Re: What's the etymology of ketchup/catsup?

        1.. Chollie wrote (and my email program is having trouble with this format):
        2.. 
 3.. An Egyptologist, Charles Jones, believes that the Phoenicians gave their
alphabet to the Malay (the "Redjang Script") and that Phoenician currently
lives on as the language of the Redjang of Sumatra. He even has a very nice
lexicon available to prove the similarities between the two languages. Check it
out at:
    http://home.earthlink.net/~cjones3/doc.htm

        Perhaps that name should be _cojones_ -- that's what he has, and brass, at that.

 (I would add though that Jones' ideas are far from Orthodox, and I don't know
anyone who agrees with him...

 Mercy! Another breakthrough in Austronesian Linguistics! Would you like a
detailed critique, or will _HOO HA_ do? Just a couple: (a) Ml. mata hari 'sun'
(eye of the day) appears in various mis-spellings. Unfortunately, Ml. _hari_ is
fairly certainly < AN *waRi (*R prob. a velar fricative, reflexes variously r,
g, h or zero). (b) In one of the wordlists, Egyptian krt 'cart' is equated with
Redjang krita, overlooking Ml. kareta ([k@'reta/) in the next column. Now,
Latin carrus may be one of those "Mediterranean" words of uncertain origin, but
Ml. kareta comes directly from Portuguese, so not prior to ca. 1500 CE. And so
on. There are a couple really stunning bloopers in his Ml/Indonesian data. Ah
well, as Don Quixote was wont to say, "En este mundo, amigo Sancho, todo puede
ser."

 Halfway seriously: I recall seeing Jaspan's Redjang book when it first came
out; the lang. didn't strike me as overly bizarre-- just full of loans from Ml.
and Minang Kabau (S. Sumatra-- it diphthongizes final V; so does Aceh, another
possible contact). Since most Indonesian scripts are assumed to have come via
India (various regions, at various uncertain times), and Indic Brahmi script(s)
were inspired by Semitic (Aramaic?), _some_ resemblance might not be
surprising. Roman coins of the 1st Cent. CE have been found at Oc Eo (southern
tip of Viet Nam), assumed to have brought by Arab traders, so contact prior to
that could be assumed. SE Asia was apparently known as a source of gold; the
Greeks' "Golden Khersonese" is believed to refer to the Malay Peninsula. (Is
that where they discovered fish sauce? Though I must say, the idea of
preserving/fermenting little fish could have occurred independently; not to me,
however.) And if the Egyptians could sail to the Americas, as we know, surely
they could have gone coastwise to SE Asia, now couldn't they? It could
happen...... ;-)

 The Waponis speak some sort of gibberish, but I think that it's unlikely that
he developed some sort of Polynesian/Celtic/Hebrew/Latin conlang for the film.
Pity - that would be a rather cool language, IMHO.

 Agreed. Shall we form a committee? I'll contribute Austronesian/Polynesian and
rusty Latin..... BTW, the first investigator of Melanesian languages, a British
missionary whose name I disremember, concluded that they were Semitic.