*e   

*e numeral prefix; cardinal numeral marker

Note:   Also Tongan ʔe ‘untranslatable particle used before numerals’, Hawaiian ʔe ‘general numeral classifier which precedes numerals from from 1-9’ (Elbert and Pukui 1979). In addition to the indisputably cognate forms cited above it is tempting to compare Palauan e ‘prefix used to form number words that refer to units of time’. However, cognates are unknown in any other non-OC language, and PMP mid vowels *e and *o are rare and problematic. For these reasons I treat Palauan e as a chance resemblance.

In the standard grammars of Fijian and several of the Polynesian languages the numeral marker e is equated with the predicative or existential marker of similar shape which is widespread in OC languages. However, it is noteworthy that reflexes of *e ‘numeral marker’ are known to be distributed only from the western Solomons to Polynesia, whereas reflexes of the variant *i ‘numeral marker’ are found both in CMP and in OC languages.

One hypothesis worthy of further investigation is that a numeral marker *i was innovated in PCEMP and a predicative or existential marker *e was innovated in POc, with a subsequent tendency for the former (which was syntactically more restricted) to be equated with the latter (which was syntactically freer). Just how restricted the distribution of the numeral marker *i, *e was remains unclear, but in most languages it does not occur with ‘one’, and in many others it does not occur with numerals above ‘five’.

*ebek thudding sound

Note:   With root *-bek₁ ‘dull muffled sound’.

*ebuk dust, powder

Note:   With root *-buk₁ ‘decay, crumble; powder’.

*ebun heap, pile, swarm, flock; to swarm, assemble, gather

Note:   With root *-bun ‘heap, pile; cover with earth; assemble, gather’.

*ebuq gut a fish, eviscerate

Note:   Kelabit ibhuʔ is assumed to derive from underlying **ebhuʔ through affixation with *-in-, a derivation which enables us to explain the voiced aspirate as the regular reflex of *b (following shwa). A parallel example is seen in ebhaʔ ‘water’, ibhaʔ ‘kind of bark bowl used for emptying water’.

*ebuR sow, strew, scatter

Note:   With root *-buR₂ ‘strew, sow; sprinkle’.

*ebus finished, gone

Note:   With root *-bus ‘end, terminate, finish’.

*edaŋ light, radiance; shine

*edaq vetative; don't

Note:   Also Javanese aja ‘don't!, may (it) not’, Buginese ennaʔ ‘no, not’. Bare'e ja ‘only, just, not then’, Makassarese -ja ‘enclitic with a limiting, and therefore sometimes exclusive, accentuated or contrastive character; only, but’ probably are distinct.

*edeg back (of humans or animals)

Note:   Also Casiguran Dumagat adég ‘the upper back portion of a person's body; turn your back on someone or something’. If Singhi Land Dayak dug (expected **dog) is in fact cognate with the Philippine forms cited here *edeg must be assigned to PWMP. How its referent might have differed from that of *likuD remains unclear.

*edem₁ overcast; dull lustre

Note:   With root *-dem₁ ‘dark; overcast’. Old Javanese meḍem is cited under eḍem, but the available textual evidence does not rule out the possibility that it is the morphologically complex surface realization of underlying peḍem.

*edem₂ soak, dye

*eden to brood, sit on eggs

Note:   Also Bontok eleŋ ‘to rest, stop working, put down one's load for awhile’, Cebuano ugaŋ ‘mother hen’, Tiruray eran ‘(of a hen) to sit on eggs’, Balinese edem ‘rest, be at rest, sleep’.

*egaŋ dry, dried up

Note:   With root *gaŋ ‘dry near a fire’.

*egap gasp, open the mouth to breathe

Note:   Also Tagalog higáb ‘yawn’, Sundanese ɨŋap ‘feeling of suffocation, choking’, Sundanese eŋap ‘gasp for breath’, Old Javanese egep ‘gasp for breath’, Palauan chisb ‘hiccough’.

