Reconstructions

Note

Also Pangasinan dáyat ‘sea, ocean’, Javanese ḍarat ‘land (as contrasted with water, air)’, Sundanese darat ‘dry land in contrast with water, terra firma; darat-an ‘land (in a broader sense than darat); figurative for ‘rest’ or ‘intervening space’, Balinese dahet ‘dry land; shore’, Bare'e daga ‘substitute term for sea or lake’.

Dempwolff (1934-38) reconstructed this term with the meaning ‘surface; level, plain’ (German: Fläche), but this seems clearly to be in error, as reflexes in Melanau (Mukah) of coastal Sarawak, Mongondow of northern Sulawesi, Tetun of central Timor and Roviana of the western Solomons agree in pointing to the meaning ‘littoral sea’, or perhaps ‘line where the land meets the sea’. In most Philippine languages reflexes of *daRat refer to the sea without qualification, and in Malay and some other languages of western Indonesia (as Toba Batak), which may have borrowed their term from Malay, the meaning is ‘land, as opposed to sea’. While these terms are semantically antithetical, the meaning ‘littoral sea’ serves to bridge them and suggests how the unqualified senses ‘sea’ and ‘land’ may have developed from a meaning that bridged the two. Thanks to Arlo Griffiths for pointing out Cham darak.