Reconstructions

Note

Also Bikol bilás ‘the husband of one's sister-in-law, or the wife of one's brother-in-law’, Hanunóo bilás ‘the reciprocal relationship between spouses of siblings, regardless of sex, as the relationship between a man's wife and his sister's husband’, Aklanon bilás ‘the relationship of two outside in-laws, such as the wife of one brother to the wife of another brother’, Hiligaynon bilás ‘the affinal relation of husbands or wives of siblings’, Cebuano bilás ‘the husband or wife of one's husband's or wife's sibling’, Mansaka bílas ‘relation of husbands of sisters’, Iban biras ‘debt-slave, one who is taken as a servant by his creditor until the debt has been worked off; descendants of such in relation to the descendants of the creditor’. The gloss of Tagalog bilás is inexplicit.

I take ‘WZH’ to be the unmarked meaning of ‘the husband of one's sister-in-law’ (reflecting a male point of view), although ‘HZH’ is also available. Similarly, I take ‘HBW’ to be the unmarked meaning of ‘the wife of one's brother-in-law’ (reflecting a female point of view), although ‘WBW’ is also available. Under these interpretations the meaning of the Tagalog form is essentially identical to that of Malay biras. Despite the perfect formal and semantic agreement of the Tagalog and Malay forms this comparison remains problematic, since Tagalog bilás is ambiguous for *bilas or *biras, and other Philippine witnesses point clearly to the first alternative, which is phonologically incompatible with Malay biras. It is possible that all of the Philippine forms are loans from Malay.