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To return to the semantic strand of this ongoing discussion:<br>
<br>
By sheer coincidence, I was just browsing through a wordlist of
Tidung (spoken in Tarakan, Kalimantan Utara), and the word for
'give' is given as <i>saiyang, </i>which is clearly related to
the familiar Malay <i>sayang</i> 'love'/'compassion'/'pity'. Seems
like an almost completely parallel semantic change to that which was
posited by several discussants for Malay <i>kasi(h)</i>, and, in my
view, the clincher for this proposed etymology.<br>
<br>
Appell-Warren, Laura P. (1978) "The Tarakan Dialect of the Tidung
Language of East Kalimantan: Distribution and Basic Vocabulary", in
A.S. Wurm and Lois Carrington eds., Second International Conference
on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, Pacific Linguistics C-61,
148-166.<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:gil@eva.mpg.de">gil@eva.mpg.de</a>
Webpage: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/%7Egil/">http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/</a>
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