whale

[Robert Blust]

Dear Jean-Paul,

The Puyuma word means 'shark', not 'whale'.  Hanunoo /duyung/ means
'dugong', not 'manatee' (both are members of the order Sirenia, but the
manatee is an Atlantic species and the dugong a Pacific species).  There
is a discussion of the semantic shift in Puyuma /buaya/ in my on-line
AUSTRONESIAN COMPARATIVE DICTIONARY.

Best,

Bob Blust

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, potetjp wrote:

> There is no word for "whale" (# 232) in the majority of the languages listed
> in _Lexique thématique plurilingue de trente-six langues et dialectes d'Asie
> du Sud-Est Insulaire_, Paris: L'Harmattan (1997).
> The 11 terms entered are:
> MALAY WORLD
> Bugis: pausu?, tampausu?
> Moken: ekan nani
> Sama Sitangkay: kahumbu
> Sama Sulsel: basisou
> Malaysian: tempaus
> Indonesian: (ikan) paus
> PHILIPPINES
> Hanunoo-Mangyan: duyong
> Maguindanao: kumbo
> Tagalog: dambuhála?
> FORMOSA
> Yami: amumubu (father of flying fish)
> Puyuma: buaya
>
> 1) Query: do you know other terms for "whale"?
>
> 2) Sharing of opinion. What do you think of the following "confusions"?
> The Hanunoo-Mangyan term - duyong - is the same for "whale" and "manatee".
> Although both sea mammals, this confusion is strange.
> Even stranger is the Puyuma term - buaya - because it means "crocodile" is
> many other languages.
> To refer to crocodiles, the Puyumas use a Japanese loanword _wani_  (Liste:
> # 262) < Jap. _wani_ (Nelson (1969): _The modern reader's Japanese-English
> character dictionary_: # 5317).
> I suppose Japanese traders bought crododile skins (Jap. _wanigawa_) from the
> Puyumas so that the Japanese term _wani_ was substituted to the native term
> for "crocodile", now lost.
> Incidentally Jap. _wanizame_ "shark" is derived from  _wani_ "crocodile"
> (ibid); _same > -zame_ (Nelson #5294) means "shark".
> _Kodansha's furigana English-Japanese dictionary_ (1994) translates "shark"
> by _same- and _fuka_ (cf. Nelson # 5337), so I conclude _wani_ is now
> obsolete and that the trade I was referring took place when Formosa was
> Japanese, unless ancient and dating back to the Middle-Ages.
> Jean-Paul G. POTET
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