou for your blogsite. As far as I know, it has been the most in-depth working website I've seen dealing with filipino linguistics. I've often used your site as a resource for my research in (recent) tagalog etymology. Just one thing, I have been looking around for Dr.Zorc's core etymologic dictionary ...to no avail. Do you have any leads as to how to acquire a copy?

Christopher Sundita said...

Thanks for the compliment and for using my blog!

I acquired a copy via interlibrary loan, which I initiated at my local library. I had to return my copy last week, though. What a shame that I didn't have the time to read through all of it!

--Chris