Re: left and right

On Mon, 07 Apr 2008, Roger Mills wrote:
> 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)
>
I looked again at the original copy, and the transcript of the original
forms that I had made.  The original used 9 for /N/ and Q for /?/.
When I had transcripted for my own notes I had used G for /N/ which
occurs in Pacific orthographies.  In trying to reverse-engineer into
the manuscript form from memory I had given 9 Blust's value.  I think
this is correct as looking through the MS I see **FOFO9A, which gives
fofoga in Samoan, the polite word for face, or parts of the face.

For a while I thought that the material from this manuscript would make
an interesting lexicon for a Japanese or Altaic-style language.
Unfortunately the information is too thin and patchy to create
something complete in itself.  So the idea floats around the back of my
head as something that could be a substrate in a bigger language
project.

> > 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.
>
I would suspect that **uNa does not exist as a separate morpheme.  It
would be me seeing coincidences.  I should take note in case I decide
to keep **uNa as a morpheme for something (uphill, perhaps).

A browse of my dictionary of Maori found uta, which does mean 'to shore,
to land, inland'.

> > 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.
>
The last I heard the loss of NZMaori as a first language and its
requirement through learning was tending to lead to a levelling of the
suffixed ending.  It has been several years since I last checked.

- andrew.

> 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.


--
Andrew Smith  --  hobbit@griffler.co.nz  --
http://hobbit.griffler.co.nz/homepage.html

"If you are gonna rebell you have to wear our uniform."