Re: Pali and Tagalog Question...

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.

Reply