Reconstructions

Note

Also Bikol agtáʔ ‘Negrito, Aeta, Philippine aborigine’, Aklanon ágtaʔ ‘Negrito, Ate (aborigine of Panay); black, very dark skinned’, Aklanon áti(h) ‘Negritos (living in the mountains), Cebuano ágtaʔ ‘supernatural man of dark complexion and extraordinary size, said to inhabit trees, cliffs, or empty houses. He is said to play practical jokes on people, kidnap them. He has a large cigar in his mouth; name occasionally given to Negritos’, Maranao agtaʔ ‘witch, black demon; black’, aita ‘Negrito, mountain people with kinky hair and small stature’, Maranao ateʔ ‘person who is dark brown to black’, Simalur hata ‘person, human being’, Kisar ake ‘slave’.

Grace (1972) suggests that Canala (New Caledonia) ka ‘enemy, one to be killed and eaten’ may be connected, but this would be the only known reflex of *qaRta in an Oceanic language, and in view of the phonemic brevity of the form I do not see how convergence can safely be excluded as an explanation of the observed similarity. Reid (1989:51), Reid (n.d.) posits *qaRtaq, a form which is supported by several Central Philippine witnesses as noted above, but which is in conflict with the absence of a final consonant in at least Tagalog, Sama-Bajaw, Proto-Minahasan, Mongondow, Palauan, and Rembong. Since the latter languages form a rather diverse collection, it is simpler to hypothesize an irregular change in one Central Philippine language which diffused to surrounding speech communities rather than an irregular loss of *-q on as many as six historically independent occasions.

Finally, the arguments presented in Blust (1972) for assigning a meaning ‘outsiders, alien people’ to this form now appear stronger than ever. Based on ‘occurrences of unique alleles’ Bellwood (1997 [1985]) notes that the Negritos of Luzon and Mindanao probably have been separated for over 10,000 years. The distribution of phenotypically similar Negrito populations in the interior of the Malay Peninsula and in the Andaman Islands suggests that a Negrito population was widespread in island Southeast Asia when phenotypically southern Mongoloid Austronesian-speaking populations began to arrive in the region. Blust (1981) argues for cultural contact and borrowing of animistic beliefs between indigenous Negrito and incoming Austronesian -speaking groups by about 3,000 B.C.

Most recently Reid (1987) has argued persuasively that incoming agricultural Austronesians must have encountered an established Negrito hunter-gatherer population in the Philippines which over the course of time assimilated linguistically to the new arrivals. Under such conditions it is not difficult to see how *qaRta would have been applied by Austronesian speakers to the Negrito population of the Philippines, and ultimately adopted as a self-designation by some of these same groups. In other areas the term came to be applied to outsiders taken in war whose social position was that of ‘slave’ (someone with no claims to filiation with lineages of the dominant group). More puzzling are the semantic innovations which caused *qaRta to replace PMP *tau in the meaning ‘person, human being’.