*egik high-pitched throaty sound

Note:   With root *-gik ‘shrill throaty sound’. PWMP *e > Bikol u in the penult is exceptional, but not unparalleled (cf. e.g. Dyen 1953:fn. 67, and the Bikol reflex of *edeg, *Reken, etc. in this dictionary).

*e(ŋ)guk make a gurgling sound

Note:   With root *-guk ‘deep throaty sound’. Pending further information, I treat Manggarai NC- and eNC- as diachronically equivalent.

*ejaq vetative; don't

*e(ŋ)juŋ nose

Note:   Also Ilokano agóŋ ‘nose; the funnel-shaped entrance to a bow net’, KAKI ɨgɨŋ ‘nose’, Iban (Lemanak) ɨdɨŋ ‘nose’, Ifugaw olóŋ ‘nose’. It is possible to reconstruct a PPh disjunct *ajuŋ, but this possibility -- because it is only weakly attested -- is ignored here.

*e(ŋ)kab open, uncover

Note:   Also Tagalog hikáb ‘yawn’. With root *-kab ‘open, uncover’.

*e(ŋ)kak choke, gasp, struggle for breath

Note:   With root *-kak₁ ‘cackle, laugh loudly’. Possibly identical to *Sekak.

*ekal to remove, take off or out

*ekaŋ hoot, croak

Note:   With root *-kaŋ₂ ‘bark, croak’.

*ekap gasp for air

Note:   Also Ilokano rikáb ‘gasp, respire convulsively’.

*e(ŋ)keb a cover; to cover

Note:   With root *-keb₁ ‘cover’.

*e(ŋ)kek subdued laughter; sobbing

Note:   With root *-kek ‘shriek, creak, cluck, chuckle’.

*ekeŋ stiff

Note:   With root *-keŋ₁ ‘cramps, stiffening of limbs’.

*ekep brood, sit on eggs

Note:   Also Nias uxu ‘brood, hatch eggs’, Mongondow oob ‘brood, sit on eggs’, Uma ooʔ ‘brood, sit on eggs’, Bare'e oʔo ‘brood, sit on eggs’. With root *-kep₁ ‘cover; fold over’.

*eket stick, adhere

Note:   With root *-keC ‘adhesive, sticky’.

*e(ŋ)kik shrill cry

Note:   With root *-kik ‘shrill throaty sound’.

*ekit squeak, shriek

Note:   Javanese eŋkèt probably is a loan from Malay.

*ekuk make a croaking sound

Note:   With root *-kuk₂ ‘sound of a sob, cackle, etc.’.

*ekup enclose, cover

Note:   With root *-kup ‘enclose, cover’.

*elak separate two things

Note:   Also Fordata elat ‘frontier, border, line of division’.

*eleb knee

Note:   Also Kanakanabu ə'və ‘knee’. Probably *qeleb.

*elem₁ shade, darkness

Note:   With root *-lem₁ ‘dark; obscure’. To judge from the Mongondow contrast of oḷom and olinow, and from the reconstruction of PMP *qalinu ‘shade, shadow’ next to *elem, this item probably referred to formless shade in contrast to the well-defined shadow of something. The similarity of the Manggarai word to the other two cited here may be a product of convergent evolution operating on a common monosyllabic root.

*elem₂ cautious, suspicious

*elet₁ borrow, be in debt

*elet₂ exert strength or effort

*eliŋ high-pitched sound

Note:   With root *-liŋ₁ ‘clear ringing sound’.

*eluŋ bend, curve

Note:   With root *-luŋ₁ ‘bend, curve’.

