Reconstructions

Note

Also Kapampangan paníkiʔ ‘a bat, the largest variety’, Tagalog pánikiʔ ‘large herbivorous bat’, Bare'e paneki, Manggarai néki ‘flying fox’, Sika nii ‘bat’. Mills (1975:796) considers the nasal ambiguous, but Kapampangan, Bare'e, and Chamorro all point to *n, Makassarese pañiki evidently showing a sporadic palatalization. The consonant gemination in several of the Cordilleran languages of northern Luzon remains unexplained.

This widely distributed term was replaced by *mpekʷa in POc, and by a variety of terms in Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Lombok. In some languages of the Lesser Sundas, reflexes of *paniki refer both to the large tree-roosting fruit bat (Pteropus sp.) and to the smaller insectivorous cave bats. These two are lexically distinguished in so many languages that an original distinction seems likely, but no good reconstruction is yet available for the latter. It is possible that the greater diachronic stability of *paniki is due to its economic importance, since the flying fox is regarded as a delicacy among many Austronesian-speaking peoples.