Re: USAGE: Words for "boredom"

David Peterson wrote:
(Hawaiian)

>>manaka: (adj.) boresome, tiresome, dull, monotonous; bored,
>uninterested.
> (snip) And it's an old word, descended from one of
>the Proto-Polynesians, so it was pre-colonization.
Does your dictionary give a proto-form?  I was trying to puzzle it out,
working backwards-- (*ma- frozen adj./stative prefix; **nata or *Nata) but
then noticed the final long _a:_.  That could mean that the root is
*ta( )a, with two frozen prefixes, *ma-Na- (both attested elsewhere).   Now
it's true that lots of consonants get lost in Hawaiian, but generally PN
long vowels derive from a lost *?, so PN **ta?a '....?'-- which could
correspond nicely with e.g. Malay tahan 'endure, last' (cf. tak bisa tahan
"(I) can't stand (it)", or tertahan "unbearable") which indeed descends from
PAN *taqan glossed approx. as in Malay (the *q is one of the vaunted
"laryngeals", probably an uvular stop, as attested in Taiwanese langs.).

The Haw. ho?o- is *paka- almost everywhere else, e.g. Maori whaka- ; I don't
know why Haw. has /o/ here (though it suggests that somewhere, pre-PN, some
dialect(s) reduced these pre-tonic /a/s to schwa, which does generally > PN
/o/.