Reconstructions

Note

This is clearly the ‘short form’ of *aku ‘1sg nominative’, but since the two shapes are not related by a morphological process (unless one appeals in a somewhat ad hoc fashion to subtractive morphology) they are documented separately. Most Formosan data cited here is from Ross (2006). As noted in Blust (1977), prenasalized forms of *-ku reflect *ni-kú (*ni ‘genitive case marker for singular human referents + *-ku ‘1sg gen.’), in which the unstressed vowel of *ni was lost, followed by nasal place assimilation. It seems clear that this change had already taken place in POc, where reflexes of the genitive pronouns function only to indicate possessors, and never agents. However, in WMP languages the reduction of *ni-kú to -ŋku may have happened at different times across a wide range of languages, and it is therefore assumed that PMP still had *ni-kú).

In POc and many of its descendants, whether indicated in the glosses given here or not, the possessive pronouns are suffixed to directly possessed (‘inalienably possessed’) nouns, such as most body parts and kin terms, the words for ‘name’ and ‘shadow, reflection (soul)’, and perhaps a few others, while they are suffixed to a possessive classifier for indirect possession, usually distinguishing edible, drinkable and general possession, but sometimes further refinements (as in Vanuatu), or fewer (as just edible and general in western Melanesia).