Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 482  George van Driem   language shifts which took place have left so little evidence intact that a genetic relationship is no longer demonstrable by conventional comparative means. One of the predecessors of East Asian, [Schmidt 1906] Austric mac- rofamily, uniting Austroasiatic and Austronesian, was likewise based on morphological evidence drawn especially from Nicobarese. Today lexi- cal evidence for Austric remains scarce [Diffloth 1994]. The arguments are still primarily morphological in nature, with Nicobarese still playing a star role. [Reid 1994] relates the Proto-Austroasiatic causative morphemes *< pa - ~ - ap -> and *< ka -> to the Proto-Austronesian causative prefixes *< pa ->, *< ka -> and *< paka ->, the Proto-Austroasiatic agentive marker *< ma - ~ - am -> with the Proto-Austronesian agentive *< mu - ~ - um ->, the Proto-Austroasiatic instrumental infixes *<- an -> and *<- in > with the Ma- layo-Polynesian instrumental prefix *< paN ->, Proto-Austronesian instru- mental morpheme *< ni - ~ - in -> and a Nancowry Nicobarese nominaliser suffix <- a > with a Proto-Austronesian ‘objective’ suffix *<- a >. The morphological evidence and its interpretation remain controversial due to the widespread nature and complexity and morphological processes involving infixation and discontinuous morphemes in Austroasiatic, inclu- ding Nicobarese. By comparison with Austroasiatic, greater progress has been made in understanding the historical grammar of Austronesian, which may be both a function of the paucity of historical linguists working on Aus- troasiatic as well as the greater intractability and complexity of the linguistic problems confronting scholars of Austroasiatic historical grammar. Progress on the Austronesian side is in no small measure to the contributions of Reid himself, e. g. [Reid 2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2010]. Reid too envisaged an even larger macrofamily and contended that Austric ‘as a language family may eventually need to be abandoned in favour of a wider language family which can be shown to include both Austronesian and Austroasiatic languag- es but not necessarily as sisters of a common ancestor’ [Reid 2005: 150]. The evidence adduced by Starosta for East Asian, though meagre, is morphological in nature. The ancient morphological processes shared by the families of this phylum were an agentive prefix *< m - >, a patient suffix *< - n >, an instrumental prefix < s - > and a perfective prefix *< n - >. The East Asian word was ostensibly disyllablic and exhibited the canonical structure cvcvc . By contrast, the structure of his family tree comprising Kradai, Aus- tronesian, Tibeto-Burman 1 , Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic was based on 1 Starosta accepted the Sino-Bodic hypothesis and rejected the Sino-Tibetan model. Due to an editorial error, the label ‘Sino-Tibetan’ appears in the posthumous version of