Reconstructions

Note

Also Ifugaw kamálig ‘a wooden floor constructed under an Ifugao house when its inhabitants celebrate the expensive kamálig feast … In hudhúd literature kamálig is used in the sense of hagábi, “lounging bench”; it is set under the house of a wealthy family,’ Ilongot kamari ‘squarish domestic house, raised 6 to 15 feet above the ground’ (Lebar 1975:104), Pangasinan kamálir (expected **kamálil) ‘granary’, Kapampangan kamálig ‘storehouse’, Yakan kamalig ‘storage shed, chicken house, shelter for animals. (A small house for storage of different kinds of things such as rice, corn or implements. It is often built on the ground without flooring, or the floor is close to the ground. Sometimes it consists of a roof only)’, Sangir kamalir-aŋ ‘shed, hut, esp. for a boat’. Not to be confused with Ilokano kamarín ‘barn, granary’, Agta (Eastern) kamárin ‘any small house used for storage; barn’, Ifugaw (Batad) kamalín ‘a relatively large building, as a house built to be lived in; a barn, church, school building’, Cebuano kamarin ‘warehouse with an iron roof’, Mansaka kamarin ‘storage shed’, all of which appear to be borrowings of Spanish camarín ‘small side-chapel; (actor’s) dressing-room; closet’, some acquired directly, as Ilokano kamarín, Cebuano kamarin, or Mansaka kamarin, but others indirectly, as Agta (Eastern) kamárin, which is said to be from Ilokano

As noted in Blust (1987) the most reasonable gloss for this challenging form is ‘men’s house’, that is, a dormitory for unmarried men. According to Fox (1993b:12) “This designation assumes, however, the existence of Melanesian type men’s houses among the early Austronesians prior to their contact with the non-Austronesian populations of New Guinea,” and he notes that “Tryon (1993), assigns *kalamiR the gloss, ‘granary, shed’. It might therefore be appropriate to see the widespread Western Malayo-Polynesian reflexes as a retention and the usages found in Oceania as an innovation.” Quite apart from his repeated mis-citation of the form as *kalamiR (three times in a single 13-line paragraph), and his patently false assertion that “widespread Western Malayo-Polynesian reflexes” support the meaning ‘granary’, there are a number of problems with this statement. First, Fox apparently fails to understand that *kamaliR must be reconstructed for Proto-Oceanic, as this is the only gloss (apart from ‘man, male’ in the Admiralties) that reflexes of *kamaliR have in Oceanic languages. But Proto-Oceanic was spoken by a language community that had only recently arrived in the western Pacific, and that shows little influence from the Papuan languages that were already present in this region. Second, in the context of the wider set of ‘house’ terms considered by Blust (1987) *lepaw is clearly a better PMP candidate for the meaning ‘granary’, as it is attested in this sense in both CMP and WMP languages, whereas *kamaliR is attested in this meaning only in the Philippines. Third, a search through Tryon (1995) turns up no reference to ‘granary shed’, and hence no data that was not already considered in Blust (1987). Fourth, Fox’s suggestion that bachelor’s houses were unknown to Austronesian speakers prior to reaching New Guinea is fundamentally at odds with the ethnographic evidence, since the institution of bachelor’s houses has been described for inter alia, the Amis, Tsou, Rukai and Puyuma of Taiwan (Chen 1988:271ff), the Lepanto and Bontok of northern Luzon (Keesing 1962:121, Lebar 1975:83), the Modang of east Kalimantan (Guerreiro 1998), the Acehnese of northern Sumatra (Loeb 1972:221ff), the Mentaweians just west of Sumatra (Lebar 1972:42), the prehispanic Chamorros, Palauans, and Yapese of western Micronesia (Alkire 1977:21, 30ff, 33ff) ), the Ende of central Flores (Lebar 1972:87), the Sika of east Flores (Lebar 1972:89), the Solorese of east Flores and Adonara (Lebar 1972:92), and the Tanimbarese of the southern Moluccas (Lebar 1972:112). Surprisingly, Green and Pawley (1999:55ff) adopt the same position, concluding that PMP *kamaliR meant ‘granary’ despite the fact that this meaning is attested only within the Philippine subgroup, that the Greater Central Philippine languages of Sulawesi reflect it in other meanings, as ‘palace’ (Mongondow), or ‘boat house’ (Sangir, where, however, *R is reflected as /r/ instead of expected /h/), and that in some of the languages of northern Luzon, as Kankanaey, kamálig describes a sleeping place used “mostly in the daytime.”

In conclusion, the great semantic diversity of reflexes makes it difficult to confidently reconstruct a gloss for PMP *kamaliR, but ‘men’s house’ seems by far the most plausible alternative, as special structures that serves both as dormitories for unmarried men and as men’s clubhouses are widely attested in traditional Austronesian-speaking societies, and POc *kamaliR could have had no other meaning.