Friday, May 22, 2020

Paiwan Every Day 76: king

Today is difficult, though again very interesting.

With crop, one naturally pictures a farmer working in the field using tools like a hoe or a rake. With tool, Robert Blust starts to talk about metals that might have been available in Early Austronesian (EAN) societies for the making of farming implements, especially iron, copper et cetera. Linguistic evidence leads him and some others to consider "Proto Austronesians as literate metallurgists", though not without skepticism from archaeologists (p. 483, "Prehistory of the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples").

Most of Blust's examples for metal come from Proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian (PWMP) outside Taiwan. For Paiwan, the dictionaries and notebooks at my hand offer me the following:

Metal            Paiwan (Ferrell 1982)        Paiwan (CIP Online 2020)      Paiwan (Valjeluk Mavaliu)
iron                  vatjuljayan                            vatjuljayan                                        tjinar               
copper             paliljuk, liun                           vuljavan
lead                     tsiqi                                      ciqi
gold                                                                 king (borrowing)
tin                   vatjukun, banban                      tjinar
aluminum         vatjukun                                 arumi (borrowing)

While vatjuljayan, tsiqi/ciqi, king, and arumi appear consistent, the rest are contradictory and need explanation. How did the Paiwan acquire these words? Did they - obviously excluding the loaned king and arumi - exist in the society or were they introduced? Answers to these questions might tell us how literate Paiwan people were in metallurgy.

pazangal a kakavelian nua king tucu?

In English:
Is the price of gold expensive now?

Glossary:
  1. pazangal: expensive
  2. a: case marker for non-specific, nominative
  3. kakavelian: the root is "veli-" (buy, sell). [kaka-veli-an] means price. 
  4. nua: case marker for possessive
  5. king:gold (borrowing)
  6. tucu: now
Reading: 

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Paiwan Every Day 668: pai

pai, kinemnemanga tiamadju tu kemacu tua ljigim nua kakinan.   Free translation : Now, they decided to take their mother's sewing needle...