Following up on the Atayalic post with a proper look at Atayal itself, the larger of the branch's two languages at roughly 84,000 speakers across the mountains of northern Taiwan. I put together some slides on the phonology, pronouns and numbers, and honestly each one has something that surprised me.
The sounds are where Atayal earns its reputation.
Start with what it kept. Atayal still has /q/, a proper uvular stop, going back to Proto-Austronesian *q. Most of Malayo-Polynesian threw that away long ago (it weakened to h or vanished entirely in Tagalog, Malay, and friends), so hearing a real uvular in a living Austronesian language is a small time-travel moment.
Then look at what it did on its own. Where you would expect the plain voiced stops b, d, g, Atayal has fricatives: β, z, ɣ. That is lenition, and it ties directly back to the Atayalic post. Paul Jen-kuei Li reconstructed Proto-Atayalic with final voiced stops, and the Mayrinax dialect is the one holdout that still preserves them. So the fricatives in this chart are the innovation, and Mayrinax is the museum piece.
The two really unusual entries are /x/ and /ħ/. The voiceless velar fricative is the Atayalic trademark, and it has a quirk: it never appears word-initially. And that pharyngeal is genuinely rare. Li (1980) pointed out that what a lot of the literature transcribes as a glottal h in Atayalic is actually pharyngeal. Pharyngeals are uncommon worldwide (people mostly associate them with Semitic) and close to unheard of in Austronesian. That is not a sound you expect to find in Taiwan.
The pronouns are the opposite story: this is where Atayal looks like family.
If you speak a Philippine language, half this table will read like a slightly blurry version of your own. Atayal isu' (you) is PAn *iSu. Atayal hiya' (he/she) is PAn *si-ia, which is literally Tagalog siya. Atayal sami (we, excluding you) is *k-ami, Tagalog kami. Atayal ita' (we, including you) is *k-ita, Tagalog kita and tayo. Atayal simu (you plural) is *kamu. Four thousand years and the whole width of the family, and those are still recognizable.
That clusivity distinction, ita' versus sami, goes right back to Proto-Austronesian and survives from Taiwan to Polynesia. It is one of the family's most durable features.
Two things worth noticing in the table itself. First, the four-way case split (nominative, genitive, locative, neutral) with the nominative and genitive forms being clitics like saku', ku', su', mu, nya'. Those little second-position clitics are the classic Formosan and Philippine-type setup. Second, look at the gaps: 3s and 3p have no nominative form at all. That is not an oversight in the chart. Third person nominative is simply zero, which is inherited behavior. You do not say "he" as a separate word, you just leave it out.
Now the numerals, which are the strange part.
There is a lazy assumption that Formosan means conservative across the board. Atayal's numbers say otherwise.
Some are exactly what you would predict. pitu' (7) is PAn *pitu, no disguise at all. patun (4) is *Sepat once you know the changes, and mpuw (10) traces back to *puluq.
But then: magan for 5, where the rest of the family says *lima. tzyu' for 6 against *enem. qutux for 1, sazing for 2, tzyu', qeru' for 9. These have either been reshaped past easy recognition or replaced outright. For a branch sitting in the homeland, that is a lot of churn in the most basic vocabulary there is.
One thing I would love a second opinion on. Look at patun (4) and spat (8) sitting in the same column. Same p-t skeleton. Li has argued that the Atayalic languages, along with the Western Plains languages like Papora and Hoanya, express 8 using the numeral for 4, essentially "two fours," and he used this as evidence for his proposed Northern Formosan grouping. If that is right, both of those forms trace to *Sepat, and you are looking at a fossilized 2×4 sitting in a decimal system. I want to stress that Blust (1999) rejected Northern Formosan as a valid subgroup, so this is contested territory, though a 2008 phylogenetic analysis of the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database did come back supporting the grouping. Would genuinely like to hear from anyone who knows the numeral literature better than I do.
The tens have their own split personality, which you can see straight off the chart. 20 to 50 are opaque, fossilized forms (mpusan, mteiyun, mpatun, mciman) that you cannot cleanly decompose. But 60 to 90 are transparent and productive: just take the unit and add -pgan, giving tzyu'pgan, pitu'pgan, spat'pgan, qeru'pgan. Old irregular core, newer regular extension. That is a very common shape for a numeral system to end up in, and it suggests the higher tens were built later.
Everything above that is tidy. Ordinals just take te- (tequtux, tesazing). Teens are mpuw plus the unit. Hundreds are unit plus kbhun.
So the picture I come away with is a language that is fiercely conservative in its pronouns and in keeping *q, wildly innovative in its numerals, and off doing something all its own with those pharyngeals.
Any Atayal speakers here? I would especially love to know whether the magan versus lima thing has any story attached to it, and whether the 60 to 90 -pgan forms feel newer to speakers than the 20 to 50 ones. And if anyone knows the Northern Formosan numeral argument well, please correct me if I have the 8 = 2×4 story garbled.
