Reconstructions

Note

Also IDA labu ‘squash’, Malay labu ‘gourd, gourd-shaped water vessel, pumpkin; musk melon’, Sundanese labu ‘kind of gourd’, Javanese labu ‘vine-grown melon or gourd’, Toba Batak tabutabu ‘bottle gourd, used as a rice container’.

This form is widely regarded as a Sanskrit loan (Dempwolff 1938, Wilkinson 1959:635-636), but there are problems with this interpretation. First, the bottle gourd evidently has been present in Southeast Asia for millennia, making it unnecessary to borrow a foreign term for it. Second, the reconstruction proposed here ends with a uvular stop that is not present in Sanskrit alabu. While the final glottal stop in some languages could be secondary, the presence of -k as a regular reflex of *q in the Tboli word makes it far more likely that this term is directly inherited, despite its general similarity to the Sanskrit name for the same plant.