Rhythm and the Synthetic Drift of Munda

The South Asian (Munda) and SouthEast Asian (Mon-Khmer) branches of the Austroasiatic language family2 are perhaps the most divergent in the world. They are opposite in structure at every level (Table 1): In Sora,4 a Koraput Munda language of Orissa, the sentencèHe doesn't want to give me the rice' is head-last and synthetic, as in (1), but in Khmer5 (Cambodian), it is head-®rst and analytic, as in (2): (1) Sora: Anin he/she dN-obj-øEn me dAr«j rice-«n-art «-inf-tiy give-ben-inf idsöm want-tE-3pr ted not (2) Khmer: ko(«t he/she /«t not cAN want /aoy give baay rice køom me Table 1. Polarizations in Munda vs Mon-Khmer discussed in this paper.3

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