The Peoples of the Bow: The Ubiquitous Word for "Bow"

Premise:

The phonemes /p/, /b/, /v/, and /f/ are all related as labial consonants (bilabial plosive voiced and voiceless, labiodental fricative voiced and voiceless). Drift / shift between dialects usually occurs there.

Hypothesis:

The harnessing of spring tension in the form of spring traps and archery is a technology of such ancient origin the language for it is found across more than half the globe, from Mesopotamia to Asia, and from Asia to Island Southeast Asia and beyond to the Eastern Pacific Oceanic island cultures.

Comparisons:

Sumerian: PANA¹ (𒉼) “bow” (also BAN, BANA, PAN)

Akkadian: qaštu [PANA²] (𒉼) “bow” (also BAN, BANA, PAN) Sanskrit: BĀṆGA³ (बाण) is “arrow”, “reed shaft” Malay: PANAH⁴ “bow (for shooting arrows)”, "an arrow", "to shoot an arrow"

Binisaya: BANA⁵: "husband"

Binisaya: PANA⁶: "arrow", "pointer", "crazed"

Cebuano BANA⁷: "husband", "man", "spouse"; BANÁ "get, take for a husband"

Cebuano PANA⁸: "archery", "arrow", "bow", "shaft", "spear"; PANÀ "arrow or spear

projected"; "shoot an arrow or spear"; "make into an arrow or spear"

Hiligaynon: BÁNA⁹ "husband", "a married man whose wife is alive"; "to take a

husband"; "to join a man in wedlock"

Hiligaynon: PAN¹⁰ "bow"; "bow and arrow"; "arrow"; "dart"

Ilocano: PANA¹¹ "dart", "shaft"; BAI TI PANA¹² "bow"

Tagalog: BANA¹³ "husband"; "marsh"; "lowland covered with water"

Tagalog: PANA¹⁴ "bow" Sāmoan: FAGA¹⁵ “a bay"

Sāmoan: FANA¹⁶ "to shoot”; "to syringe"; FAGĀ "a mast"

Tongan: FANGA¹⁷ "a small or private beach"; "to keep and breed"; "to set (a trap)";

"temple(s)"; "sides(s) of the head" Tongan: FANA¹⁸ “to shoot” Hawaiian: HANA¹⁹ "bay"

Hawaiian: PANA²⁰ “bow and arrow”

Māori: WHANA²¹ "to recoil, to spring back as a bow"; "to thrust or drive away"; "to

expel"; "a spring made of a bent stick set in a trap"; "to kick"; "to revolt"; "to

rebel"

Māori: WHANGA²² "to wait"; "to lie in wait for"; "to repeat after another"; "to measure

with the extended arms"; "a bay"; "any place on one side"

Different example—

Take the word for “land” within the Austronesian/Polynesian language family alone:

Cebuano: BANWA²³ ("fatherland")

Hiligaynon: BÁNWA²⁴ ("Town, city, municipality, state, common-wealth, public weal;

citizens, electors, inhabitants; to become a town")

Ilocano: BANUAR²⁵

Tagalog: BANWA²⁶ ("state")

Binisaya: BANWA²⁷ (“land, people, country”) Papua New Guinea²⁸: HANUA (“village”, “big village”) Fijian: VANUA²⁹ (“land, people and custom") Vanuatu (Mele): FENUA³⁰ (“Country", "land", "(large) island", "home”) Tongan: FONUA³¹ (“Land”, “Country”, “territory”, “place”; "afterbirth", "placenta") Sāmoan: FANUA³² (“land”, “placenta”, “fastening of the bonito fishhook”—refer to

Māui land-puller legends) Hawaii: HONUA³³ (“Land”, “Country”) Māori: WHENUA³⁴, ³⁵ (“The Earth", "the whole Earth", "a country", "a district", "land”)

And...

