[Papuanlanguages] 'Eating water' and Alan Rumsey's 'further twist; 'burn' and 'sleep' are the same in Korafe and Baruga

[Jim & Cindi Farr]

My apologies to the group. It was too close to lunch. In Korafe and Baruga it is 'burn' and 'sleep', not 'burn' and 'eat' which are either homophones or synonyms.

Baruga has 'evari' for both and Korafe has 'avari' for both. The 'burn' meaning is intransitive, so for someone to 'burn something' we need a verb series with 'set-a-fire'.

e.g. Dungetiri (he lit it), avisira (it burned, distant past) He set it on fire (and) it burned (a while ago).

They do appear to be cognate (we still need a nice PUBLISHED comparative work on Binandere etomology), and are in the 'i' verb conjugation in both languages.

Jim (having eaten!)
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Alan Rumsey 
  To: Papuan languages discussion list 
  Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 9:20 PM
  Subject: Re: [Papuanlanguages] 'Eating water' and Alan Rumsey's 'further twist;'burn' and 'sleep' are the same in Korafe and Baruga


  Hi Jim and Cindy. Good to hear from you. How about 'eat' and 'burn'? Do Korafe and Baruga have the same words for them? Regarding 'sleep' and 'burn', it seems harder to see how there could be a single basic meaning that they are contextual variants of.  I notice that you put quotation marks around 'same' when describing them as "the 'same' word". Do you regard them as such? Could they just be homophones? Is the word the same or similar in form in the two languages? If not, that would seem to make the homophone interpretation less plausible than if so.

  Cheers,
  Alan

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