*ema₁ father's sister, possibly address term

Note:   Also Iban mak ‘mother’, Javanese emak ‘maidservant who takes care of the children; mother, mom’. The meaning of this form is problematic. If we simply conjoin the attested glosses it would seem to follow that *ema meant both ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Such a result, however, would be anomalous, since (1) the meanings ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are represented by PAn *ina and *ama respectively, and (2) reflexes of *ina apparently never mean ‘father’ and reflexes of *ama apparently never mean ‘mother’. If we posit *ina and *ama as referential terms, and *ema as vocative, we can eliminate the problem of synonymy raised in (1), since then *ina = ‘mother (ref.)’, *ema = ‘mother (voc.)’, *ama = ‘father (ref.)’, and *ema = ‘father (voc.)’. Nonetheless, we would still have no explanation for the unique occurrence of a single vocative form representing two address forms. Similarly, we cannot support an inference that the material cited here reflects *ama with oxytone stress, since the divergent semantic evolution of cognates assigned to *amá would remain problematic in any case.

Alternatively, we might assume that *ema was used in teknonyms, as reported for Tboli and Manggarai. Even so, the problem of a single teknonym meaning both ‘mother’ and ‘father’ would remain unsolved. The only parallel to the semantic range of *ema known to me is that of *aya ‘FZ’, which is reflected in some languages with the meaning ‘mother’ and in others with the meaning ‘father’, but which also appears in a few languages with the meaning ‘aunt’, or specifically, ‘FZ’. Perhaps *ema was a vocative/address form of *aya, just as *mama was a vocative/address form of PMP *(ma)tuqah ‘MB’. If so, however, the absence of any reflex which refers exclusively to female collaterals of the parental generation is puzzling, as is the use of the apparently redundant vocative marker -ʔ (for further discussion of vocative marking in PMP cf. Blust 1979).

*ema₂ kiss

*embaq bring, take along

Note:   Also Acehnese ba ‘bring, take along’.

*embaw high, on top

Note:   With root *-baw₁ ‘high; top’.

*embej bind the waist; band around the waist

Note:   With root *-bej ‘wind around repeatedly’.

*embeŋ a dam; to dam a stream

Note:   Also Iban baŋ ‘thwart in a longboat, between the gunwales’, Malay embaŋ ‘thwart, crossbar’, Sasak embaŋ ‘dam up’. With root *-beŋ₂ ‘block, stop, dam’.

*embet bind the middle

*embut to pound, of the pulse

Note:   Also Old Javanese embun, Madurese embun ‘fontanel’. PWMP *embut is inferred by extraction from the reduplicated form.

*emeg damp, moist

Note:   Also Tagalog hímig ‘humidity’, Bikol damóg, dumóg ‘saturated, Cebuano humúd ‘wet’, Mongondow omok ‘make wet, dampen’.

*emis sweet taste

*emit small in quantity, few; trifling amount

Note:   Also Ngadha emé ‘small, few, insignificant’.

*empas fall away, crumble (as a wall)

*empeŋ block, obstruct, dam a stream

Note:   With root *-peŋ ‘plug up, dam; cover’. Dempwolff (1934-38) included Fijian bā ‘fish fence’, Samoan pā ‘fence’, but it now seems clear that these forms are not to be compared with reflexes of *empeŋ.

*empu grandparent/grandchild (recipr.); ancestor; lord, master, owner

Note:   Also Tagalog poʔ ‘honorific, Sir, Madam’. This comparison is complex in a number of respects. First, although it is the most common, it is only one of four stem variants: *ampu, *empu, *impu, and *umpu. Second, an unusual number of affixed forms can be reconstructed next to the simple base. Some of these, as *empu-ŋ, *empu-q, and *t-empu evidently involved distinctions of vocative/address and referential forms (Blust 1979). Another, *empu-ni-a, involves what appears initially to be a possessed kinship term (cp. *ama-ni-a ‘his/her father’) which on closer inspection turns out to function very differently from other kinship terms followed by the genitive marker *ni and the 3sg. object pronoun *-a. The common reflex of *-i ‘local transitive’ in Malay mem-pu-ña-i and Makassarese punnà-i ‘have, possess’, suggests an etymon *empu-ni-a-i. However, since *empu-ni-a evidently meant ‘its owner’ (lit. "owner-of-it"), the Malay and Makassarese constructions in -/i/ must have arisen after the reanalysis of *empu-ni-a as a verb *empuña, and hence is a product of independent parallel changes. Likewise, the morphological similarity of Malay per-empu-an ‘woman; feminine; womanly (courtly, and in titles)’ and Mongondow pog-ompu-on ‘children and grandchildren’ appears to have ho historical basis (cp. Malay (Jakarta) perempuan ‘woman’, with last-syllable vowel indicating *-an, not *-en).

