Dempwolff Reinvented: A Review of Wolff (2010)

This ambitious study, the result of over forty years of intermittent labor, essentially attempts to restart Austronesian comparative linguistics from the ground up. It rejects several key distinctions made by Dempwolff and accepted by virtually all subsequent scholars, and proposes a number of modifications to the phoneme inventory and word structure that reportedly are motivated at least in part by the author’s belief that Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan are branches of a larger language phylum. The body of the work contains sketches of the historical phonology of 37 languages reaching from Taiwan to Polynesia. These vary greatly in quality, accuracy, and relevance. The book concludes with a glossary of around 1,760 reconstructions, about 95 percent of which are drawn from Dempwolff or from Blust and Trussel’s more recent Austronesian Comparative Dictionary.