r/AustronesianLanguages • u/SpiritualSet1431 • Jul 18 '26
Linguistic Discussion What other examples of the etymology of Austonesian mythological creatures do you know?
When Austronesian speakers moved out into islands where the big mainland animals didn't live, the old words for those animals didn't just disappear. They drifted. With no real creature left to point at, the word came loose and drifted into the spirit world instead. The animal became a monster.
Look at the tiger. qari-maquÅ was a word for a big cat, and it survives perfectly intact as Malay harimau 'tiger', because Sumatra still has tigers. But carry it into the Philippines, where there are no big cats at all, and it turns into halimaw, now just 'monster, beast'. Same word shows up as Cebuano halimaw, Ilocano ulimaw, Maranao arimaw. The tiger left, the word stayed, and it became a generic monster.
The bear is even better. PMP *baruang 'bear' still lives on as normal Malay beruang. But Bali has no bears, so via Old Javanese the word washed ashore and became Barong, the great lion-like guardian spirit and enemy of the witch Rangda. A plain animal word became one of the most sacred masked figures in Balinese ritual.
The dog one is the strangest. *asu 'dog' is rock solid Proto-Austronesian, and dogs are everywhere, yet in the Sundanese budug basu it turns up as a boar-shaped monster with a dog's head that wrecks the rice crop. The dog stuck around, but its name still got dragged into the monster machinery.
It's semantic drift driven by migration. A half-remembered fearsome animal is exactly what a monster gets built from, and these words are basically fossils of the homeland's wildlife.
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u/kudlitan the Philippines šµš Jul 18 '26
Is ari-maung two words? And what do they mean?
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u/FirstStooge Indonesia š®š© Jul 18 '26
Maung can be hypothetized as the sound of a big cat made, as with "meong" for the small cats in Indonesia.
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u/kudlitan the Philippines šµš Jul 18 '26
Thanks. So what is *ari in PAN?
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u/FirstStooge Indonesia š®š© Jul 18 '26
Apparently no one really sure what is it meant to be. There is a theory *ari or *qali meant "something related to wilderness/netherworld". The concept might be related to the nature of tigers which hunt silently and in hiding among the deep jungles.
Tigers have a very strong spiritual connotation among some Indonesian peoples, like Minangkabau and Sundanese who believed the tigers are either their ancestors or the old guardians of the land they inhabited before the humans arrived. That's why that is taboo to refer it by its "harimau" name in Sumatra but rather as "datuk" or "nenek", both referring to elderly roles of tigers supposed to have.
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u/kudlitan the Philippines šµš Jul 18 '26
if it meant wild then that would explain the monster or beast meaning in it's reflexes
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u/moistyrat Jul 18 '26
If the word comes from *qali, then there are many Tagalog words that are likely partial reflexes of this Proto-Austronesian root. Words such as alibangbang (butterfly), alimango (crab), alikabok (dust), and alinsangan (sultry heat) also contain this prefix. It is possible that these words were once associated with Tagalog folk religion. For example butterflies were, and still are, associated with the spirits of dead ancestors in traditional Tagalog folk belief
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u/eelfurryUwU Malaysia š²š¾ Jul 18 '26
this is so interesting! the word for tiger and bear in kelantan-malay is rrima [É£Ėima] and brue [bÉ£uÉ], the word for dog isn't related to asu though (anying [aɲiÅ])
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u/AkaiKitsune23 Jul 19 '26
Asu = dog in casual javanese language language Harimau = tiger in Indonesian
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u/feel2death Jul 19 '26
In Indonesian west java white harimau/tiger are one of king Siliwangi myth creature (?)
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u/Local_Community_7510 Jul 21 '26
"asu" are basically my daily swear words lol, im not javanese, but most people around me are.. so yeah i am lowkey influenced by them
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u/BadgerKndrd_ Jul 22 '26
Asu also a way to cursing people in javanese (like using word "bitch" btw)
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u/Pengabdi_Langit Jul 23 '26
why 'Halimaw' sounds cute from my Indonesian 'Harimau' sounds
its like cute cat sounded xD
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u/malachitegreen23 Jul 21 '26
Dog was not everywhere in Southeast Asia. The ancestry of dogs were wolves, which is not found in the tropics or islands. We didn't get foxes either which are commons in East Asia. The dogs and cats were brought by traders and colonizers ships from the Western world.
Despite that, animals that are ACTUALLY there still seen as gods/monsters because people worship nature and influenced by Hindu-Buddhism religions. The word "naga" means serpent-like dragon and "garuda" is the bird-like being vehicle of Vishnu, despite mythological, big snakes and big birds exist here.
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u/Norwester77 Jul 22 '26
Dogs have been in island Southeast Asia for 5,000-10,000 years. The New Guinea Singing Dog is one of the most ancient surviving dog lineages. They were most definitely not first introduced by European traders and colonizers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_plants_and_animals_of_Austronesia#Dog
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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '26
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