'Eye of the day': A Response to Urban (2010)

It has been claimed that the expression 'eye of the day' = 'sun' is limited to Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian languages, and that within Austronesian it is absent from Taiwan and the Philippines. However, either direct or indirect evidence for this association is globally distributed (including examples from Taiwan and the Philippines). While the concentration of transparent cases seems higher in Southeast Asia and Oceania than elsewhere, this may simply be due to widespread retention of Proto-Austronesian *maCa nu qalejaw 'sun', along with the possibility that all three language families are distantly related. Rather than an areally distinctive phenomenon, 'eye of the day' = 'sun' is better treated as a language universal that, like many other language universals, shows a nonuniform distribution in space.