Reconstructions

Note

Also Cebuano tambúli ~ tambúliʔ ‘melongena, kind of conch; horn made from the horn of a water buffalo or a conch’, Malay buri ‘a trumpet’, Sangir tambuhi-ŋ ‘conch shell trumpet, blown as a signal of the departure or arrival of large boats’, Aua tauru ‘conch shell trumpet’ (expected **afui), Mbula twiiri ‘trumpet shell, Triton, a large sea shell which is blown as a horn for signalling’, Gilbertese tau ‘Triton conch, trumpet shell’, Mota tauwe ‘conch shell used as a trumpet’.

The conch shell trumpet is well-known in the Pacific, where it played an important traditional role in the launching of voyaging canoes, the calling of members of the village to ceremonies, providing an alert to imminent danger, etc. However, this reconstruction presents special problems, since its PMP status depends crucially on Tiruray (and the indirect support provided by the Palauan evidence for the doublet *tabuRiq). In addition, a number of languages in the Philippines reflect a word with irregular *R > l, as with the Cebuano form just cited or similar forms in other languages of the Philippines (see Note to *tabuRiq). These appear to be loanwords, although the usual appeal to Malay as a source language does not work well here. Given the limited set of forms that he compared, Dempwolff (1938) erroneously reconstructed *tam-buri ‘triton shell trumpet’. It is now clear that the rhotic in this form was *R, and that there is no comparative evidence for prenasalization of the medial stop. Both of these observations were first made for Proto-Oceanic *tapuRi by Ross (1988:147).

The limited pattern of survival of this form in both the Philippines and Indonesia suggests that it either disappeared among groups that moved inland to a montane environment where the conch was not easily obtained, or was replaced among lowlanders through contact-induced culture change. All in all the pattern of distribution for reflexes of PMP *tabuRi (and its doublet form *tabuRiq) suggests that survival was most strongly favored in areas of cultural conservatism, and disfavored where traditional practices either competed or conflicted with those introduced from outside, as among hispanized Filipinos, where the use of animal horns apparently came to be favored over shell trumpets, or among the peoples of western Indonesia, where overlays of Indian and Islamic cultural influence have altered many aspects of the traditional cultures of lowland groups.