Comment on Blust "The Resurrection of Proto-Philippines"

As Blust critiques the rejection of Proto-Philippines (PPH) in Ross (2005), l address that paper briefly first. Accepting that all Austronesian languages outside Taiwan belong to a single branch of Austronesian that has no members in Taiwan, in 2005 it was a reasonable geography-based inference that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) might have come into being in the Batanes Islands and, if so, that the Batanic languages were a first-order offshoot of MP. This was Ross's (2005) "History 1." The alternative hypothesis, "History 2," was that the Batanic languages were clearly MP but not a first-order offshoot and reached their current location at a later stage. The paper reached no firm conclusion but commented, as Blust notes, that "there is a greater likelihood that History 1 is correct," because the Batanic languages appear very conservative. However, "the evidence for this conclusion is circumstantial, and does not have the same status as subgrouping evidence based on shared innovations."