ACD - Austronesian Comparative Dictionary Online

*sabaq irrigated ricefield?

PWMP sabaq irrigated ricefield ⇫ ¶

WMP
Bisaya	sabaɁ	downriver
Bisaya (Limbang)	sabaɁ	downriver
Dairi-Pakpak Batak	sabah	wet ricefield, rice paddy
Toba Batak	saba laŋit	ricefield that is irrigated only by the rains
	saba	irrigated ricefield (as opposed to ‘dry ricefield/swidden plot’)
	aek par-saba	irrigation water for the rice paddies
Karo Batak	nabah-ken	convert a piece of land into a rice paddy
	tuba sabah	poisonous root used to stun fish
	jumah sabah	irrigated ricefield ( ‘swidden’)
	sabah taban	rice paddy that returns to control of the village head because the owner has violated traditonal law
Malay	sawah	land cultivated with swamp rice, whether the rice is planted in a natural swamp or on irrigated soil; rice is planted usually in small lots separated from one another by low dykes; a stretch of these lots is ; the word is used in South Malaya and Minangkabau, but has taken its place in Kedah and Perak, and in Kelantan and Patani
Angkola-Mandailing Batak	saba	wet ricefield, rice paddy
Old Javanese	a-sawah-sawah	to work in the , grow irrigated rice
	sawah	irrigated ricefield
Javanese	ñawah	to work rice paddies
	sawah	rice paddy, wet rice field
	se-sawah	to be a rice farmer
	pa-sawah-an	rice paddies collectively, i.e. land devoted to raising rice
	sawah ulu	paddy that is easily flooded during

Reconstructions

PWMP

sabaq

irrigated ricefield

Note

Also Ida'an Begak, Kuamut, Belusu, Bulungan sawa ‘wet ricefield’, Iban tanah sawaɁ ‘irrigated land’, Salako sawàh ‘wet ricefield’, Sundanese sawah ‘artificially flooded ricefield’, High Balinese sawah ‘ricefield that can be flooded at will’.

The history of irrigated rice in the Austronesian world remains unclear. While evidence of rice agriculture at the time of the initial Austronesian settlement of Taiwan is abundant in both the long-established linguistic record and in the much more recent, but key archaeological site of Nankuangli East at the Science-based Industrial Park in Tainan, all that either line of evidence unambigously supports is swidden rice.

The present comparison (based just on Toba Batak, Javanese, Malay, Ngaju Dayak manawan ‘to harvest’, and Fijian cava ‘harvest time’), was first proposed by Dempwolff (1938). However, the Ngaju Dayak and Fijian forms are best left out, little additional supporting evidence has been found through subsequent searching, and the Ida'an Begak, Kuamut, Belusu, Bulungan, Sundanese, Balinese, Salako and possibly Iban terms all seem to be loans from Malay. Given this limited evidence, and the absence of a suite of related terms such as is known for swidden rice in PAn, the meaning of *sabaq must remain tentative. Nonetheless, given the consistent indications that the Batak terms are native the word itself clearly has some antiquity among languages in island Southeast Asia.