Towees

[Ross Clark (FOA LING)]

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Cleven
To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: 26/01/2002 8:49 a.m.
Subject: Re: Towees

"janilta at j.email.ne.jp" wrote:
>
> Lisa,
>
> My (excellent) 'lexique du tahitien contemporain' by Yves Lemaitre,
has
> indeed :
> 'to'i : hache; autrefois herminette'
> (ie axe, formerly adze).
> And my 'illustrated Hawaiian dictionary' also has :
> 'axe : ko'i (also means adze)'.

there seems to be a convention concerning the use of 'w' to represent a
glottal stop, or at least an approximation of it; lowullo/lo'lo, for
another example; there's many others in the Jargon IIRC.......so
to'i=>towee is another example of this convention, wake nah?

MC

I don't really think so. Seems to me it's just to show that the word has two
syllables, and hence it's a more revealing spelling than "toes". Or "ow" is
just a standard way to indicate a certain vowel quality. Europeans mostly
just don't hear glottal stop, or if they do they represent it as a "break",
using hyphen or apostrophe. It would be interesting if this word turned up
in any native languages, to see whether the glottal was there. To me that
would be good evidence for direct Polynesian-Amerindian transfer, but I
wouldn't expect it.

Ross Clark