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