Re: CHAT: coincidence

Carsten Becker wrote:
> FWIW, if I remember correctly, somebody here said that the
> Polynesian word for 'fish' is inuk? Now guess what the Ayeri
> word is ... 'inun' -- I mangled some words from a Tagalog
> wordlist once because I was too lazy, and I don't know
> exactly whether the word for 'fish' is among this handful of
> words.
>
It may well be 'inuk' _somewhere_, since, to paraphrase Don Quixote, "in
this marvelous world, all things are possible", but to the best of my
knowledge all Polynesian langs. have "ika" or some close variant thereof (at
the most, perhaps i?a).

I recently (5/19) wrote:
> > (Polyn. ika = Ml/In. ikan 'fish', one of the few words (like mata 'eye')
> > that is recognizable--with only minor sound changes--in almost every MP
> > language.)
>
Yahya then brought up a counter-example:  Kadazan  sada,

Me again:
..That "sada" looks like it might
correspond to Tagalog et al. isda? 'fish' (*is@daq IIRC) found mainly in PI
languages.

>[ikan is] reconstructed *iSekan or somesuch-- it must be AN. Only a witness
>in
Formosan lgs. warrants that 3-syl form with "*S" --which > s/S/h et al. in
Formosan lgs., h but mostly 0 in all the rest (so *ikan in Malayo-Polynesian
properly speaking). (end quoting)

You are not guilty of inadvertent stea...coincidence :-))))