Perhaps most problematic are the forms assigned to *maki-empu and *paki-empu. With regard to the first of these Mongondow clearly reflects a prefix *maki- which remains a functional (non-fossilized) affix in such languages as Ilokano (/maki/- ‘prefix used to indicate that something is done with others, etc.’), Tagalog (/maki/- ask for or make a request for; join in company; imitate’) and Murut (Timugon) (/maki/- ‘petitive’; also /amaʔ/ ‘father’:/maki-amaʔ/ ‘subject calls object "father" ‘, cited in Prentice 1971:135). Since the Mongondow form is supported by the parallel but unglossed Itbayaten form machi-apo, cited under apo ‘GP/GC’ (reflecting the variant *ampu), the total comparison appears to be explained most simply by assuming loss of the last prefixal vowel independently in POc *mokompu ‘grandchild’ (with regressive assimilation of the remaining first syllable vowel), and in such WMP forms as Bare'e makumpu opu ‘GGC’ and Dampelas maʔupu ‘GC’. Foreshortened forms such as Karo Batak k-empu ‘GC’, Rejang k-epew ‘GC’ and Uma k-umpu ‘GC’ can be assigned arbitrarily to forms that begin either with *maki- or with *paki-. Semantically, *empu and its variants also present a complex picture.

Among relatively uncontroversial PMP meanings for all four variants are: (1) GP/GC (recipr.), (2) ancestor, and (3) lord, master, owner. Meaning (1) places *empu among the set of kinship terms, but it is the only reciprocal term that can be reconstructed for PMP. Meaning (2) appears to underlie references to totemism in Manggarai empo, Numfor k-epu, and perhaps in some other languages (see below), while meaning (3) probably underlies at least two seemingly unrelated semantic developments: the meaning ‘parent-in-law’ and the meaning ‘crocodile’. Reflexes of *empu or one of its variants mean ‘parent-in-law’ in such widely separated languages as Ngaju Dayak ((h)empo), Sangir (empo), Kédang (epu), Tolai (tabu-na), and Kilivila (tabu). Among the Kédang, who practice matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, the term also refers to the mother's brother, and among the Kilivila, who practice patrilateral cross-cousin marriage, it refers to the father's sister.

I have found no generally accepted explanation for the grouping of terms for grandparents and parents-in-law under reflexes of the same etymon in Austronesian languages, but the alignment follows naturally from a hypothesis that PMP speakers practiced matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, since under such an arrangement the wife-giving group is universally regarded as ‘lord, master, owner’ of the wife-taking group (Blust 1993, and references therein). The term *empu (and its variants) in meaning (3), then, could have acquired its affinal sense through its use as a title reflecting the higher status of the descent group represented by the MB/WF as against that of the ZS/DH. The recurrent association of grandparents or ancestors with crocodiles and/or other large, dangerous animals is seen in e.g. Tiruray bébéʔ ‘GP/GC; kind of large, black, extremely poisonous snake, considered by the Tiruray to be the original kind of snake, and to have been born of human parents as a twin to a Tiruray child’, Manggarai empo ‘nickname for the crocodile’ (in West Manggarai = ‘crocodile’), Rembong empoʔ ‘GP/GC; crocodile’, Kedayan bapa ‘term of address for the category epu; crocodile’ (Barnes 1974:246-47), and in general anthropological references to the Berawan (Metcalf 1982:254, 257), Malagasy (Frazer 1960:601ff), Mentawai (Loeb 1972 [1935]:166), Atoni (Schulte Nordholt 1971:323), where the crocodile is regarded as the ancestor of the ruler of Kupang), and various societies of the southeastern Solomons (Codrington 1891:178ff). Such widespread associations may be products of convergent development, but are more likely to reflect totemic ideas that were present in PMP social organization, together with a mixture of fear and respect for the crocodile as the ‘lord, master, owner’ of the all-important rivers around which Austronesian speakers so often settled. Finally, the semantic connection of Sasak peŋ-empo-n with Old Javanese paŋ-empw-an is clarified by the discussion of the ‘rice mother’ in Frazer (1960:479-87).

