(Hawaiian) Words for "boredom"

David Peterson wrote:


>In a message dated 06/18/02 3:43:39 PM, romilly@EGL.NET writes:
>
><< Does your dictionary give a proto-form?  (snip most of proposal for Haw.
manaka: < prefixes **ma-Na, base -ta?a < AN *taqan

>    Oddly enough, it does not; they're usually pretty good about that.  The
>missing consonant could be *? or *h, since all glottals were lost, but why
do
>the other two have to be frozen prefixes?
True, they don't have to be. But my first impulse is to view ma- almost
always as the frozen stative prefix, which shows up on lots of
verbal/adjectival forms throughout Oceania.  **Na- is a little dicier... The
alternative is a compound-- but does/can  Haw./PN "mana" refer to the human
mind/personality?

>Anyway, in a reference section I'm
>looking at in another dictionary, though, they're saying that they
>reconstruct some long vowels as just double vowels, the example they give
>being:
>Maori: taaura
>Hawaiian: ka:ula
>From PEP: taaula
Meaning........?  At least two possibilities: (1) compounds of _***ta( )a -
ula_, or
(2) again, an attested frozen prefix *ta- with sporadically lengthened
vowel, which happens. PEP is sort-of the end of the line, historically
speaking, comparable to:

(vastly simplified)
PEP  <  Proto PN  < Proto Oceanic  < Proto Austronesian, cf.
Spanish < Latin   <  Proto Italic  <  PIE
>
>So maybe the last vowel could be reconstructed as long...?
(Or double vowel.)  That works for individual langs. and various subgroups
of PN, where most long-V arise from consonants lost since PPN times; a pesky
few seem to show sporadic (i.e. inexplicable) lengthening.  PPN itself had a
few double vowel sequences, but all (I think) resulted from C-loss since POC
times. POC however retained AN CVCV(C) structure pretty faithfully-- there
were lots of mergers in the consonants, but very few outright losses.

Doesn't seem
>likely.  I don't know.  I know very little about historical polynesian.  :)
I'm quite out of the loop, too.  A lot of work has been done just within the
PN languages that I haven't followed. That's relatively easy. But it can be
difficult to align PN words with  western (Indonesian/PI area) cognates
because of all the mergers/losses that PN has undergone. Example:  _Zero_ in
Haw. might reflect AN *s, c, j, ns, nc, nj, d1, d2, nd1, nd2, R, q, h that I
can recall right
nd.........:-(

Then there's also the problem of semantic drift; thus, my alignment of Haw. ta:
with AN *taqan might be considered way out in left field by real PNists.

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