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

[Bradley McDonnell]

This is far from David's original inquiry, but I'll just add that Besemah
(Malayic, South Sumatra) appends /h/ to all loanwords that end in the
vowels /a, e, o/. The reason is actually quite clear.

Besemah only has three vowel phonemes /i, a, u/ in addition to the pepet.
High vowels in closed final syllables with an /h/ or glottal stop coda
lower to mid (or sometimes high-mid) vowels (i.e., i -> e, u -> o).
Therefore, when speakers adapt loanwords with mid-vowels, they usually
raise the vowels in pre-final syllables, but append /h/ to final syllables.
Therefore, the soup *soto ayam *in Besemah is *sutoh ayam. *This is also
the case with word-final /a/ because all words with a final a raised to
barred i. So, desa 'village' is realized as disah in Besemah. So, there may
indeed be a principled reason for the addition of /h/ in loanwords in
Malay.

For what it's worth, I'll just mention that neither Besemah (nor to my
knowledge any other isolect of southern Sumatra) uses kasi(h) to mean give.
Besemah only has the form kesian (where e is a schwa) meaning 'pity'. It
does not carry the sense of 'love'.

Best,
Brad

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 6:00 AM, Tom Hoogervorst <tomhoogervorst at hotmail.com
> wrote:

>  Dear list,
>
>
>
> Further to Waruno’s point on the appearance of final /h/ in Malay
> vernaculars, it may be added that this tendency is also attested in some
> loanwords:
>
>
> *əngkah* ‘glue’ < Hokkien *n̂g-ka* (黃膠)
>
> *gajah* ‘elephant’ < Sanskrit *gaja*
>
> *galuh* ‘gem’ < Sanskrit *galū*
>
> *patih* ‘chief minister’ < Sanskrit *pati*
>
> *rupiah* ‘a kind of coin’ < Sanskrit *rūpya*
>
> *səkolah* ‘school’ < Portuguese *escola*
>
> *səparuh* ‘one half’ < Javanese *səparo*
>
> *teh* ‘tea’ < Hokkien *tê* (茶)
>
>
>
> In addition, the following examples have a word-final /h/ in Malaysia but
> not in Indonesia:
>
>
>
> *jaguh* ‘champion’ < Javanese *jago*
>
> *tempoh* ‘time’ < Portuguese *tempo*
>
>
>
> It would seem, as was pointed out before, that this reflects underexplored
> processes of interdialectical borrowing prior to the standardization of
> Malay.
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Tom Hoogervorst
>
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>
>
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