Reconstructions

Note

Also Casiguran Dumagat bukéd ‘mountain, hill; travel over or through the mountains’, Pangasinan búkid ‘vicinity, surroundings’, Karo Batak bukit ‘name of a village and a sub-lineage of the Karo Batak’, Toba Batak buhit high, splendid, majestic; honored, respected; towering (< Malay), pusuk buhit 'the towering peak': mountain west of Samosir Island in Lake Toba, buŋkit high, Balinese bukit ‘isolated hill’; bukit-bukit ‘hills’, Sasak bukit ‘hill’, Fijian buke buke ‘mound of earth on which yams are planted’, Tongan puke ‘mound of earth over a yam, or a taro or other root vegetable’, Samoan puʔe ‘swell, rise; mound, hillock’.

Dempwolff (1934-38) posited *bukid ‘mound of earth’, but the final consonant of his reconstruction cannot explain various reflexes in northeastern Luzon. The referent of this form probably is not represented by any single English term. It seems clear that it included ‘mountain’, but there are various indications (particularly the glosses in Paiwan, Itawis, and Iban, but also other reflexes that refer to natural vegetation or to cultivated plants) that the concept ‘mountain’ was inseparably associated with heavily forested terrain, as opposed to the more open terrain of the coast. A number of the forms in western Indonesia appear to be Malay loans, as indicated both by irregular reflexes of the final consonant and by the distinctively Malay use of bukit to refer exclusively to hills in opposition to mountains.