Part I presents some 980 reconstructions for Proto-Micronesian, Proto-Central Micronesian, and Proto-Western Micronesian. Part 2 (to appear in volume 42 [2]) gives reconstructions for two additional subgroups within Proto-Micronesian: Proto-Pohnpeic and Proto-Chuukic, and their immediate ancestor, Pinto-Pohnpeic-Chuukic. A handful of putative loans are also identified, and a single English finder list is provided for all of the reconstructions.

INTRODUCTION. Lexical data for a number of Micronesian languages began to be collected systematically in the mid-1960s as part of the development of language lessons for the U.S. Peace Corps and in connection with other Micronesian language projects that followed at the University of Hawai'i. These data were stored on a mainframe computer using programs then being developed (Hsu and Peters 1984), and eventually dictionaries were published for a number of the languages included in this study (Elbert 1972, Abo et al. 1976, Lee 1976, Sohn and Tawerilmang 1976, Harrison and Albert 1977, Jensen 1977, Rehg and Sohl 1979, Goodenough and Sugita 1980, Jackson and Mark 1991). Comparative work using these data began with Marck 1977, focusing on the group of languages referred to as Nuclear Micronesian. In the next several years, the authors of the current study put the initial data on computer and substantially added to them by directly eliciting information from speakers of Micronesian languages who were students in th e Bilingual Education Project for Micronesia at the University of Hawai'i. Hsu (1976) was especially helpful in cognate searches. This early activity culminated in a printout identified as Bender et al. 1984. Preliminary findings and some of the computer programs being used in the comparative work are summarized in Bender and Wang 1985. More recent work and the initial compilation of this presentation of the data have been done primarily by the second author.

CLASSIFICATION OF SUBGROUPINGS IN NUCLEAR MICRONESIAN. In this etymological dictionary we attribute to Proto-Micronesian (PMc) an inherited lexical item shared between a Chuukic or a Pohnpeic language, or Marshallese or Kiribati (Gilbertese), on the one hand, and Kosraean (Kusaiean), on the other. We have also attributed to PMc some lexical items in only one Micronesian language that are shared with some other Austronesian language and cannot be attributed to borrowing, although a systematic search for such items has not been made. Following Jackson (1983), we attribute to Pinto-Central Micronesian (PCMc) items shared by Kiribati and any other Micronesian language lower in the tree of figure I, but not found in any other Austronesian language, and we attribute to Pinto-Western Micronesian (PWMc) items shared by Marshallese and any other language lower in the tree, but not found in any other Austronesian language. (Micronesian languages not shown in figure r include Sonsorolese [SNs] and Tobi [TOB] [which shou ld be positioned on a par with PuA], the Tanapag dialect of Carolinian [CRN] [which should be included with PUL, CHK, and MRT within PECk], and Pingelapese [PNG] [which should be included with PON and MOK under PPC]). Protoforms from all three languages--PMc, PCMc, and PWMc--are inter-spersed in a...