Reconstructions

Note

As noted in Blust (1982b) from a morphological standpoint this is one of the most challenging of all Austronesian comparisons. In addition to the reduplicated and infixed forms of *bahi that are reconstructed here there are numerous other affixed forms that are confined to particular languages or genetically restricted groups of languages, and a few that are widespread but semantically heterogeneous.

The following is a selection of affixed bases that may or may not indicate proto-forms with similar morphology: 1) Ilokano ka-babai ‘the smaller part of a pair’, Maranao ka-babai ‘feminine — esp. applied to female nut called togaiaq’, 2) Bontok ka-babaiy-an ‘sister or female cousin of a male Ego’, Kankanaey ka-babai-an ‘girl, maiden, lass’, Tagalog ka-babai-han ‘womanhood; women as a group’, Bikol ka-babayi-an ‘women’, Cebuano ka-babayi-nan ‘women as a group’, 3) Puyuma maki-baya-bayan ‘copulate’, Isneg maki-babbáy ‘be concupiscent, lustful’, 4) Hanunóo bayi-ʔán ‘doe, the female of deer’, Binukid bahi-an, and Manobo (Western Bukidnon) behi-ʔan ‘female animal’.

The last of these may point to PPh *bahi-ʔan ‘female, of animals’, but this inference would be much more secure if a similar meaning were found in other, more distantly related languages. While similar forms do occur in Taiwan, elsewhere in the Philippines and in Malagasy, their meanings are widely divergent (Rukai (Tona) abayánə, Puyuma ba-bay-an, Paiwan va-vay-an ‘woman’, Ifugaw ba-bay-án ‘sexual organs of a woman’, Cebuano bayi-nan ‘people on the bride’s side in a marriage’, Malagasy va-vai-ána ‘be made to have a companion’), and so no higher-order reconstruction appears possible at present.

Finally, like several other nouns referring to people the word for ‘woman’ appears to have had a plural form distinguished by length of the penultimate vowel, as in Kapampangan , Motu and most Polynesian languages. Cross-cutting the evidence for plural marking by lengthening of the penult is the evidence from several languages in western Melanesia for a singular : plural distinction based on the contrast of /a/ and /i/ Molima wavine ‘woman’ : wivine ‘women’, etc.). If this distinction is posited for POc it may help to explain the otherwise irregular first-syllable /i/ in a number of other languages that are not known to distinguish plural from singular in this way, as Nali pihin, Sori bibiŋ, Wuvulu pifine, Tanga fifin or Niue fifine ‘woman’.