Proto-Torres–Banks language

Proto-Torres-Banks (abbr. PTB) is the reconstructed ancestor of the seventeen languages of the Torres and Banks Islands of Vanuatu. Like all indigenous languages of Vanuatu, it belongs to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian languages.

More specifically, it is the shared ancestor of the following modern languages (ranked geographically, from NW to SE): Hiw, Lo-Toga, Lehali, Löyöp, Volow, Mwotlap, Lemerig, Vera'a, Vurës, Mwesen, Mota, Nume, Dorig, Koro, Olrat, Lakon, and Mwerlap.

Proto-Torres-Banks, as reconstructed with the comparative method from the attested daughter languages, evidently represented an early, mutually intelligible chain of Oceanic dialects in the northern part of Vanuatu starting from 1000 BCE after Lapita settlement of the archipelago, as evidenced by the pattern of loss and retention of the Proto-Oceanic phoneme *R, which merged with *r in the early history of the North-Central Vanuatu dialect chain. It therefore is not a "true" proto-language in the sense of an undifferentiated language ancestral to all Torres–Banks languages, but rather a part of the early North-Central Vanuatu linkage with some dialectal variation across different island groups, before they eventually disintegrated into mutually unintelligible languages.

Elements of the proto-language have been proposed by linguist A. François: vowels and consonants, personal pronouns, space system, vocabulary.

Proto-Torres-Banks had 5 phonemic vowels, /i e a o u/, and 16 consonants:

Following the loss of final POc consonants (or dialectal addition of a paragogic vowel), syllable structure in Proto-Torres-Banks was open, i.e. (C)V with optional consonant: e.g. POc *quraŋ "crayfish" > PTB *ura ~ *uraŋi; POc *matiruʀ "to sleep" > PTB *matiru; POc *laŋit "sky" > PTB *laŋi "wind". No descendant language preserves this situation today, but it can still be found in other related languages such as Gela and Uneapa.

Stress fell on the penultimate syllable. Following the pervasive loss of final vowels, descendant languages usually have stress on the final syllable. Vera'a and Mota have lost stress entirely.

In all of the descendant languages except for Mota, vowel hybridization occurred (a form of metaphony or umlaut). Later, a process of vowel deletion took place whereby every second vowel, being unstressed, was dropped: this resulted in an increase in the number of vowel phonemes – a process known as transphonologization. For example, PTB *laŋi "wind" > HIW [jɔŋ], MTPTooltip Mwotlap language [lɛŋ], giving rise to phonemes /ɔ/ and /ɛ/ respectively. Words which initially had 4 syllables were reduced to 2 syllables (e.g. POc *RapiRapi "evening" > PTB *raβiˈraβi > MSNTooltip Mwesen language /rɛβrɛβ/ [rɛɸˈrɛɸ]); *CVCV disyllables were reduced to a single CVC syllable (e.g. POc *roŋoR "to hear" > PTB *roŋo > LKNTooltip Lakon language /rɔŋ/); words with 3 syllables ended up with 2, including *CVCVV which became *CVCV (e.g. POc *panua "island, land" > PTB *βanua > LKNTooltip Lakon language /βanʊ/).

In Mota, only single high vowels were dropped, evident even in the earliest records: e.g. *tolu "three" > /tol/. In the 1880s, Codrington reported cases when Mota had preserved high vowels (e.g. /siwo/ "down"; /tolu/ "three"), which have since disappeared from today's Mota (e.g. /swo/; /tol/).

In Hiw, Lo-Toga and Vera'a, the final vowel was retained as a schwa when it was originally lower than the one under stress: e.g. POc *ikan "fish" > PTB *íɣa > HIW /ɪɣə/, LTG /iɣə/. In Vera'a, the schwa became an echo vowel, e.g. POc *pulan "moon" > PTB *βula > *βulə > VRA /fulʊ/; that final vowel in Vera'a can disappear in phrase-medial position, yielding the form /ful/ for 'moon'.

In trisyllabic words, the first vowel tends to be deleted or copied after the second vowel, with the exception of Mota and Lakon, which preserve them. Thus, POc *panua "island, land" > PTB *βanua > LKNTooltip Lakon language /βanʊ/, but MSNTooltip Mwesen language /βʊnʊ/.

The historical sound changes that took place from Proto-Oceanic (POc) to Proto-Torres-Banks (PTB) were intricate, yet largely regular. Some have been reconstructed explicitly, whether on vowels or on consonants; others are implicit in published lists of PTB lexical reconstructions.

Pervasive phonological sound changes include:

• The loss of all final POc consonants, such as POc *manuk "bird" > PTB *manu. This sound change resulted in the language having only open syllables.
• The labialization of POc *p, *ᵐb and *m before *o or *u, resulting in PTB *w (< *βʷ), *ᵐbʷ and *mʷ (especially in Torres and northern Banks languages).

Considering each POc proto-phoneme sequentially, the PTB reflexes can be listed in the following table.

The pronouns of Proto-Torres-Banks are (from François 2016: 33-35):

The following are reconstructions for numbers 1–10 for PTB:

1. *tea, *tuwale
2. *rua
3. *tolu
4. *βati
5. *taβea-lima
6. *laβea-tea
7. *laβea-rua
8. *laβea-tolu
9. *laβea-βati
10. *saŋaβulu

A reconstructed sentence (from François 2009:191):

• François, Alexandre (2005), "Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages" (PDF), Oceanic Linguistics, 44 (2): 443–504, doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0034, S2CID 131668754
• François, Alexandre (2009), "Verbal aspect and personal pronouns: The history of aorist markers in north Vanuatu" (PDF), in Pawley, Andrew; Adelaar, Alexander (eds.), Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history: A festschrift for Bob Blust, vol. 601, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 179–195
• François, Alexandre (2011), "Where *R they all? The history and geography of *R loss in Southern Oceanic" (PDF), Oceanic Linguistics, 50 (1): 142–199, doi:10.1353/ol.2011.0009, S2CID 55766987
• François, Alexandre (2013), "Shadows of bygone lives: The histories of spiritual words in northern Vanuatu" (PDF), in Mailhammer, Robert (ed.), Lexical and structural etymology: Beyond word histories (PDF), Studies in Language Change, vol. 11, Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton, pp. 185–244, doi:10.1515/9781614510581.185, ISBN 978-1-61451-059-8
• François, Alexandre (2015). "The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages" (PDF). In Alexandre François; Sébastien Lacrampe; Michael Franjieh; Stefan Schnell (eds.). The languages of Vanuatu: Unity and diversity. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. pp. 137–195. hdl:1885/14819. ISBN 978-1-922185-23-5.
• François, Alexandre (2016), "The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu" (PDF), in Pozdniakov, Konstantin (ed.), Comparatisme et reconstruction : tendances actuelles (PDF), Faits de Langues, vol. 47, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 25–60, doi:10.1163/19589514-047-01-900000003, S2CID 171459404