Re: Me-lah-ha

--- 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 having been mostly superceded by reflexes of *emas, it is only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.

How come the search archive function doesn't work below ca. 8000 any
more ("archive empty")?

> Torsten