To Polynesian Experts

[Frédéric Plessis]

This message was written 1 week ago in reply to Per Hage 's query on
Proto-Polynesian sibling terms but I have got troubles to post it.


Dear Austronesianists,

I don't think that 'tukana'- eSib and atua 'God, deity' are related. As
Marck said, tuakana is a reflex of the well-known PMP protoform.(k)aka
'e//Sib'.(see Blust 1980 Early austronesian social organization). In
western Austronesian languages however, aka-kaka reflexes have the meaning
'elder sibling'. The feature 'same-sex sibling' associated with relative
age is only attested in Eastern indonesia and Oceania, but not in the
western part.
Another term (*tuqah) is also attested to denote seniority in An languages.
Reflexes of *tuqah (sometimes shortened as wa') are also used to denote
parent's elder siblings. 'mature, ripe' seems to be the primary meaning of
*tuqah.
Blust proposed (1980) ma(n)tuqah as the PMP term for Mother's Brother,
parent-in-law. I rather think that *tuqah is a broad term denoting
seniority (grandparent, parent's elder sibling, elder sibling..)

The first element in tukana could be an fossilized prefixe **tu- (denoting
reference). Similar prefixes are also found in the languages of Sulawesi
(see Barr 1988)
references could be found in my website:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/3891/kinbiblio.html

*atua probably comes from PMP*.atuan 'god, deity'(see Blust 1995).
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/8831/blust.html for reference

 **tua- in the proto-polynesian terms *tua-ngaqane 'B (w.s) and *tua-fafine
Z (m.s) could be related to *tuRan(ng) (see Chowning 1991, Marck 1995)but
the exact meaning of PMP.tuRang is yet to be discovered.

Then *tuakana could be morphologically analysed as :

(1) tu-aka-na (prefix tu- + aka + na)
(2) tua-aka-na (**tua > POC.tuqa 'old, mature')
(3) tua-aka-na (** tua > POC.tuRa(ng) 'consanguine of Ego's generation')

note : the element **tua- also appears in the compound word tuatina 'MB' -
see Marck (1995)


Frédéric Plessis
PhD candidate, EHESS-Paris (France)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/8831
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/3891/