Reconstructions

Note

This is a problematic comparison first proposed by Dempwolff (1938) as gawa ‘to work’, which he distinguished from gaway ‘magical activity’. The comparison given here supports the first of these reconstructions as gawaq rather than gawa, except that Iban shows final glottal stop for expected -h. The second appears here as PWMP gaway ‘religious feast, festivity’. Complicating the picture are western Indonesian forms such as Sundanese gawe ‘work, business’, pa-gawe ‘worker’, Old Javanese gaway ~ gawe ‘work, task, occupation; work, product; feast, celebration; use, purpose’, Balinese gawe ‘to do, make, work’, and Sasak gawe ‘work, performance’ which suggest that gaway may be an affixed form of *gawaq.