Reconstructions

Note

Also Kapampangan timug ‘southwest monsoon wind’ (< Tagalog), Mapun timu east wind, east’, Maranao timor ‘wind’ (< Malay), Tausug timul ~ timur ‘the name of a wind the blows from the northeast’ (< Malay), Ngaju Dayak timor ‘east, east wind’ (< Banjarese), Wolio timbu ‘east, rainy season’, Muna timbu ‘east monsoon, rain from the east’, Erai timun east, Rotuman timu ‘continuous heavy rain’ (from an unspecified Polynesian source).

This term is clearly the mate of PAn *SabaRat ‘south wind (?)’, PMP *habaRat ‘southwest monsoon’. Since Taiwan lies just outside the monsoon climatic zone the meaning of these terms in PAn is somewhat less clearcut than the PMP equivalents, which clearly refer to the seasonal rain-bearing winds that are associated in the northern Philippines, where PMP probably was spoken, with the southwest and southeast monsoons. The directional content of reflexes necessarily changed as Austronesian speakers expanded southward from Taiwan and the Philippines to the Equator and beyond, but the connection with the monsoons is maintained in much of insular Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. Further east, beyond the reach of the monsoon regime the combination of seasonality, direction, rain and wind that characterizes the monsoons is lost, but various components of the meaning are retained, especially in Polynesian languages, where reflexes include references to rain, strong wind and destruction caused by storms.