*emun if

Note:   Also Ma'anyan, Kapuas, Siang amun ‘if’, "Proto-Malayo-Javanic" *lamun ‘provided it be’ (Nothofer 1975:97), Brunei Malay (l)amun ‘if, provided that’.

*emuŋ gather, collect together

*emuR hold in the mouth

Note:   Also Sundanese ɨmɨy ‘hold something in the mouth for awhile, as the saliva from the betel chew’ (< *emeR), Tae' ammo ‘put something in the mouth and conceal it by closing the lips’ (< *emuq). With root *-muR ‘gargle, rinse the mouth’. This comparison may be a product of chance.

*-en verbal suffix marking patient or undergoer voice; nominal suffix marking product of an action or thing affected by an action

Note:   *-en is one of the most important affixes that can be reconstructed for PAn, PMP and PWMP. Like other affixes in the ‘focus system’ it evidently marked voice in verbal constructions, and at the same time served to create deverbal nominals. Both functions are widely attested, the latter often fossilized in reflexes of *kaen-en ‘be eaten/what is eaten = cooked rice’. The use of *-en to mark passive imperatives has not been noted in Formosan languages to date, but is widespread in the Philippines and western Indonesia. In some languages, as Bikol, there is a synchronic contrast between imperative marking with a reflex of *-en, and an alternative marking with a reflex of *-a. The former alternative occurs when a short (agent/possessor) pronoun immediately follows the suffixed verb, while the latter occurs without the pronoun. In other languages (as Kelabit) imperatives which use a reflex of *-en are felt to be ‘softer’ or more polite than imperatives which do not make use of passive verb morphology (in this connection cp. also Malay passive imperatives/dehortatives in di-, as with Jaŋan di-gaŋgu guru-mu! ‘Don't disturb your teacher!’).

Since at least two forms of imperative marking can be reconstructed for PWMP, it would be worth trying to determine whether a similar contrast existed in PAn. Possibly related (because it is irrealis) is the use of a reflex of *-en to mark future or intended action in Atayal and several Philippine languages, including Hiligaynon Bisayan and Aklanon.

In addition to the above uses, several languages in the Philippines and western Indonesia use a reflex of *-en to mark various types of usually visible bodily afflictions (skin diseases and the like), as well as comparable conditions of decay or deterioration in non-human subjects (e.g. *bubuk-en ‘crumbling, of something infested with weevils’). Finally, reflexes of *-en are used in some kin terms to mark collaterality, as with *anak ‘child, offspring’, but *anak-en ‘niece, nephew’, *ama ‘father’ but *ama-en ‘uncle’, *ina ‘mother’, but *ina-en ‘aunt’, etc.

*ena catch or get caught in a trap; hit mark with spear, etc.

Note:   Ifugaw (Batad) ona may reflect *kena.

*enap scale of a fish

*enat to pull something toward oneself

*enda no, not

Note:   Also Agutaynen anda ‘none; nothing; the absence of something, someone’, Siocon Subanun ndaɁ-idun ‘none’, Maranao daɁ ‘none, nil, lose, not’, Tiruray endaɁ ‘none, not any, not’. Many thanks to David Zorc for pointing out the similarity of these Philippine forms.

*endaŋ stop, come to a stop

Note:   Also Bikol udóŋ ‘stop, come to a stop’.

*enduR thunder

*endut resilient, springing back when pressed down

Note:   Old Javanese eṇḍut ‘mud’, Balinese eṇḍut ‘mud, clay’, eṇḍut pasih ‘quicksand on a beach’, Sasak endut ‘muddy, slippery’ appear to be distinct.

*enem six