Proto-Pama-Nyungan kinship and the AustKin Project : reconstructing proto-terms for "mother's father" and their transformations

This chapter presents work on a knotty problem in the reconstruction of kinship terms in Australian protolanguages, especially the very large Pama-Nyungan family. The problem concerns terms for grandparents: this is a significant issue for the discovery of ancient social systems in Australia, as explained below (see also McConvell 2012, 2013; McConvell and Hendety 2010). The chapter also exemplifies a method of reconstructing kinship systems that relies heavily on linguistic reconstruction of individual terms and their meanings. When a set of roots and meanings has been reconstructed, this forms a kinship system as understood in anthropology, which would normally fall into one or another of the limited types recognized in ethnological typologies of kinship systems. This in turn has implications for other features of the social organization of the society of the protolanguage speakers.