A layer of Dongsonian vocabulary in Vietnamese

Michel Ferlus (1)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

The present paper aims at demonstrating by means of linguistic evidence how the pestle used to husk rice was invented by the Dongsonians, the ancestors of the Vietnamese. That innovation spread in Southeast Asia as far as India, through the Austroasiatic continuum.

Mots clés: historical phonetics; diachronic phonology; Dongsonian; Vietnamese; pestle; rice cultivation; Mon-Khmer; Austroasiatic

Domaines: Linguistique

Michel Ferlus. A layer of Dongsonian vocabulary in Vietnamese. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 2009, 1, pp.95-108. ⟨halshs-00932218v2⟩