Re: Brothers-in-law

Nik Taylor wrote:
> Some US states have a similar status, known as "Common law marriages",
> though, most states have since repealed common-law marriage laws
True enough. (Generally IIRC seven years was the criterion.) But the idea of
_repealing_ "common-law" is a bit of an oxymoron, no? One suspects that
increasing ease and prevalence of legal divorce, divorce lawyers, and greedy
divorcers had a hand in that. :-(((

More on topic, re words for "husband/wife"--

Proto-Austronesian had *laki 'man, husband', *binay 'woman, wife' and *sawa
'to marry; spouse'.  Malay/Indonesian has replaced them with loans, suami
(M), isteri (F), kawin, nikah 'to marry'. But Ml/In. laki-bini means
'husband and wife, married couple'. (And laki-laki as an adj. means 'male
(human)', 'female (human) is a word unrelated to *binay; the dictionary
gives bini as 'wife' (and as a verb, to marry=take a wife) but it isn't
standard Indonesian in my experience-- perhaps colloquial/rural? or maybe
Peninsular Malay).

Interesting in itself, that many "native" words have suffered pejoration in
Indonesian (and Malay) and Javanese, and languages influenced by them--
*bangkay 'corpse' > now refers only to a dead animal, for humans it's Arab.
mayat; *bunting 'pregnant'> now only of animals, of humans, again, it's
hamil (Arab., I assume). Even *matay (Ml/In. mati) 'dead' is somewhat
impolite for people, Arab. wafat is preferred.

Another IN language I can think of offhand has a reflex of *sawa--
/ho/ to marry, /ho/+poss. 'husband', /ho/+poss.+'female' 'wife'