Anomalous Liquid: Sibilant Correspondences in Western Austronesian

The present contribution is meant to draw attention to two or more apparent sound correspondences among the languages of the Philippines and western Indonesia that involve liquid phonemes in one language or set of languages and sibilants in another language or set of languages. The data are problematic, and in my view do not justify the reconstruction of new protophonemes. At the same time, the recurrent regularities appear to be greater than chance, and so deserve a public airing. In either case, there would seem to be a lesson to be learned from the set of comparisons considered here: either we must reckon with at least two protophonemes that were overlooked by Dempwolff, or we must recognize that factors other than divergent development from a common ancestor may sometimes produce recurrent phonological similarities that bear a striking mock resemblance to true sound correspondences.