The Greater Central Philippines Hypothesis

ROBERT BLUSTUniversity of Hawaii

The Evidence for Proto-Philippines

All Philippine languages developed in situ, and are daughters of a single parent language called Proto-Philippines.

EVIDENCE: cognate sets

For example:

Dumagat: amiyan (northeast monsoon)

Ilokano: amian

Hiligaynon: aminh-an

Cebuano: amihan

Maranao: amian

BUT, THERE ARE PROBLEMS:

Most scholars believed that Proto-Austronesian was spoken in Taiwan.

Direction of the

Austronesian

expansion:

1. Southward

into the Philippines

2. Westward into

Borneo, mainland Southeast Asia, Sumatra and Madagascar

3. Eastward into Sulawesi, Moluccas and the Pacific

Philippine Microgroups (Blust, 1991)

1. Bashiic – Yami of Botel tobago Island and Itbayaten and Ivatan

2. Cordilleran – Agta, Atta, Balangaw, Bontok, Casiguran…

3. Central Luzon – Kapampangan, Bolinao, Sambal

4. Inati – Negrito population in Panay

5. Kalamian – Kalamian Tagbanwa and Agutaynon

6. GCP (Central Philippines, South Mangyan, Palawanic, Manobo, Danaw, Subanun, Gorontalic)

7. Bilic – Bilaan, T’boli

8. Sangiric – Northern peninsula of Sulawesi in Indonesia

9. Minahasan – vicinity of Lake Tondano in Sulawesi

Assumption:

Tagalog, Bikol, Bisayan complex, South Mangyan (but not North Mangyan), the Palawanic languages, all of the languages of Mindanao except the South Mindanao group and the Gorontalo-Mongondow languages of Sulawesi

continue an immediate protolanguage called

Greater Central Philippines.

Philippine Language

• To any language native to the Philippine

Islands without regard to its genetic

affiliation.

• To any member of a putative subgroup of

Austronesian Language most members of

which are located in the Philippine Island.

• Blake (1906:318) Languages in the

Philippines as a “subdivision of the Malay

branch of the Malayo Polynesian family of

Speech”

• Philippine subgroup: its members included

& only the languages in the Philippine

archipelago

FACTS:

Almost the entire central region of the Bisayas and southern Luzon

constitutes an extended dialect network with roughly 45 million first-

language speakers of Tagalog, Bikol and intergrading varieties

of Bisayas

Linguistic diversity show surprisingly high degree of homogeneity...

The linguistic history of the central Philippines included a major episode of linguistic

expansion/ extinction.

Proto-Greater Central Philippines

- name of the hypothetical language brought about the linguistic levelling in the Bisayas and Southern Luzon.

Expansion of Proto-Greater Central Philippines

Central Philippine languages predominate to the almost total exclusion of others.

WHY IS THIS SO?

Evidence of GCP expansion:

1. Unexpectedly low level of linguistic diversity in

southern Luzon, Bisayas and Northeast

Mindanao.

2. Gorontalic languages of northern Sulawesi linked

with languages of the

central Philippines

3. Presence of ‘the strereotyped g’, referring to

sporadic instances of *R > g in languages which

normally reflect PPH *R as some other phoneme.

Again, GCP Hypothesis:

• History of related languages is not always a uniform process of differentiation and divergence…

but may be punctuated by important episodes of extinction.

Speakers of PGCP underwent a dramatic territorial expansion, probably from a

homeland in northern Mindanao or southern Visayas.

TIMELINE:

4 500 BP – earliest radiocarbon dates accepted for a

Neolithic presence (initial Austronesian settlement)

3 500 BP – break-up of Proto-Philippines; separation of the Philippine Languages

- Philippines must have been home to various descendants of Proto-Malayo- Polynesian

“The how and why of such an expansion probably will never be known”, said Blust.

Circa 3 500 BP,

• Austronesian languages started to be thinly distributed throughout the Philippine Islands, but were confined to a fairly narrow range of environments, including only the coastal zones of the larger islands.

The Proto-Philippine territorial expansion covered a greater territory and led to more widespread linguistic levelling.

Because of Austronesian colonization,

1. Linguistic clock was ‘reset’.

2. Divergence began anew from a single founding community.

3. Language displacement

-historical events led to language expansion and extinction.

As a result of contact, Austronesian languages were adopted, and this happened

throughout the Philippine archipelago.

Some words:

*alut : shave off

Cebuano – alut

Western Bukidnon Manobo – alut

Maranao – alot

Gorontalo – waluto

*ebu : cough

Tagalog – ubo

Bikol – abo

Aklanon – ubo (h)

Cebuano - ubu

Austronesian culture history: some linguistic inferences and their

relations to the archaeological recordROBERT BLUST

University of Hawaii

• Historical linguistics can illuminate fragments of the human cultural past that are often irrecoverable from the archaeological record.

• Evidences may be:– Mutually corroboratory– Contradictory

• Comparative method was used.–To reconstruct culture history.–To illustrate the ways in which tools

may complement, corroborate, or contradict the independent testimony of archaeology.

Striking example of partial agreement between linguistic and archaeological inferences involves the…

PIG

Sediq (north central Formosa) – babui

Kankanabu (south central Formosa) – baburu

Paiwan (southern Formosa) – vavui

Tagalog – baboy

Sulawesi – wawu

CONCLUSIONS

Austronesian speakers were sedentary villagers who possessed:

(1) Sophisticated maritime technology

(2) Root and grain crops

(3) Pig, dog, fowl

(4) Pottery

(5) Knowledge of iron and loom

(6) Indigenous syllabary