Irregular sporadic sound change and East Polynesian origins: A response to Davletshin (2023)

The origins and timing of human settlement of East Polynesia are important questions for both academics and contemporary communities of that area. Linguistic innovations exclusively shared by East Polynesian languages with Northern Polynesian Outlier languages indicate that the East Polynesians originated late in prehistory from the Northern Polynesian Outliers, a proposal known as the Northern Outlier–East Polynesian (NO-EPn) hypothesis. In the December 2023 issue of this journal, a linguistic argument was made by Albert Davletshin that East Polynesia was settled from West Polynesia through the Southern Cook Islands. Key to Davletshin’s argument was a proposal for the existence of a theorised language spoken in the vicinity of Mangaia, from where certain Polynesian canoe plants were then transported to East Polynesian islands. Davletshin’s article argued against our December 2020 article in this journal, which had presented linguistic and botanical data relative to an East Polynesian origin of red-flowered hibiscus known as kaute (and cognates), and deriving its name from innovations proposed to have occurred in the Marquesas Islands. Our 2020 article was in alignment with the hypothesis of a Northern Outlier origin of East Polynesian languages. This response to Davletshin’s 2023 article documents examples of sporadic irregular sound change, the existence of which had been called into question.