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Padraic mentioned starting a new thread for this topic, to not take the limelight off of lethino pronouns. Anyway, Roger Mills has been incredibly helpful, but as I am not a linguist, I'm a touch bewildered. But, he's essentially whittled things down to: "Latin and Proto-Austronesian had similar consonant inventories except for /f/, which PAn lacks". The problem though is manhandling latin polysyllabic words to fit them into a PAn bi-syllabic structure (which Tagalog still favors for base roots: inom, kain, luto, aral, etc), although there are attested trisyllabic bases which got reduced, such as *paNudan > pandan (Pandanus) by dropping the middle vowel. My thought was to eliminate the unstressed syllables, much like what Spanish already has done on its way to becoming its modern self. Roger then suggested doing that, then dealing with clusters (which PAn had few). The easiest way would be to reduce them down, either assimilation, or just getting rid of one in favor of the strongest, except perhaps where nasal + consonant comes into play. Thoughts?