Reconstructions

Note

Also Amis cilah/cinah ‘salt’, pa-cilah/cinah/ ‘to salt or add salt’, Maloh siaʔ, Paku siraʔ, Moken selaʔ, Tae', Mandar sia, Manggarai ciʔé, Ngadha siʔe ‘salt’, sié me ‘sugar’, Lamaholot siʔa, Arguni sire-r ‘salt’. Dempwolff's (1934-38) inclusion of Tagalog siláʔ ‘food’ (given by Panganiban (1966) as ‘man-eating wild animal; flesh- or meat-eater) clearly is misassigned.

Many languages in the Philippines and eastern Indonesia have replaced this morpheme with a reflex of the PAn nominal *qasiN ‘saltiness, salty taste’ or its stative verbal form *ma-qasiN ‘salty’, and many Oceanic languages have replaced it with a reflex of *tasik ‘sea, saltwater’. Indeed, it appears necessary to reconstruct both PPh *qasin and POc *tasik in the meaning ‘salt’, although PCMP evidently retained a reflex of *qasiRa which was replaced independently in much of the region by reflexes of PMP *ma-qasin. While no Oceanic language unambiguously reflects *qasiRa, some Southeast Solomonic forms can arguably be assigned to it. However, given the widespread extension of *tasik to include ‘salt’ in Oceanic languages I follow the primary sources in treating Lau, Kwara'ae, Kwaio asila ‘salt’ as a suffixed reflex of *tasik (> asi ‘sea, saltwater’, asi-la ‘salt’).