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

[David Gil]

I am grateful to Waruno for supporting my position, with his conclusion 
that "the cognate doublets _kasi_ / _kasih_ '1 love, 2 give' do not 
represent an exceptional case."

I also concur wholeheartedly with Waruno's comments about 
inter-dialectal borrowings and their effects.  I can offer many more 
such examples, here are two:  (a) the Jakarta Indonesian "bego" 
('stupid') was borrowed into Riau Indonesian with the final glottal 
characteristic of Jakarta, and is accordingly written in Riau as 
"begok"; conversely, (b) Speakers of Jakarta Indonesian generally "don't 
hear" the final phonemic glottals in Riau and other Sumatran dialects of 
Indonesian.  A Jakartan friend of mine who visited Sumatra learned that 
they have a different word for 'see', and uses it when talking to 
Sumatrans.  But whereas the original Sumatran word is written "tengok" 
and pronounced with a final phonemic glottal, my Jakartan friend 
internalized it as a vowel-final word with variably inserted glottal 
(see below), and writes it "tengo". Thus, for him it constitutes a 
doublet with his word "tengok" (with final velar stop) which means 'visit'.

I would just add that with regard to Jakarta Indonesian, what Waruno 
refers to as "automatic final glottal after word-final vowels" is 
non-automatic (and hence a much more complex phenomenon) for the 
following two reasons:  (a) it is lexically conditioned, occurring after 
most but not all vowel-final words (some exceptions are "ini", "itu", 
"aja", "saya" (this was first observed by Uri Tadmor); and (b) for 
almost all words that do take the final glottal, its presence is 
variable and contextually conditioned, occurring more commonly in 
phrase-final than in phrase-medial positions (but again, there are 
lexical exceptions, such as "pak", where the final glottal is pretty 
much obligatory).   Right now, at the MPI EVA Jakarta Field Station, 
we're in the middle of a project in which we're examining the 
correlations between final glottals and h's in Jakarta Indonesian and 
the syntactic environments in naturalistic texts; hopefully in a couple 
of months we'll have precise figures to show for this ...

David


On 19/02/2015 01:05, Waruno Mahdi wrote:


> With regard to word-final laryngeals & glottals, the situation in
> Malay dialects of Indonesia of the last two or three centuries is
> somewhat complicated. But first of all one must differentiate
> alternation of (1) final glottal stop with zero, and that of (2)
> final laryngeal aspiration and zero.
>
> (1) some Malayic languages and/or dialects are known to add an
> automatic final glottal after wordfinal vowels (e.g. Jakartan,
> Banjarese, a.o).
> As a result of dialect mixture or interdialectal borrowing or
> influence, this led to irregular final glottal in dialects which do
> not atomatically postglottalize final vowls..
> Thus standard indonesian Malay has _datuk_ where Old Malay had regular _datu_;
> or one finds the doublets _Dayak_ (hinterland population in
> Kalimantan) and _daya_ for 'south' (in _barat daya_ 'south west').
>
> (2) in Malay vernaculars spoken particularly in Java of the 19th and
> 20th centuries, an _h_ frequently appeared after worf-final vowel
> particularly in vernacular Malay as spoke by Sino-Indonesians and
> Dutch. This also effected the Indonesian Malay spoken by indigenous
> Indonesians. A notorious example is the word _tempoh_ 'time' in the
> Indonesian Proclamation of Independence of 1945 as written by
> Sukarno. The word originates from Creol Portugues _tempo_ (apparently
> via Indies-Dutch) and is still spelled _tempo_ (without _h_) in
> modern standard Indonesian.
> Hance, the cognate doublets _kasi_ / _kasih_ '1 love, 2 give' do not
> represent an exceptional case.
>
> Aloha,
> Waruno
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> An-lang at anu.edu.au
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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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