[An-lang] etymology of Malayic "kasi" ('give')

[Tom Hoogervorst]

The phonotactic constraints outlined in the previous posts were of much help for me to make sense of the ‘volatile’ final /h/ in Malay, whether actually pronounced or not. 

I should add that this phenomenon is not limited to early romanisations of Malay. I have also found it in Old Javanese literature (although not in any consistent way):

dasih ‘servant’ < Sanskrit dāsī
gajah ~ gaja ‘elephant’ < Sanskrit gaja
patih ‘high official’ < Sanskrit pati
ratih ~ rati ‘pleasure’ < Sanskrit rati
warih ~ wari ‘water’ < Sanskrit vāri

David’s comment on the discrepancy between orthographic representations and actual pronunciations is well appreciated and may also hold true for the above attestations.

Tom

Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 11:45:24 +0900
From: gil at eva.mpg.de
To: an-lang at anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: [An-lang] etymology of Malayic "kasi" ('give')


  
    
  
  
    Sorry to be so finicky about these little phonological details, but
    the list of loanwords with final h offered by Tom
    Hoogervorst, while perhaps corresponding to the orthographic
    conventions of Standard Indonesian, does not correspond to the
    reality of any of the couple of dozen or so dialects of Malay and
    Indonesian that I can vouch for.  In particular, for all of the
    dialects that I am familiar with, there is a distinction between teh
    'tea', in which the final h is invariably preserved, and
    most or all of the other loanwords cited by Tom, in which the h
    is either completely absent, or present only in phrase-final
    positions.

    

    (My colleague Tim McKinnon has suggested that the above distinction
    between teh and most/all other words with supposedly final h
    is due to a principle of minimality, whereby a simple CV would be
    too small to constitute a proper word; hence the h is
    invariably retained.  However, in at least some of the dialects that
    I am familiar with, CV words (with no final h or glottal
    stop) are possible, albeit dispreferred.)

    

    David

    

    

    PS Football provides a great source for new loans, which, arguably,
    enter straight into local dialects rather than being mediated
    through the standard language or a higher-prestige local dialect. 
    We recently ran a little "experiment" (more like a game, actually)
    whose output was a large corpus of naturalistically produced Messis
    and Ronaldos, in different syntactic environments, in Jakarta
    Indonesian.  We're still working on coding the results, but
    impressionistically, there was variation between final vowels, final
    hs and final glottal stops.

    

    

    

    On 19/02/2015 23:00, Tom Hoogervorst
      wrote:

    
    
      
      
        Dear list,
         
        Further to Waruno’s point on the appearance of
            final
            /h/ in Malay vernaculars, it may be added that this tendency
            is also attested in some loanwords:
         

          
        əngkah
            ‘glue’ < Hokkien n̂g-ka (黃膠)
        gajah
            ‘elephant’ < Sanskrit gaja
        galuh
            ‘gem’ < Sanskrit galū
        patih
            ‘chief minister’ < Sanskrit pati
        rupiah
            ‘a kind of coin’ < Sanskrit rūpya
        səkolah
            ‘school’ < Portuguese escola
        səparuh
            ‘one half’ < Javanese səparo
        teh ‘tea’
            < Hokkien tê (茶)
         
        In addition, the following examples have a
            word-final
            /h/ in Malaysia but not in Indonesia:
         
        jaguh
            ‘champion’ < Javanese jago
        tempoh
            ‘time’ < Portuguese tempo
         
        It would seem, as was pointed out before, that
            this
            reflects underexplored processes of interdialectical
            borrowing prior to the standardization of Malay.
        

          
        All the best,
        Tom Hoogervorst
         
      

      
      

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    -- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550333
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/


  


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