Proto-Oceanic (abbreviated as POc ) is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family . Proto-Oceanic is a descendant of the Proto-Austronesian language (PAN), the common ancestor of the Austronesian languages.
6-533: Proto-Oceanic was probably spoken around the late 3rd millennium BCE in the Bismarck Archipelago , east of Papua New Guinea . Archaeologists and linguists currently agree that its community more or less coincides with the Lapita culture . The methodology of comparative linguistics , together with the relative homogeneity of Oceanic languages , make it possible to reconstruct with reasonable certainty
12-560: Is considered to be typologically unusual for Austronesian languages, and is only found in some Oceanic languages of New Guinea and to a more limited extent, the Solomon Islands. This is because SOV word order is very common in some non-Austronesian Papuan languages in contact with Oceanic languages. In turn, most Polynesian languages , and several languages of New Caledonia , have the VSO word order. Whether Proto-Oceanic had SVO or VSO
18-791: Is still debatable. From the mid-1990s to 2023, reconstructing the lexicon of Proto-Oceanic was the object of the Oceanic Lexicon Project , run by scholars Andrew Pawley , Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond. This encyclopedic project produced 6 volumes altogether, all available in open access . In addition, Robert Blust also includes Proto-Oceanic in his Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (abbr. ACD). Selected reconstructed Proto-Oceanic terms of various animals from Blust's ACD: Reconstructed Proto-Oceanic terms for horticulture and food plants (other than coconuts): Reconstructed plant terms from Malcolm Ross (2008): Selected reconstructed Proto-Oceanic terms of various plants from
24-532: The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary : There are several known reconstructed words evident of material pottery culture among the Lapita : From Lynch, Ross, and Crowley (2002): *I=kaRat-i=a 3SG =bite- TR = 3SG a ART tau person na ART ᵐboRok. pig *I=kaRat-i=a a tau na ᵐboRok. 3SG=bite-TR=3SG ART person ART pig 'The pig bit a/the person.' *A ART na=ᵑgu CL = 3SG
30-655: The conventional transcription of a protophoneme differs from its value in the IPA , the latter is indicated: Based on evidence from the Southern Oceanic and Micronesian languages, Lynch (2003) proposes that the bilabial series may have been phonetically realized as palatalized : /pʲ/ /ᵐbʲ/ /mʲ/ . Many Oceanic languages of New Guinea , Vanuatu , the Solomon Islands , and Micronesia are SVO , or verb-medial, languages. SOV , or verb-final, word order
36-528: The principal linguistic properties of their common ancestor, Proto-Oceanic. Like all scientific hypotheses, these reconstructions must be understood as obviously reflecting the state of science at a particular moment in time; the detail of these reconstructions is still the object of much discussion among Oceanicist scholars. The phonology of POc can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty. Proto-Oceanic had five vowels: *i, *e, *a, *o, *u, with no length contrast. Twenty-three consonants are reconstructed. When
#426573