[Mihalic] More etymology

[Ross Clark (FOA DALSL)]

> Kaukau: Lanyon-Orgill (1960: 187) says this is the "sweet 
> potato, Dioscorea
> sativa". However, Dioscorea is the yam genus, not the sweet 
> potato genus,
> which is Ipomoea.
> **Ross (1992:380) lists this as having "no known source".

For the sake of completeness, I should mention Hawaiian Creole /kaukau/
'eat, food', probably derived from Chinese PE chow-chow 'eat, food',
ultimately from Cantonese cháau 'stir-fry'. However, it seems to me there
are formidable gaps (semantic, phonological, geographical, historical) to be
leaped in any attempt to derive this from either CPE or HCE. Does anyone
know how early (and where) this word turns up in TP?

> Pamuk: The Tongan word for prostitute is "pa?umutu" (where 
> "?" is a glottal
> stop) (Tryon, 1995, part 4, p. 586).
> **Ross (1992:367) notes this is a post-arrival term from 
> Colloquial Samoan
> "pa?umuku". He notes that unlike words such as "kaikai", 
> "pamuk" is not
> found in other Pacific pidgins, and therefore there is no evidence for
> their presence in pre-arrival Pacific Padgin. He suggests 
> that "pamuk" and
> "malolo" "were current only in the pidgin of the Samoan 
> plantations, where
> the majority of New Guinean plantation labourers learned their pidgin
> (Mühlhäusler 1976, 1979:193)" (pp. 367-68). In a footnote 
> Ross observes:
> "Don Laycock suggested an alternative etymology, Tahitian 
> pa'umotu (in some
> dialects pa'umoku) means 'Tuamotuan'. Apparently the term was 
> used by other
> Pacific Islanders to refer to Tahitians in general, and might 
> have acquired
> its Tok Pisin sense through popular association of ideas" (p. 
> 367, n. 15).

As I mentioned in my other post, the Pa'umotu connection was suggested to me
by my colleague Robin Hooper in (I think) 1984. However, I am happy (and not
surprised) to learn that Don Laycock may have thought of it independently
and probably earlier.

Ross Clark