Malay: NUSA⁴ (“motherland, fatherland, island - only in island-names, not in speaking

of an island”)

Malay "NUSA⁴" is an interesting deviation from the FA- / FE- / HO- / VA- / WHE- variants. It appears that the consonant /s/ was absorbed into the preceding vowel /u/ and following vowel /a/. Furthermore, the lack of the prefixed morphemes suggests to me that the concept of TE PĪ³⁷ might be at work in the evolution of the names for "motherland", which is a subject matter of its own. Simply put, though, TE PĪ³⁷ is the Polynesian linguistic mechanism by which names of gods and sacred or deified chiefs are skirted around in conversation. I will expand on this subject in a separate post and link it here in a future update to this blog entry. The effect of this linguistic mechanism is the obfuscation of etymologies to those unaware of TE PĪ³⁷, the creation of linguistic markers that reveal which island group a person comes from, and the generation of new branches in word development. In short, it creates "confusion of languages" and prevents native speakers from "taking the names of their gods in vain". This is evident, for example, in the chiefly register of Tahitian with the word for "star" FETŪ³⁸. The common use word is FETIA³⁸ wherein TŪ³⁹ "to rise" is substituted with TIA⁴⁰ "to arise" thereby maneuvering obliquely around the profaning of the name of the war god TŪ⁴⁴ ubiquitously revered throughout the Pacific under names like TŪ-MATAUENGA⁴⁴ (constructed on Māori TŪ⁴¹), and KŪ-KĀ'ILI-MOKU⁴² the "fisher of islands", and "island snatcher".

Another example of FANA¹⁶ in use is within the Polynesian word FANAU⁴⁵ / WHANAU⁴⁶, the word for “childbirth”. It is actually a metaphor derived from the words for “bow” and “arrow”.

FANA¹⁶ (“bow, to shoot”) U⁴⁷ (“a reed, an arrow”)

Compare with Māori HU⁴⁸ ("mud", "swamp", "a promontory"; )

“Childbirth” = “to shoot arrows” / "to fire a bow"

Since the bow is one of humanity’s oldest technologies, it makes sense that the word would endure and follow mankind. Wherever we migrated regardless of how many tribes and nations our species subdivided into, the bow came with us until the bow became obsolete or regarded as a coward's weapon. We see this happen as well with many other words for early human technologies from animal husbandry to fire, stone, water, wind, and wood, for family relationships, life and death, dawn and dusk, and especially (we must never forget) the gods.

Our ancestors must have drawn a connection between the idea of impregnating a bow with tension and potential kinetic energy in order to launch arrows like so many children, perhaps on ships, out of bays. In order to achieve escape velocity from islands, the seaman (pardon the pun) had to be accomplished enough and able enough of body in order to navigate through and beyond reefs while negotiating the push/pull dynamic of offshore and onshore breezes. This would require the best sailors. The island (fanua / fonua / honua / whenua) wields its marshy, reed-choked, shallow bay (faga / fanga / hana / hanga) like a bow (ban / bana / fan / fana / fanau / pan / pana), the boat (wa'a / waka / va'a / vaka) and its crew, often of near kinsmen (fanau / whanau), becomes the arrowhead and shaft (ban / bana / pan / pana, etc.)

With this powerful metaphor in mind, we must re-evaluate the meaning of mythologies, especially those of Eurasia and the Ancient Near East, which feature archer gods and demigods, heroes and villains. Was it truly arrows that the sun gods and moon goddesses fire arrows from? When Adonis / Cupid fired his arrows of love, was it a metaphor for something else? Missionary expeditions? Military expeditions? Colonial expeditions?

Notes on bow technology:

Hebrew:

Qašat (קשת)

Akkadian:

qaštu [GIŠ.PAN / 𒄑𒉼]

Proto-Semitic : *qawš

Arabic : qaws قَوْس "bow"

Syriac : qeštā ܩܶܫܬ݁ܳܐ "bow"

Ugaritic : qšt [𐎖𐎌𐎚] “archer”, “bow”, “bowman”

Although archery probably dates back to the Stone Age – around 20,000BC – the earliest people known to have regularly used bows and arrows were the Ancient Egyptians, who adopted archery around 3,000BC for hunting and warfare. In China, the earliest evidence of archery dates to the Shang Dynasty – 1766-1027BC.

So we should look to Africa and Egypt for a source of the word for “bow”.

Middle Egyptian:

𓈎𓄿𓋴𓍢𓂡 [qAs] string (bow), bind (victim), tie (rope-ladder) {Gardiner: N29 G1 S29 V1 D40}

𓈎𓋴𓍢𓂡 [qAs] string (bow), bind (victim), tie (rope- ladder) {Gardiner: N29 S29 V1 D40}

𓄝𓏏𓏲𓌟 [stw] arrow, dart {F29 X1 Z7 T19}

𓈎𓄿𓋴𓍢𓂡 𓄝𓏏𓏲𓌟 / 𓈎𓋴𓍢𓂡 𓄝𓏏𓏲𓌟

[qAS-stw] “bow (and) arrow” (qaštu)

Akkadian applied the African word using the Sumerian cuneiform. This is an orthographic loan rather than a calque or phonological loan.

