Re: Vagaries of Swadesh Lists (was: Automatic clustering of languag

From: Roger Mills
Message: 48282
Date: 2007-04-07

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> Talking of loans, isn't _nama_ 'name' in the Indonesian Swadesh list
an Indic loan?

Undoubtedly. Likewise _suami, isteri, -kerja, saya_ resp. husband, wife,
work, I (< 'slave' IIRC); and Arabic ber/pikir 'think', possibly ber/napas
'breathe'; _bagai-_ in bagaimana 'how?' is either Indic or Dravidian, I
forget offhand which, meaning 'kind, sort'.......Of course there are native
equivalents for most, but considered colloquial/familiar/inelegant.

> ...The Javanese list has...one loan whose source is not obvious
to me - _tlaga_ 'lake'.

From something like _tad.aga_. A quite exhaustive listing of Indic loans is
online at: http://crcl.th.net/indic/indo.htm . Unfortunately, the Skt.
transliterations display poorly, both in IE and Firefox :-( In addition to
the Casparis work mentioned there, there's also the older "Sanskrit in
Indonesia" by J. Gonda (1952).