Reconstructions

Note

Also Tunjung anum ‘water’. This is one of the rare widely-distributed forms in AN languages that is absent from Dempwolff (1934-1938), since it does not appear in any of the three languages used for his ‘inductive reconstruction of Proto-Indonesian’ (1934), namely, Tagalog, Toba Batak and Javanese, and is found in only one of the eight languages used to test his reconstruction deductively, namely Ngaju Dayak. Nonetheless, throughout the AN language family outside of Taiwan *danum and *wahiR are in competition for the meaning ‘fresh water’. PMP *wahiR appears to have meant ‘stream, river’ (and the fresh water in it), while *danum referred only to the water itself.

Reflexes of PMP *danum have a peculiar distribution: they are common in Taiwan and the northern Philippines, but were replaced by other terms throughout the central and southern Philippines, and throughout all of Indonesia apart from the Barito Basin in southeast Borneo. In the Pacific they have a rather scattered distribution, being absent from Vanuatu except for two very small areas in west Santo and the Shepherd Islands. Finally, although most languages reflect only one or the other of these two terms both are found in the Admiralty Islands, where one is the common word for ‘fresh water’ in one language, and the other the semantic equivalent in a closely related language. In Fiji and Polynesia both occur in the same languages, but with different meanings (PPn *wai ‘fresh water’ : (*faka-)ranu ‘rinse with fresh water after bathing in the sea’), and in Wayan of western Fiji they co-occur in a single expression (wai dranu ‘fresh water’, as opp. wai tasi ‘salt water’).