However, that said, one way of writing qaštu (𒄑𒊺𒉪) uses Sumerian:

GIŠ (𒄑) “wooden object”

ŠE (𒊺) “reeds” (from cluster of 12x U written 𒌋)

NIR (𒉪) maybe “best of the best” or “superior” (from NUN 𒉣 over NUN 𒉣)

Perhaps the "superior reeds" alludes to the flight of arrow shafts.

References:

1. The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project, 2017-

http://oracc.iaas.upenn.edu/epsd2/cbd/sux/o0036669.html

2. The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project, 2017-

3. WisdomLib - BAṆGA (बाण)

4. SEAlang Library Malay Dictionary Corpus

5. Binisaya: BANA

6. Binisaya: PANA

7. Cebuano Dictionary: BANA

8. Cebuano Dictionary: PANA

9. Hiligaynon Dictionary: BÁNA

10. Hiligaynon Dictionary: PANÂ

11. Ilocano Dictionary: PANA

12. Ilocano Dictionary: BAI TI PANA

13. Tagalog Dictionary: BANA

14. Tagalog Dictionary: PANA

15. Pratt, George and Whitmee, Samuel James. A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language. Trübner & Company, 1878. (pg. 188)

16. Pratt, George and Whitmee, Samuel James. A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language. Trübner & Company, 1878. (pg. 190)

17. Tongan dictionary : Tongan-English and English-Tongan : Churchward, C. Maxwell (Clerk Maxwell) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (p. 140)

18. Tongan dictionary : Tongan-English and English-Tongan : Churchward, C. Maxwell (Clerk Maxwell) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

19. Ulukau - Hawaiian Dictionaries: Kepano's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary for browsers at http://www.wehewehe.org/ (HANA)

20. Ulukau - Hawaiian Dictionaries: Kepano's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary for browsers at http://www.wehewehe.org/ (PANA)

21. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 608)

22. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 610)

23. Cebuano Dictionary: BANWA

24. Hiligaynon Dictionary: BANWA

25. Ilocano Dictionary: BANUAR

26. Tagalog Dictionary: BANWA

27. Binisaya: BANWA

28. Papua New Guinea:

29. Gatty, Ronald. Fijian-English Dictionary. Cornell University Library. 2009. (p. 292)

30. Clark, Ross. A Dictionary of the Mele Language (Atara Imere),Vanuatu. Pacific Linguistics. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. The Australian National University, 1998. (p. 8)

31. Tongan dictionary : Tongan-English and English-Tongan : Churchward, C. Maxwell (Clerk Maxwell) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (p. 196)

32. Pratt, George and Whitmee, Samuel James. A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language. Trübner & Company, 1878. (pg. 191)

33. Ulukau - Hawaiian Dictionaries: Kepano's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary for browsers at http://www.wehewehe.org/ (HONUA)

34. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 620)

35. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 621)

36. SEAlang LibraryMalay DictionaryCorpus

37. Davies, Herbert John. A Tahitian and English dictionary. London Missionary Society, 1851. (p. 196)

38. Davies, Herbert John. A Tahitian and English dictionary. London Missionary Society, 1851. (p. 86)

39. Davies, Herbert John. A Tahitian and English dictionary. London Missionary Society, 1851. (p. 283)

40. Davies, Herbert John. A Tahitian and English dictionary. London Missionary Society, 1851. (p. 265)

41. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 588)

42. Ulukau - Hawaiian Dictionaries: Kepano's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary for browsers at http://www.wehewehe.org/ (KŪ-KĀ'ILI-MOKU)

43. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 588)

44. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 590)

45. Pratt, George and Whitmee, Samuel James. A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language. Trübner & Company, 1878. (pg. 190)

46. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 609)

47. Pratt, George and Whitmee, Samuel James. A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language. Trübner & Company, 1878. (pg. 140-141)

48. Tregear, Edward. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Lyon and Blair, 1891 (p. 87)