Reconstructions

Note

Also Simalur fəŋi, foŋi ‘night’, Bare'e weŋi ‘evening, night, dark’; ma-weŋi ‘dark’, nasumba m-beŋi ‘overtaken by night’, Buginese wenni ‘night’, Chamorro pueŋi ‘night’ (with *R to /y/?), Erai hene(n) ‘night, nightly dark; in chronology it is often used for the space of 24 hours and also for time in general’; hen rua ‘day before yesterday, day after tomorrow’, Tanga biŋ ‘a day from sunrise to sunset; yesterday’, Bwaidoga/Bwaidoka boi ‘yesterday, recently’, Tubetube boniyai ‘night’, Kwaio boni ‘night; ten day mourning period’, Sa'a poi ‘the following day’; poe rua-na ‘the third day on’, Lonwolwol bUŋ ‘(noun and qualificative): darkness, blackness; night; dark, black; black charcoal or ashes (especially for witchcraft purposes); unconsciouness, li-bUŋ ‘night-time’, wo-bUŋ ‘day’, Tongan pō ‘night’, Niue pō ‘night; Hades’, Samoan pō ‘night; day (of 24 hours, i.e. unit of time reckoning, esp. in certain expressions; dark; blind’, Nukuoro boo ‘night; birthday’, Tuvaluan poo ‘night time; the space of a complete day, i.e. 24 hours’, Rennellese poo ‘night; day (in counting time); become night’; poo hia ‘how many days?’, haka-poo ‘spend or stay a night or day’, Maori pō ‘night; season; place of departed spirits’; whaka-pō ‘darken; grieve’, Hawaiian pō ‘night, darkness, obscurity; the realm of the gods; pertaining to or of the gods, chaos, or hell; dark, obscure, benighted; formerly the period of 24 hours beginning with nightfall (the Hawaiian "day" began at nightfall); fig. ignorance, ignorant; state of, time of’.

Three general morphological observations are of some interest in connection with this form: (1) The analysis of Paiwan veŋin, Toba Batak borŋin and similar forms with -n remains unclear. If *-n was a suffix it evidently was unique or very rare, and its function obscure (if from *beRŋi-en, the suffixal vowel has irregularly dropped). Alternatively, we could posit a doublet, but this appears unsatisfactory in view of the likelihood that *beRŋi appeared in a number of different expressions, some of which almost certainly involved affixation, (2) evidence from both WMP and OC languages suggests that this word sometimes occurred with the 3sg possessive suffix: PMP *beRŋi-ni-a, POc *poŋi-ña. POc *poŋi thus took the marking for ‘inalienable’ possession (like body parts, kin terms, the words for ‘name’, ‘shadow/soul’ and the like). (3) internal Polynesian evidence suggests that the irregular change observed in PPn *pō ‘night’ probably resulted by back-formation from *poŋi-a ‘be overcome by night’ (to **po-ŋia, with automatic moraic extension of the new monosyllabic content word **po to **pō). If so, Maori pōŋi-a ‘be overtaken by night, benighted’ represents an analogical extension of the lengthened vowel to a morphological context in which it did not originally occur.

With regard to meaning, it is clear from usages in both WMP and OC languages that this term had multiple functions. In addition to designating ‘night’ (opposite of day), *beRŋi marked the 24-hour unit used in counting ‘days’ (hence ‘how many days?’, ‘three days ago’, ‘three days hence’, etc.), and evidently figured in the expression for ‘tomorrow’ (‘day after tomorrow’, etc.; ‘yesterday’, however, was expressed with *ñeRab or its doublet ñiRab). As noted by Pawley (1979), POc *poŋi probably was used in conjunction with *panua in some time expressions. Finally, Bikol sa baŋgí ‘at night, in the evening’, Javanese sa beŋi ‘all night long, one whole night’ are assumed to reflect different proclitic elements (*sa ‘locative’ vs. the clitic form of *esa ‘one’).