Re: Check out "Austronesian Language Comparison"

(re "island" in Tagalog)
Viktor Orenji wrote:
> > Yup, it's a Hispanic loanword...  A more indigenous Tagalog synonym
> > is 'pulô', which sounds somewhat more literary.  The circumflex accent
> > indicates that the stress is at the final syllable which ends with a
> > glottal stop.
>
It has been _conjectured_ that even "pulô" /puló?/ is a borrowing. from a
colloq. Malay (or other) ['pulo], historic *pulaw (which the Tag. cannot
regularly reflect, due to the final /?/).  The rather weak support for the
conjecture is that Tag. sometimes adds a final /?/ to known Ml. loans.

He also says there is no word for "island" in Toraja; I'm pretty sure they
use "nusa", though it could well be < Ml. Even though they live in the
mountains, surely there are islands in lakes and rivers???

Even Engl. has borrowed "isle", and has tinkered with native "island" to
make it look more Latinate.

Otherwise and on the whole, a quite well done list.  More than for the
island words, my eyebrows went up at his mention of Fijian written "j" = tS.
This might well be a recent innovation, to adapt Engl. loans, but there are
no "j"s at all in Cappell's authoritative dictionary (my edition is late
60s).  He does list --
"engine:  idini; engineer: idinia"  Those would be /indini/ stress unknown,
and probably /indin'ia/, and it's possible the "d" before /i/ could have an
allophone close to [dZ] .

Y'all might be interested to take a look at
http://cinduworld.tripod.com/timorlist.htm -- vocab.from what I consider one
of the most fascinating of all Indo. languages.  It features some amazing
sound changes (*r,l,d,n,N all > n), morphological metathesis, and quite a
few words "of obscure origin".