Lien du jour: Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database

I recently borrowed Dr. Zorc's Core Etymological Dictionary of Filipino, which Sauvage Noble mentioned in his blog. Fascinating read and quite a refreshing change from poking my nose in non-linguistics textbooks for school. ;-) There are some Tagalog words that I hadn't realized were foreign borrowings via Malay (though can't remember them offhand...).

Anyway...

Here's today's link of the day (or at the frequency I post, perhaps link of the month!):

http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz

I saw it mentioned in an AN-LANG post by Simon Greenhill. It is the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database. Even if it just opened up, it seems to be very comprehensive!

It is basically a database of common vocabulary words of Austronesian languages such as Philippine languages like Tagalog & Ibanag to non-Philippine ones like Madurese, Paiwan, and Hawaiian. Heck there's even Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Central Malayo-Polynesian.

The full list is here and as of now there are 282 languages, though there are new languages being added regularly. I hope it grows some more! Apparently many of the sources were culled from works by Drs. Bob Blust, Laurie Reid, David Zorc, and other Austronesian linguists.

And just for a start, you can see what the word for day is in other Austronesian languages.