Question to Polynesian expert

[Waruno Mahdi]

> > No it doesn't. The word first appears in English in Cook's voyages,
> > in descriptions of Tahiti and other Polynesian societies. Cook spells
> > it "tattow"; Bougainville a few years earlier had spelled it "tataou"
> > (in French). Both of these are clearly attempts to represent the
> > Polynesian /tatau/. If there is a puzzle here, it is why the final
> > syllable changed from /taw/ to /tu:/ in English.

I agree that the evidence quite clearly points to a Polynesian origin.
As for the puzzling secondary shift in the rhyme, is there any data
on when it took place? It would be interesting of course, if influence
of Old Javanese _tatu_ had played a role, but I am somewhat skeptical.

Firstly, the O.Jav. word has a different meaning (wound, scar) which,
although somehow connected, nevertheless does not make it a more
convincing source of motivation for the shift, than say _tattoo_ "military
parade" (the tattoos of Polynesian warriors giving them a particular
martial appearance).
Secondly, I am not aware of O.Jav. _tatu_ having been borrowed into Dutch
or having even become a feature of the Indo-Dutch vernacular, in which the
main source of local lexical items was Bazaar Malay, or of any Pidgin Dutch
of Indonesia (e.g. Petjoh).

O.Jav. _tatu_ can in any case not be cognate with the Polynesian _tatau_.
Has it been derived by anyone from a higher order protoform? Could it
be a derivation from PAN *Ca[?]u "person"?

With regard to the PAN form for "tatoo", *beCik, it is interesting to note
that one of the reflexes attributed to it, Kampampangan _batik_ "skin
blemish", could theoretically just as well reflect *baTik "batik pattern".
It seems quite likely that the latter is a doublet of *beCik. The
reconstruction of the proto-phoneme *T, as distinguished from *t and *C,
should indeed probably be regarded as the least convincing of all, and
Bob Blust (1988, "Austronesian Root Theory", p. 93) actually subsumes
*baTik together with *beCik under the root *Cik.

Just my two pence....

Waruno

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Waruno Mahdi                  tel:   +49 30 8413-5411
Faradayweg 4-6                fax:   +49 30 8413-3155
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Germany                       WWW:   http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/~wm/
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