Dempwolff's <i>*R</i>

1. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *R was reconstructed by Dempwolff to account for the correspondence of Tagalog g with Toba-Batak r and the lack of a corresponding phoneme in Javanese (i.e. loss of a consonant and contraction of the abutting vowels); thus, *beRas, Tg. bigás , Jv. wòs, TBt. boras ‘polished rice’. Certain contradictions to Dempwolff's formula appeared not only in the Javanese cognates, but in those of Ngaju-Dayak and Merina, a dialect of Malagasy. The present article will examine these contradictions, to see whether they suggest hitherto unrecognized PMP distinctions.