Austronesian Archives

Edible Possession in Halmahera

April 9, 2019 || David Kamholz

Tags: Austronesian, Halmahera, Maluku, Oceanic languages, Patani, possessive pronouns, Sawai

The island of Halmahera is a spider-shaped island located in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands. It was these islands, the so-called “spice islands”, that several European nations sought in the 15th and 16th centuries as the source of cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Along the east coast of Halmahera, the closely related Austronesian languages Patani and Sawai (among others) […]

The Most Common Words in PanLex

March 7, 2019 || Benjamin Yang

Categories: Language and Linguistics, PanLex Database

Tags: Austronesian, Esperanto, linguistic diversity, loanword, mother, statistics, wanderword

The PanLex Database contains a large diversity of languages and dialects. This diversity allows us to explore interesting language facts, illuminated by casting PanLex’s wide net across the languages of the world. One question, originally suggested by our founder and director emeritus Dr. Jonathan Pool was: What’s the most common word in the PanLex Database? […]