Reconstructions

Note

Also Malay busar, busur ‘bow (of archer); bow (for cleaning cotton)’, Acehnese pusu ‘archer's bow’, Manggarai wusu ‘cotton bow; clean cotton with a cotton bow’ (loan from Javanese). PAn *busuR appears to have meant only ‘hunting bow’. While the same meaning persisted in PMP, many reflexes of this form both in WMP and in CMP languages refer to a bow-shaped implement used to card cotton or kapok fibers. Since Gossypium species are adventitious to Southeast Asia, and presumably were introduced during the early stages of Indian contact in western Indonesia, it is unlikely that the use of *busuR for carding Gossypium fibers has an antiquity of more than two millennia. It is, however, possible that such an instrument was used earlier for carding the fibers of the indigenous kapok. Phonologically irregular forms such a Manggarai wusu suggest that the practice of carding kapok fibers with a bow-like instrument may have spread from Indianized regions such as Java or the various Malay states of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. If so, it is surprising that the association of a reflex of *busuR with the carding of kapok fibers is found among the geographically more remote mountain peoples of northern Luzon, whereas reflexes in the more accessible lowland areas often refer to a hunting bow (e.g. in Tagalog and Bikol). Everything considered it seems safest to conclude that PAn *busuR referred exclusively to a hunting bow, but that by PMP or at least PWMP times this form had taken on the additional meaning of a bow-like instrument used to card the fiber of the silk-cotton, or kapok tree.