Re: left and right

Andrew wrote:


> On Sat, 05 Apr 2008, ROGER MILLS wrote:
>> Michael Poxon wrote:
>> >I don't know if this is true for the other islands, but on the Big
>> > Island of Hawai'i, you don't use compass directions, but "Mauka"
>> > (towards the mountain, usually inland) and "Makai" (towards the
>> > sea).
>>
>> ma- either 1. adjective marker or 2. < *mai directional marker
>> uka < *qutan, Ml. hutan 'forest'
>> kai < *tasik, Ml. id. 'sea'
>>
> That surprised me enough to get out my proto-polynesian word list
> (Biggs, 1979).  A librarian very kindly made me a photocopy of it from
> the microfiche some years ago.  I dusted it off and fruitlessly hunted
> through it.  It's not in order -- note to self, organise and find a
> ring-binder going spare to keep this within for the short term.  I
> checked the list I had made from it some years ago on my computer, and
> found, without the comparisons that Biggs had:
>
> Ma9uga 'mountain'
> 9uta 'inland (from shore), shore, land (from sea)'
What does that "9" represent?  Possibly glottal stop? (Blust uses 9 for the
velar nasal in some of his old typewritten and less-old ASCII work)

> tahi 'sea'
> mai 'toward speaker'
>
> No listing of ma- found.
*ma- is the stative/adjective marker (inter alia) in Western AN languages;
where it occurs in Oceania it's usually considered fossilized. On balance I
suspect that Hawaiian ma- is indeed from *mai
>
> What puzzled me was I could identify mauka as cognate with maunga in
> NZMaori.  Did a split occur between ma9uga and 9uta? so one word has a
> velar and the other a dental? or were they always separate words.
I'm not familiar with **-uga ~?**uNa 'moutain' at all, but then I'm not up
on my OC languages. I doubt *g is reconstructed for Proto OC; presumably the
merger of vd/vl stops (except *t/d, which > **t and **r IIRC) is one of
POC's distinguishng features. But I think OC *k/g would be reflected as /?/
in Hwn. Hwn /k/ is < OC/PAN *t. Whether there are borrowings with /k/ < *k/g
in Hwn, I don't know.
>
> Sadly my list does not note where the final consonant has been lost from
> the Austronesian parent of Polynesian languages.  Shame that.
Final C (those that survived into Proto Oceanic) were lost somewhere in the
ocean ;-), on the trip from nuclear Melanesia (where a handful of lgs.
retain them) to the Fiji/Polynesian area.  Traces of them (often re-shuffled
by analogy) do survive in some of the verbal suffixes of Fiji and PN.

Actually I've recently seen that a better gloss of *qutan is "scrub land,
brush, weeds, etc." -- it comes to mean "vegetables" in many languages. The
usual Western AN word for 'inland' is *daya, but I don't know whether that
surivives in OC-- it would be something like Hwn /la:/ I think. But Hwn -uka
can't _regularly_ reflect **uga/uNa.

Reply