Reconstructions

Note

Also Karo Batak er-buru ‘to hunt, go on the hunt’; m-buru-i ‘hunt by frightening out into the open, of drovers shouting and beating the underbrush’; per-buru ‘hunter’, Rejang burew ‘hunt’; tukaŋ burew ‘hunter’, Sundanese buru ‘hurry, hasten’; buru-buru ‘rush, perform something with lightning speed’; muru ‘go to or come from somewhere; hurry somewhere’; ŋa-buru ‘hurry to a place; pursue’; bu-buru ‘to hunt’, Old Javanese buru ‘hunter; hunting’; a-buru, a-buru-buru ‘to hunt, go hunting’; pa-burw-an ‘hunting ground; hunting’, Balinese buhu ‘chase, drive away, hunt’.

This term was the subject of a misguided discussion in the earlier literature, in which diphthongs *-ew and *-ey were proposed as addenda to those reconstructed by Dempwolff (Dyen 1953a, Hendon 1964). It now seems clear that *buRaw had two rather well-defined semantic foci: 1) it applied to the act of chasing animals from the cultivated fields, above all to frightening off birds from the rice fields by vigorous shouting (the latter element being preserved as a distinct semantic component in Ngadha buro), 2) it applied to humans, in which case the meaning was that of banishment or exile from the village (in the case of individual persons) or that of migration (in the case of the entire resident community). Since its application to animals appears to have been more frequent and fundamental, it probably is no accident that reflexes of *buRaw are confined largely to those societies that traditionally retained the cultivation of grain crops.

The problems surrounding the change *-aw to u in Malay and some of its closest relatives remain unsolved. This change (and the comparable change *-ay to i) are paralleled in other forms, but are confined to Malay and a few other languages of western Indonesia which are either closely related to Malay, or which have numerous Malay loanwords, or both. There is thus no basis for a triangulation of the proposed *-aw, *-ew and *-ay, *-ey distinctions to any proto-language higher than the hypothetical immediate common ancestor of Malay, Acehnese, the Chamic languages, and perhaps Sundanese. Both the irregular form and the innovative meaning show that the Malay reflex of *buRaw was borrowed into a number of languages in the Sumatra-Java-Bali region, in a few cases resulting in etymological doublets (e.g. Karo Batak, with native buro and borrowed buru).