Reconstructions

Note

Also Malay uda ‘young (in certain expressions only), Toba Batak uda ‘father’s younger brother’, Simalur udo ‘father’s sister’s husband’, Balinese uda ‘young, fresh; naked’, Sasak odaʔ ‘unripe (of fruits), not yet fully developed (bones)’, Tae' ura ‘young’.

Dempwolff (1938) posited *uda, assuming that the forms cited here under *muda and *ŋuda contain fossilized affixes. Although a morphologically complex analysis is possible to maintain in some languages with muda (< *ma-uda?), it is more difficult with *ŋuda, where no appropriate affix of the shape *ŋ is available. To account for the variation in initial consonant across a wide range of languages I prefer to reconstruct doublets, and assume that *ma-ŋuda (with stative prefix *ma-) was reanalyzed in a few languages as a dynamic verb maŋ-uda, thus giving rise to a new base uda, which then underwent a new cycle of affixation with *ma- The motivation for such reanalysis seems fairly transparent, since *_ŋ-_initial bases are rare, and most of these refer to the oral or nasal region of the face (Blust 2003a).