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Re: Pali and Tagalog Question...

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Saturday, January 11, 2003, 5:37
On Sat, 28 Dec 2002 18:26:10 -0800, Barry Garcia <barry_garcia@...>
wrote:

>I was looking through a dictionary of English - Pali terms, and saw that >"face" in Pali "mukha" is spelled exactly the way that "face" in Tagalog >is spelled "mukha" (/muk'ha?/). Is this a coincidence, or did Tagalog >borrow from Pali*? >
Undoubtedly borrowed. Quite likely via Malay or Javanese, though it's interesting that Tag. has preserved the /h/, unlike them.
>* It wouldn't be too strange. I've read that Tagalog has a few Indian >words, but they are few. This one seems like it could be, but of course it >might not.
There are quite a few, and almost all I can think of also occur in Ml or Jav., hence the usual suspicion of borrowing via those languages. Sometimes the loans are somewhat deformed-- like Tag. halaga 'price', Ml. harga (but I don't know the Indic original...) An old book (from the 50s or 60s) gives a pretty complete summation of Skt. loans in Indonesia, and you'll no doubt recognize some Philippine friends there too--- Gonda _Sanskrit in Indonesia_. Remember the Tasaday foofaraw? One of the giveaways that they were not a "stone age people" was their word for God, liwata IIRC-- clearly Skt. devata via some neighboring language, hence most likely post A.D. 1 or so, and clearly they were not as isolated as was claimed.

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Eamon Graham <robertg@...>