[An-lang] Etymology of Tagalog "hilaga"

Fri Mar 10 14:24:35 UTC 2017

The online Malay dictionary at 
http://melayuonline.com/ind/dictionary/detail/12/I/40 glosses "iraga" as

mata angin antara utara dengan utara timur laut

which translates as "cardinal point between north and northeast".

The Malay orthography is not a reliable indicator of whether the word 
has a final glottal, and a few random people I asked today had never 
heard of the word.

For what it's worth, the phonotactics of the word is rather odd from a 
Malay perspective, as most Malay words are disyllabic, and if they do 
have an antepenult, it usually contains whatever the "neutral" vowel is 
in the respective dialect happens to be — which is never a high [i].

On 10/03/2017 15:16, Laurie Reid wrote:
> The form actually has a final glottal stop, hilagà, which suggests it 
> may be a borrowing from Malay /iraga /'north wind' as noted by Antonio 
> Pigafetta (note John Wolff's paper on Malay borrowings in Tagalog).
>
> On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 9:19 AM, Robert Blust <blust at hawaii.edu 
> <mailto:blust at hawaii.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     I'm not sure where Bill Davis got the idea that "Malaysian and
>     Indonesian have /hilaga". /The normal word for 'north' in
>     Malay/Indonesian is /utara/, a Sanskrit loan, and /hilaga/ does
>     not appear in any dictionary of the language that I have seen. 
>     The/hilaga/ form appears rather to be confined to Tagalog and a
>     small number of languages in the Philippines that may have
>     borrowed from it.
>
>     Best,
>
>     Bob Blust
>
>     On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 3:22 PM, Bill Davis <bill_davis at ntm.org
>     <mailto:bill_davis at ntm.org>> wrote:
>
>         Not sure, but I know that SW Palawano (PLV) has /iraga?/ and
>         Malaysian and Indonesian have /hilaga/. I have heard that
>         cardinal directions came into Austronesian from other sources.
>         Before that names of seasonal winds, up/down river,
>         mountainward/seaward, etc., were all.
>
>         -Bill
>
>
>>         On Mar 8, 2017, at 5:00 PM, an-lang-request at anu.edu.au
>>         <mailto:an-lang-request at anu.edu.au> wrote:
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>>           1. Etymology of Tagalog "hilaga" (Christopher Sundita)
>>
>>
>>         ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>         Message: 1
>>         Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2017 22:03:24 -0800
>>         From: Christopher Sundita <cas536 at cornell.edu
>>         <mailto:cas536 at cornell.edu>>
>>         To: <an-lang at anu.edu.au <mailto:an-lang at anu.edu.au>>
>>         Subject: [An-lang] Etymology of Tagalog "hilaga"
>>         Message-ID:
>>         <CAFOO0beFaKXk0w20GAqJOd+JrxdmWkZRtdMFcdjfi+Chq=Lbuw at mail.gmail.com
>>         <mailto:Lbuw at mail.gmail.com>>
>>         Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>>         Hello,
>>
>>         Does anyone happen to have any insight on the etymology of
>>         Tagalog
>>         *hilaga *'north'?
>>         I've consulted the ABVD, ACD, and Wolff (2010), but was not
>>         very successful
>>         in finding an answer.
>>
>>         I see that the word for "north" in a number of Philippine are
>>         reflexes of
>>         PAn *qamiS, though the Tagalog reflex, *amihan*, refers to
>>         the north or
>>         northeast wind.
>>
>>         I also see that Antonio Pigafetta noted that the word *iraga
>>         *'north
>>         wind' in his Malay word list.
>>
>>         Thanks,
>>
>>         Chris Sundita
>>         http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/csundita
>>         <http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/csundita>
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> -- 
> --------------------------
> Lawrence A. Reid
> Researcher Emeritus
> University of Hawai`i
> Honolulu
> HI
>
> Research Fellow in Linguistics
> National Museum of the Philippines
> Manila
>
> Home address (abbreviated):
> Minoo-shi, Osaka, Japan
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-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816

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