Reconstructions

Note

Also Paiwan lauḍ ‘seaward, downhill (form used in sacred songs)’, Itbayaten hi-lawod ‘north wind (risky fishing weather)’, Tagalog láot ‘mid-ocean, high seas; far out to (at) sea’, pa-láot ‘to get into the middle of things, sail far out to sea’ (semantics apparently native, but phonemic shape evidently influenced by Malay laut), Hanunóo lawúd ‘sea, mid sea, high seas’ (< Cebuano or some other Bisayan source), Kambera lauru ‘downstream’, Lau lou ‘north; open sea to the north’.

PAn *lahud was one of the key directional terms in PAn, opposed to *daya ‘upstream, toward the interior’. In many languages this term has since been reinterpreted in terms of a system of cardinal directions, probably through Western contact influence. The general semantic evolution of *lahud is quite rich. From an original narrow sense ‘toward the sea’ the marine element has been generalized to mean ‘sea’ in Central Philippine languages generally (Bikol, Aklanon, Cebuano, etc.), Binukid, the Malayic languages, Balinese, Sangir, Buginese, Kambera, Hawu, Wetan, and Tolai. Although Topping, Ogo and Dungca (1975) give only the cardinal direction meanings, Brant Songsong assures me that this word still retains its sense of ‘toward the sea’, as in the expression lagu para i tasi, said regardless of which cardinal direction the sea might be from a given location.

Moreover, in some of these languages, as those of the central Philippines, it refers specifically to the high or open seas as opposed to littoral waters. In other languages, especially those whose speakers came to reside in high inland regions, the contrastive elevation of *lahud was extended to encompass the general meaning of ‘lower, at a lower altitude’, in some cases entirely losing its marine associations. In Thao of central Taiwan, for example, raus refers to a downhill, or downward direction from the mountains, with no particular reference to the sea, in Hanunóo of the north-central Philippines láwud refers to the lowland regions, but so far as the available data indicate, not necessarily to the sea, and in Bare'e (or Pamona) of central Sulawesi lau refers to any place that lies lower than the speaker at the time of reference, evidently with no connection to the sea as a feature of orientation.

Finally, Ngaju Dayak olo laut, Hawu dou lou and no doubt similar collocations in other languages for which insufficient data is to hand suggest that once settled in a given location, AN speakers tended to conceive of anyone who arrived by sea as a foreigner, or stranger.