A First Reconstruction of Vowels in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar

The Timor-Alor-Pantar family includes approximately thirty Papuan languages spoken in Eastern Indonesia and East Timor. Recent years have seen substantial progress on the reconstruction of the consonants of Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar, though there have been to date no published applications of the comparative method to the vowels of this language family. In this paper, I present recurrent sound correspondences supporting the reconstruction of at least six vowels: *a, *e, *i, *o, *u, and *ə.