Austronesian etymology and loanwords

Dravanvaru · December 1, 2025, 7:07pm

hansioux:

hansioux:

I was looking up native words for the Formosan leopard cat (also called mountain cats or 石虎). The Saisiyat calls them balbalan. What’s interesting is the Truku word for these rare felines is Kramu.

I think it’s a cognate for the Malay word for Malaysian tigers, harimau.

Kramu → harimau
K > ha’ ra → ri mu → mau

Origin of Taiwanese place names

The qali- initial is reserved for things that are holy, or connected to the spiritual world. The examples are rainbow *qali-waRwaR, butterfly *qali-baŋbaŋ, and whirlwind *qali-puspus. This “prefix for words with a sensitive reference to the spirit world” often evolves into kali- or ali-.

So I just saw somewhere that claimed harimau came from *qari-maquŋ, which came from wiktionary. Not sure if the *qari- prefix is the same as *qali-, also don’t know hwere the maquŋ came from.

The word for Formosan clouded leopard is *lukeNaw and remains so in most Formosan language.

So I followed your lead and looked up harimau on wiktionary. Then followed the link to *qari-maquŋ. The data source was listed so I followed that link and found a very nice resource. ACD combined with openstreetmap to show cognate sets on a map. You probably already know of it, but I thought I’d share it here because it really tied everything together for me visually.

Here’s a screenshot:

The map for *pitu₁ (seven, or 5+2) is really cool (below is just a screenshot, hover over the dots on the actual map and it shows the language/dialect and the cognate word):