[Papuanlanguages] 'Eating water' and elsewhere: a summary

[John Roberts]

Sasha Aikhenvald asked:

Is the same verb used for 'burning'? (in Amele)

My response is maybe, maybe not. The "consume" verb is *jec*, where *j* is a 
postalveolar fricative and *c* is the glottal stop. *j* is the verb stem and 
*-ec* is the infinitive marker.

Amele has two verbs for "burn", *manec* 'to roast/cook/burn' and *cijec* 'to 
roast/cook/burn'. Both would translate into Tok Pisin with *kukim*. *manec* 
seems to be the more widely used for talking about cooking food and *cijec* 
seems to be used more for expressing 'to burn, to roast, to char'. In 
Z'graggen's comparative word lists, however, I notice that these verbs are 
listed the other way around. *manec* is listed under "burn (tr)" and many of 
the other Mabuso languages have the same cognate. *cijec* is listed under 
"cooked" and this form appears to be restricted to the Gum family.

The maybe response comes from the fact that *jec* and *cijec* have similar 
stem forms. Both stems contain *j*.

I also suspect that *cijec* is the older word in the language. While *manec* 
only has a literal usage. It always means 'to roast/cook/burn', *cijec* has 
a number of extensions of meaning. E.g. *biso cijec* 'to be afraid (lit. for 
the back of his head to burn)', *deweg cijec* 'to be ashamed (lit. for the 
body to burn)', *gemag cijec* 'to have heartburn (lit. for the liver to 
burn)', *sibeg cijec* 'to make someone cry (lit. to burn his chin)'.

Both *manec* and *cijec* can have transitive forms with an object marker. 
These are *manudec* and *cijidoc* respectively. But interestingly while 
*manudec* means 'to roast/cook/burn something', *cijidoc* means 'to burn 
something'.

On the basis of all this I would say the original word for "burn" in Amele 
is *cijec* and *manec* is a later borrowing. There is also the possibility 
that *jec* and *cijec* are related etymologically but I don't have access to 
the history of these words in Amele.

John

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John R Roberts
SIL International Linguistics Consultant
dr_john_roberts at sil.org
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