Re: Me-lah-ha

--- In cybalist@..., "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@..., "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> >
> > The other night I got a really, really bad idea:
> >
> > The Mleccha are from the Moluccas, Maluku.
> >
> > In
> >
> > http://www.irja.org/anthro/malmel1.htm
> >
> > "
> > The protoforms are: *ntiti "copper", *mamu / *maum "iron", and
> > *buLauan "gold". The two former are practically restricted to

East

> > Indonesia. The form for gold apparently originally had the
> > meaning "copper" or "bronze" when it was propagated, perhaps
> through
> > trade contacts, from Taiwan through the Phillipines into

Kalimantan

> > and Sulawesi. In the Philippines and Sulawesi, it came to
> > mean "gold", and it is under this meaning that it was dispersed
> > throughout East Indonesia, and also in West Indonesia where,

after

> > having been mostly superceded by reflexes of *emas, it is only
> still
> > attested on small islands to the west of Sumatra (Simalur,
> Sikhule),
> > and in the interior of Kalimantan (Busang, Penihing). I reported

on

> > this in the publication of 1994.
> > "
> >
> > *buLauan "copper"?
> >
> cf "mleccha" in
>
> http://aa2411s.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~tjun/sktdic/
>
> the "other" meaning "vermillion, copper" (and I won't comment on

the

> state of mind of those people who handled the former, a nasty

mercury

> compound)
>
> and the whole loha = copper discussion.
>

Search for +maluku +copper and this comes up

http://www.miningtrading.com/copper/index.html

So the Moluccas had copper ore.

Some might find this relevant too

http://www.miningtrading.com/gold/index.html

Copper and gold together, facilitating a semantic shift.

These descriptions are from later times, but the geography has stayed
the same many years now:

http://www.inq7.net/vwp/2001/aug/17/vwp_3-1.htm
http://www.inq7.net/vwp/2001/aug/17/vwp_3-2.htm
http://www.inq7.net/vwp/2001/aug/17/vwp_3-3.htm

Perhaps instead Mleccha = Malacca (now Melaka)?

>
> > Torsten