Reconstructions

Note

Also Puyuma ɭaŋis ‘sky (ritual term)’, Sasak le-laŋit ‘canopy, as over a bed’, Muna laŋi-laŋi ‘a white cloth wound around the top of a tombstone (sometimes draped like a tent) to ward off the disturbing influence of the spirit of the dead person’, Buruese lanit ‘sky’, Arosi daŋi ‘the light; the wind; daylight, the day, a day’, Kapingamarangi laaŋi ‘day’.

This word has a wide range of associations. In most languages it seems to have referred not only to the physical sky, but also to a mythological realm of spirits, and reflexes in at least Iban and Sundanese suggest that the concept of a celestial spirit realm embodied the notion of seven levels, a concept that was reported in a slightly different form in early sources on Chuukese. In many parts of the Pacific reflexes of this term refer to weather phenomena, such as rain or wind, either together with the meaning ‘sky’ or without it. Forms in some languages of Vanuatu, as Central Maewo tae-laŋi and Mafea tai-laŋi apparently reflect *taqe laŋi ‘cloud’ (lit. ‘feces of sky’). Finally, in both Micronesia and Polynesia reflexes of *laŋi were used to refer to high chiefs and perhaps others of aristocratic rank.