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

[David Gil]

Sorry to be so finicky about these little phonological details, but the 
list of loanwords with final /h/ offered by Tom Hoogervorst, while 
perhaps corresponding to the orthographic conventions of Standard 
Indonesian, does not correspond to the reality of any of the couple of 
dozen or so dialects of Malay and Indonesian that I can vouch for.  In 
particular, for all of the dialects that I am familiar with, there is a 
distinction between /teh/ 'tea', in which the final /h/ is invariably 
preserved, and most or all of the other loanwords cited by Tom, in which 
the /h /is either completely absent, or present only in phrase-final 
positions.

(My colleague Tim McKinnon has suggested that the above distinction 
between /teh/ and most/all other words with supposedly final /h/ is due 
to a principle of minimality, whereby a simple CV would be too small to 
constitute a proper word; hence the /h/ is invariably retained.  
However, in at least some of the dialects that I am familiar with, CV 
words (with no final /h/ or glottal stop) are possible, albeit 
dispreferred.)

David


PS Football provides a great source for new loans, which, arguably, 
enter straight into local dialects rather than being mediated through 
the standard language or a higher-prestige local dialect. We recently 
ran a little "experiment" (more like a game, actually) whose output was 
a large corpus of naturalistically produced Messis and Ronaldos, in 
different syntactic environments, in Jakarta Indonesian.  We're still 
working on coding the results, but impressionistically, there was 
variation between final vowels, final /hs /and final glottal stops.



On 19/02/2015 23:00, Tom Hoogervorst 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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> 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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