origin of takuri=kettle, salapi=money, gunting=scissors

Wed May 9 04:53:01 UTC 2012

Hi Piers,

I recognize "salapi" and "gunting" as Tagalog words.  I never heard of
"takuri" but it's listed in Carl Rubino's 2002 Tagalog dictionary, so I
suppose it is too. It reminds me of the Japanese "tokkuri" which is the
container where you pour sake from, but I think it's just a coincidence.

I thought that "gunting" was from Min Nan/Hokkien Chinese, but I can't find
it in Gloria Chan-Yap's 1977 "Hokkien Chinese borrowings in Tagalog."  But
one dictionary lists it "ka to" as the word in Min Nan. And that's quite a
stretch from the Tagalog word. An online Cantonese dictionary lists the
word 較剪 /ga:u33 tsin35/ which may be plausible.  Also, "gunting" is used in
Indonesian.

Salapi - I see it's used in Igorot & in Chamorro.  Arsenio Manuel's 1948
"Chinese elements in the Tagalog language" says:
*Salapi*. [cho( make) -pi (money) ; chai(riches, properties, money)- piek,
silver in general, riches, fortune, money; chai(money)- pit(satin.silk),
money in general; chai(money)-pi(any form of money), money in general.] *...
*
This is from a Google Books snippet and unfortunately I don't have access
to the complete work right now.

Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera's 1887 "El Sánscrito en la lengua tagalog"
(Sanskrit [words] in the Tagalog language) offers this (which I translated
from Spanish, though I caution you it's not a perfect translation!):

salapi, money: "isang salapi" a "salapi" or coin of 4 Reales fuertes  (10
realles de vellón)[Spanish currency], or it may be half hard, one escudo
[Spanish currency again]. Sanskrit "rûpya," gold or silver coins: today
"rupya" is the coin in INdia whose value varies between 2 to 2.5 pesetas,
that's to say, half hard. It's evident to me that the Sanskrit origin of
the word "salapi" which is composed of "sa," contraction of "satu" (one) in
Malay, or of "isa," in Tagalog and a corruption of the word "rupya" or
"rupia."  In this corruption, we see "R" transforming into its equivalent
"L" and from "U" to "A," a common occurence, not only in Malayo-Polynesian
languages, but also in Sanskrit itself: the final "A" which was lost
probably due to the rules of Tagalog writing, which happened to the words
"samal," "sabat," "santal," "asal," "bigal" which are in this list as being
of Sanskrit origin. This word must have been imported into Tagalog in the
form that it has now, or at least as "salapia," because the Tagalogs don't
consider it a compound word, but as the simple name of a unit of currency
in general. This appears plausible when we hear: "isang salapi," "tatlong
salapi," which mean "one salapis, three salapis," as if "salapi" when in
reality it's made up of a number and means "one lapi." Thus, then, "isang
salapi," "tatlong salapi," mean "one one-lapi," "three one-lapi," with
which I believe has been demonstrated that the word arrived in Luzon
transformed. Whether "salapi" means a special coin and money in general is
not a rare thing. And without going beyond Malayo-Polynesian languages, we
can cite an example: in Javanese "hartâ," as in Sanskrit "artha," which
properly indicates riches, treasures, goods, came to later mean a kind of
little coin of little value (1) I suppose that in Tagalog, the meaning of
money in general was secondary and consecutive to the meaning of a special
coin. In Ibanag, you count in the same way you do in Tagalog, taking
"salapi" as a unit of currency, as we have shown in the "Bahagi" article:
this way of counting money is very general in the whole archipelago.

Hope this helps in some way,

--Chris

-- 
Christopher Sundita
BA Linguistics, University of Washington 2011
Data Specialist, Google

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Piers Kelly <Piers.Kelly at anu.edu.au> wrote:

>
> At the moment I'm trying to figure out the origins of these three
> Cebuano-Visayan words, which I'm assuming are post-contact products:
>
> *takuri* ('kettle')
> *salapi* ('money')
> *gunting* ('scissors')
>
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