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

[thaejoon1974 at ybb.ne.jp]

I am really interested in the discussion.  Let me add some information
about Dom from the Simbu province.

Dom has a single verb for `to ingest (to eat, to drink and to smoke)/
to consume'.

    ~ne- `eat, drink, smoke, chew (buai); consume'
        ("~": word with high melody, "^": falling and "_": rising.)

Tok Pisin expressions like `kaikai kaukau', `kaikai buai', `kaikai
moni' and `(dispela redio) kaikai planti bateri', which have
corresponding Dom expressions, are used by Dom speakers, but as far as
I remember, I never heard `kaikai wara'.

`dring' is used for `dring wara/bia' as well as `dring suga', which
seems to me quite different from the former, since the manner they
`dring suga' appears rather similar to the manner they `kaikai buai'.

Interestingly, I've heard `kaikai smok' uttered by Dom several times,
which were in most cases then corrected by the utterer, saying that it
was his mistake in Tok Pisin.

Dom has a different verb for `kaikaim' (as in `Dok kaikaim mi').

    ^kal- `to bite'

The use of the Tok Pisin word `kaikaim' by Dom speakers is considered
to follow the use of the Dom verb ^kal-, and possibly `kaikaim wara'
may not make sense to them, perhaps more weird than `kaikai wara'.

In most expressions ^kal- can be replaced without a big difference in
meaning with ~s- `to hit', which I think is the (semi-)hypernym of
^kal-.  Maybe, this relationship should not be applied to `kaikaim'
and `paitim' in Tok Pisin (even if spoken by Dom speakers).

Anyway, one point that intrigued me was that it was `kaikaim wara' and
not `kaikai wara' that Prof Aikhenvald found in a material.  I guess
in most varieties of Tok Pisin `kaikaim wara' is `biting water'.

Other ingestion-related words include:

    _ku- `put in the mouth' (putim long maus)
    _sikl- `chew, bite' (brukim long tit)
    ^pek ^er- `swallow' (daunim)

all of which are distinguished from ~ne- `eat' (kaikai) and ^kal-
`bite' (kaikaim).

Words for `to burn' are different in Dom.

    ~de- `to burn (intr)'
    ^gal- `to burn (tr)'

Another polysemous pattern Dom follows is `to hear, to feel, to think,
to know' which seems to be very common in the region.  

    ^pl- `to hear, to feel, to think, to know'
    _kan- `to see, to think (based on visual evidence), to have
        experience of'

`Harim smel' is more often used than `pilim smel' or `smelim smel' in
Dom speaker's Tok Pisin and actually `harim' is described as having
the meaning of `perceive, understand' in Mihalic's dictionary.

Another thing the list discussion reminds me of is Laycock (1986)
`Papuan Languages and the Possibility of Semantic Classification' PL
A-70, 1-10.

TIDA, Syuntaroo