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

[John Roberts]

Sasha,

If *manec* is a borrowing, I don't have any research that might tell me 
where it came from. All I am saying is that it patterns as a borrowed item 
in that it appears to be less integrated into the lexicon of Amele than 
*cijec*.

In the 1990s when I was in PNG I compared my Amele-English dictionary with 
Mager's (1952) Gedaged-English Dictionary. I found there were over 200 
correspondences of similar forms and meaning. Malcolm Ross scrutinized the 
list and made observations and comments on about 140 of these 
correspondences. From this we can conclude that there has been extensive 
borrowing between Gedaged (Austronesian) and Amele (Papuan) in both 
directions over many generations.

But *manec* is not on this list and neither is *cijec*. So there is no 
evidence that *manec* came from Gedaged. On the other hand, as I said before 
according to Z'graggen *manec* has its reflex in most of the Mabuso stock 
languages, while *cijec* or its reflex is limited to the Gum language 
family. How to assess this piece of information? On the one hand this might 
indicate that the older Papuan term is *manec* and Amele has acquired 
*cijec* from somewhere - probably a Papuan source. Or else it could indicate 
that *cijec* is the older term which only survives in the Gum family of 
languages and Amele now uses *manec* as a synonym alongside *cijec*.

But I don't have the resources to take this beyond speculation.

John

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