The relatedness of Timor-Kisar and Alor-Pantar languages: A preliminary demonstration

Abstract

The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, Pantar and Kisar have long been thought to be members of a single family. However, their relatedness has not yet been established through the rigorous application of the comparative method. Recent historical work has shown the relatedness of the languages of Alor and Pantar on the one hand (Holton et al. 2012), and those of Timor and Kisar on the other (Schapper, Huber & van Engelenhoven 2012a). In this chapter, we present a preliminary demonstration of the relatedness of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family based on a comparison of these two reconstructions. We identify a number of regular consonant correspondences across cognate vocabulary between the two groups and reconstruct a list of 89 proto-TAP roots.