Reconstructions

Note

Also Bontok bolláyaw ‘shooting star, meteorite. It is believed to be a spirit’, Ifugaw bulákaw ‘whiteness of a wealthy young man; used in hudhúd literature’; bulaláyu ‘meteor, shooting star’, Ifugaw (Batad) bullāyaw ‘a fireball with a tail; comet (tradition is that it eats and drinks the blood of a person at night who is not protected by a fire)’, Ilokano bullaláyaw ‘rainbow’. This cognate set encodes an animistic belief that traditionally was widespread among speakers of Philippine languages. As suggested by variations in the form of the name the distribution of the bulalákaw belief may in part be a product of borrowing, but its genealogy probably extends to PPh. Although most of the known evidence from Mindanao identifies the *bulalakaw with the spirits of lakes and rivers, the older association appears to have been with the spirits of meteors or shooting stars. The puzzling Ifugaw reference to the whiteness of a wealthy young man and the Cebuano reference to whiteness of the skin caused by contact with a spirit fireball suggests another feature of the belief which cannot be completely teased out of the available glosses. This item may contain a variant of the *qali, *kali- prefix.