Reconstructions

Note

Also Tiruray tunaʔ ‘earth, ground, soil’, Sundanese tanah ‘land, district, estate’, Leti, Wetan tani ‘earth, ground, soil’, Kayeli tain ‘ground, earth, soil, sand’. Dempwolff (1938) posited doublets *tanah and *tanəh ‘earth, land’, assigning Ngaju Dayak tana ‘rice field’ to the first of these, and tanah ‘a land’ as in tanah Jawa ‘the land of Java’ or tanah belanda ‘Holland’ to the second. However, the basis for this distinction is shaky. Ngaju Dayak tana is a native term, while tanah is clearly a borrowing of Banjarese tanah. Many languages have merged PAn *a and *e before the reflex of word-final *q, usually after it became a glottal stop. It is the neutralization of this phonemic distinction before glottal stop that has given rise to the impression that there was a variant *tanaq, which probably never existed.
In addition to the subentries cited above the recurrent pattern of a reflex of *taneq + a place name suggests that the expression *taneq + place name existed in PMP times.

Finally, in some Oceanic languages, where final consonants have been lost, the reflexes of POc *tanoq ‘earth, soil’ and *tanom ‘to plant, bury’ can be difficult to distinguish, and in fact are often combined by lexicographers or comparativists, as with Keesing (1975), who gives Kwaio ano ‘land, ground’, a clear reflex of POc *tanoq, but the subentry anom-ia ‘plant, bury’, which is just as clearly a reflex of POc *tanom, or Fox (1974), who gives Lau ano ‘earth, land’, but the subentry ano-mila ‘burying’, which exemplifies the same problem. Similarly, Bender et al (2003) posit proto-Micronesian *tano ‘ground, low’, but refer additionally to e.g. Tongan tano ‘place of burial, cemetery’, which clearly reflects POc *tanom.