Abstract
Butanglu, Tjuabar, Tjavuali, Paiwan and Stimul are five dialects of the Paiwan language, an Austronesian language in Taiwan. This paper is a comparative study of these five dialects, exploring (1) the phonemic system and forms of Proto-Paiwan (Section 3), (2) the genetic relationships of these dialects (Section 5), and (3) the historical derivations from the Proto-Austronesian (PAN) to Proto-Paiwan (Section 6).
It is evident taht these five dialects could be divided into two groups. One is Northwestern group (or dental-group), including Paiwan and Stimul. The other is Southeastern group (or palatal-group), including Butanglu, Tjuabar and Tjavuali. The prominent difference between the two groups is that the Southeastern group still keeps palatals t́ and ď, whereas the Northwestern group has merged t́, ď with t, d respectively.
The phonemic system of Proto-Paiwan is almost the same as that of Tjuabar. The phonemes reconstructed are: / p, b, v, m, t, d, c, s, z, r, ḷ, ḍ, t́, ď, ĺ, k, g, ŋ, q, y, w, i, u, ə, a/. More than one thousand lexical items are listed for the five Paiwan dialects in the Appendix.
Many of the PAN consonants have merged in Proto-Paiwan, e.g., b,w₁, W₁>v; t, t₁, T>t; D₃, Z, z>ď; ɵ, S₁-₆, x₁-₂, X>s, etc., or lost, e.g., R, H₁, H₂, Ɂ, w₂, W₂>Ø, etc. The four-vowel system is still maintained in Proto-Paiwan. As for Proto-Paiwan semivowels y and w, they are also derived from PAN semivowels.
The PAN source for Proto-Paiwan *b is indeterminate. This problem is presented briefly in Section 7. Some irregular correspondences among dialects are presented in Section 4, and some irregular developments from PAN to Proto-Paiwan are indicated in Section 7. Although tentative solutions are suggested, it is clear that these are unresolved problems. Further investigations as well as speculations are still required.
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