Reconstructions

Note

Also Simalur beli ‘price, value’, Nias bõli ‘to buy’, S-L bori, Cheke Holo voli ‘buy’. Dempwolff (1934-38) glossed *beli ‘to buy’ (‘Kaufen’), and indeed this is the attested gloss in the great majority of reflexes. Buying, however, is an activity which involves the acquisition of objects through a common medium of exchange -- i.e. some form of money. There is no known evidence of any kind that speakers of PMP (circa 3,000 BC) were familiar with a money economy; moreover, various reflexes of *beli both in WMP and in CMP languages indicate that this item referred in particular to the ‘brideprice’. Since brideprice is a set of economic arrangements between the families or descent groups involved in a marriage, the gloss ‘to buy’ for this form is best seen as an imposition upon an earlier economic order based on exchange by a later one based on purchase.

Moreover, since there is good reason to believe that the PMP socio-political order was based on matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, or asymmetric exchange (Blust 1980a, Blust 1993), it appears likely that *beli referred in particular to that category of ‘masculine’ goods which counter-circulated with the circulation of women in the formation of marriage-based alliances. The generalization of a meaning ‘marriage prestations’ to that of purchase through a common medium of exchange would have followed naturally with the adoption of a money economy, hence the widespread semantic drift. Under this interpretation the gloss of Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian *poli would not have differed significantly from that of PMP *beli, although there is little direct evidence that PMP asymmetric exchange survived in Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, or that Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian *poli referred to marriage prestations.