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Re: left and right

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Monday, April 7, 2008, 5:30
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.

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andrew <hobbit@...>