whale / whale > crocs and sharks

[Waruno Mahdi]

Oops, I only notice now that the message below which I meant to send
off to Anlang yesterday got addresses directly to Jean-Paul. So here
it comes again. My apologies to Jean-Paul who's getting this twice.
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Jean-Paul, that's a nice bit of sleuthing. At least two of the Tagalaog
forms indeed do not seem very likely to contain Arabic _bu_:

> bu + áya > Tag. buwáya "crocodile"
....
> dang- + bu + hála > Tag. dambuhála "whale".

*buqiaya "crocodile", as you surely also know, has many reflexes in Oceanic
   languages.
Virtual *Zambuha[Dj]a has a narrower distribution (Tag. _dambuhala_,
   Ngaju _jambuara_ "whale", Merina Malagasy _lambuara_ "k.o. fish"),
   but Old Javanese _lembwara_ "k.o. large fish" with irregular initial
   _l_ for expected _d_. The problem that this creates is aggravated by
   the circumstance that the Malagasy form coincides with the expected
   if it were a loan from the Javanese, and that would even suggest
   possible etymologies in the direction of _lembu_ "cow" + ???.

> Now it seems to me that  _*bu_ is a genuine Austronesian root in so far as
> it is also found at the end of words, e.g.
> Flores _embu-ngembu_ "whale" (Louise Baird)
> Sama Sitangkay _kahumbu_ "whale"
> Maguindanao _kumbo_ "whale"
> Yami _amumubu_ "whale"

I would in this case also consider the possibility of an *[eu]mebu
as protoform. That leaves prefixes ka-/ku- or, in Yami, possibly
an infix -um- (although I couldn't imagine under what circumstances
that could have gotten inserted) and vowel assimilation.
In most of the considered languages, an *e in the inner syllable of
a tri- or more-syllabic form is deleted.
Furthermore, above-mentioned *Zambuha[Dj]a is perhaps a compound with
some-or-other *Zambu < *Za- + *[e]mebu as first component? But that's
all very speculative and should obviously be taken with a generous
dosis of salt....

about Japanese _wani_ "crocodile":

> Did you infer this from the fact that the kanji has the radical "fish"?
> These may have been marine crocodiles, similar to the Australian species,

I don't think one should take the implications of the radical in characters
of Chinese-based scripts too literally. The radical "fish" must not
necessarily mean it is a fish or even a marine animal, just that there
is some semantic association to "fish" that might sometimes be quite
subtle. In English too, neither _shellfish_ nor _silverfish_ refer to
fish. Nor is a seahorse a horse. The hippopotamus (from the Greek
for "river horse") is referred to in German, Dutch, and Indonesian Malay
(perhaps in other languages too?) literally as "Nile horse" :-)

Aloha,   Waruno