comments

[Waruno Mahdi]

Thanks Daniel and Laurie for your constructive comments.

I'm first of all somehow relieved to learn, that the ethnic name
given to the Kalinga of the Cordilleras on Luzon was actually not
a reflex of the Indic Kalinga, but a local product.

Upto now, this Kalinga had for me always belonged to those glaring
realities which one was compelled to accept as fact, although whatever
over-all concepts or hypotheses one had about the general situation
would have fared much better if the fact hadn't been there.....
(why would an Indic name have been so influential at such early date
as to reach a remote interior, if one assumed the propagation of ideas
and expressions of Indic origin through the archipelago to have
principally and almost exclusively been carried out by speakers of Malay).

Now for the final glottals and role of corresponding Malay dialects.

> The nature of these loan words must also be taken into
> account; although explaining the presence of such trade related words as
> /mutya'/-"pearl", we would be hard-pressed to account for the transmission
> through a primarily trading relationship of lexical items such as
> /budhi'/-"conscience", /katha'/-"literary work", /diwa'/-"soul" and many

This difficulty, I think, is an artefact of the (actually arbitrary) choice
of basic assumptions. Why must we assume that existing relations with Malay
speakers was restricted to matters of trade only? Don't the scope of
loanwords (incl. _budhi'_ etc.) actually indicate that also ideological
and literary matters were also involved? After all, loans of Malay _surat_
"writing" are not only widespread in the Philippines, they are even attested
in Taiwan. And even such a Sanskrit loan like Cebuano _pu'asa_ "to fast"
betrays mediation of Malay.

I mean, it is a fact that those words did come there, and they couldn't
have acquired them over Internet or even by airmail. It had to be
by those same maritime trade routes. More still, even a traditional
script, related to traditional Indic-based scripts in Indonesia got
there, apparently also over thast route.

For the Philippines, just as for Western Indonesia, and for mainland SE Asia,
the beginning of acquisition of elements of Hindu-Buddhist ideology seems
to coincide not with commencement of trade relations, but with the time when
development of local socio-political complexity led to structured territorial
division involving polities being subordinated to a central overlord.

It seems to be the transition from a situation with dynamic structure
  (A is overlord of B so long and only so long as it is militarily
   stronger and can constantly force B to obey; B's loyalty to A is
   forced and a function of own weakness)
towards a legally stabilized structure
  (A is overlord by divine provision, B's loyalty to A is a virtue, and
   rebellion is a violation of the cosmic plan).

Therefore, one sees in early SE Asian epigraphy, that the paramount king
likens himself to legendary paramount monarchs of Hindu epics (Rama of
the Ramayana, Yudhistira of the Mahabharata), or even directly with some
divinity. Put crudely, one could probably say that was a transition
from "barbarity" to "civilization", provided one is prepared to use
both terms without either pejorative connotation or the opposite of that.

Trade routes were apparently the lines of communication, through which
polities en route could acquire not only trade wares, but also ideological
ideas the moment the local socio-political development had use for them.
And for the Philippines this was apparently not different than for Western
Indonesia and mainland SE Asia. What I mean to say is, that not availability
of the ideas through existing corresponding contacts made the respective
ethnic groups or language communities adopt the civilization they represented,
but they only availed themselves of those ideas when internal development of
socio-political complexity caused them to realize what they were good for.
Hence, although Austronesian shipping along the entire perimeter of the
Bay of Bengal probably commenced sometime between 1000 and 600 B.C.,
and major Malay-speaker involvement in that shipping since around 200 B.C.,
polities with Hindu-Buddhist ideology only appear in the 1st century A.D.
in mainland SE Asia, and perhaps a century later in insular SE Asia.

> It would seem that the final glottal stop in these words is more
> likely the result of assimilation though the general phonlogical tendencies
> of Philippine languages. We will notice that, at least in Tagalog, the
> phonological pattern CVCCV occurs much more frequently with a final glottal
> stop than it does without one.

Post-glottalization of final vowels does not seem to be restricted to words
with this pattern, and I'm not sure that all loans with that pattern got
the final glottal.

I think, there is a simple explanation for postglottalization also affecting
some loans from Spanish. Seeing that ideological words of the _budhi'_ type
did have the glottal, this might have been a phonological feature associated
with some prestigious social group (priests, aristocrats, or scribes).
This would provoke "hypercorrect" pronunciations of other "exclusive"
words. Something like that could be observed with some foreign words
with _p_ in the pronunciation of less educated Indonesians. As foreign
words with _f_ were pronounced with _p_ in colloquial speech, the
language community was generally aware, that words usually having _p_
in the commonly used language had _f_ instead of _p_ in the speech of
intellectuals. So sometimes one could here _f_ in words where _p_ should
have been (e.g. this happened rather often with the German motorcar brand
"Opel", which would be pronounced "Ofel").

Sorry this got so long again.

Greetings to all,   Waruno



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Waruno Mahdi                  tel:   +49 30 8413-5411
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