Given its meaning one would not expect this to be a loan distribution. However, three independent pieces of evidence show that the words in language__Tagalog, language__Ngaju Dayak, language__Malagasy and language__Javanese are almost certainly language__Malay loans. First, language__Tagalog shows -_Ɂ corresponding to __language__Malay__ final vowel. Second, the word is unknown in any language of the Philippines apart from __language__Tagalog__. Third, __language__PMP__ *_dalikan is a far better candidate for the meaning ‘trivet, three stones of the hearth’.

Zorc (1996) took the correspondence of final glottal stop in language__Tagalog to final glottal stop in language__Iban to be evidence for *-Ɂ, and so presumably would posit *tuŋkuɁ. However, as shown in Blust (2013; sect. 8.2.2.4), there are serious problems with the proposal that *-Ɂ existed in language__PAn, language__PMP, or any early Austronesian proto-language.

The agreement between language__Iban and language__Tagalog in this case appears instead to be entirely fortuitous: language__Iban added -Ɂ to many words that originally ended in a vowel (or, in some cases a -VC sequence that first monophthongized), and language__Tagalog acquired a final glottal stop in loanwords from language__Malay (mostly language__Brunei Malay). Many language__Malay loanwords entered the Philippines through a trading colony in Manila Bay, where language__Tagalog was spoken natively (Wolff 1976), and in the present case this loan evidently got no further.

Finally, language*dalikan__ ‘trivet’ is unquestionably native, and is found from the Batanes islands, to northern Sumatra, to southern Sulawesi, to the Mariana islands, to Timor in the Lesser Sundas, showing that a better candidate exists for this meaning. A loanword of this kind suggests that language__Malay contact with the Philippines was rather intimate rather than distant. Dempwolff (1938) reconstructed ‘Uraustronesisch’ *tuŋku ‘trivet’ (Dreifuss).