# Alat. Indigenous or loan?



## sotos

Is the word _alat_ (salty) a loan from european languages (AGreek αλας, New Gr. αλάτι, En salt etc) via Spanish?
Thanks for the answers.


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## rbrunner

Funny that just today I was searching for a Tagalog etymology dictionary and found nothing online and only a probably impossible-to-get book series from 1979 onwards...

But allow me to make some educated guesses: The letter "s" at the start of a word is no problem at all for speakers of Tagalog. Therefore the fact that the word is _alat_ i.e. lacks an "s" at the start of the word speaks against a loan, in my opinion.

Tagalog and other Philippine languages like Cebuano borrowed a lot of Spanish words. The could have easily borrowed the full _salado_ from Spanish, including the ending "o". I see the missing "o" at the end of _alat_ as another argument against loaning.

From looking at Tagalog and Cebuano I got the impression that Cebuano borrowed (or at least kept in use) more words from Spanish than Tagalog. But there is no word _alat_ or similar meaning "salty" in Cebuano. For me just another (albeit admittedly weak) argument against loaning.

The Cebuano word is _parat_. I don't know enough about sound shifts in Austronesian languages to confirm or deny a relationship of these two words, but I have a gut feeling that this could work out. If yes, Spanish would probably be out of the way for good.


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## sotos

rbrunner said:


> The letter "s" at the start of a word is no problem at all for speakers of Tagalog. Therefore the fact that the word is _alat_ i.e. lacks an "s" at the start of the word speaks against a loan, in my opinion.



I suppose you mean the opposite: The possibility of a loan cannot be excluded.
Interestingly, in new Greek the initial aspiration of _alas_ (gen. _alatos_) has also been lost and is _alati_.
If it is not a spanish loan, then we have either an accidental similarity or a loan from IE through a lost connection.


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## rbrunner

sotos said:


> I suppose you mean the opposite: The possibility of a loan cannot be excluded.



What I meant with this argument is this: If the Filipinos hear Spanish people say _salado_, and they feel like borrowing the word, they borrow it with the "s", because such a sound at word start is natural for them and known from many other words. I see no reason to drop the "s" later on, some time after borrowing, either. Same with the ending "o": Known from many other Spanish words, no problem to borrow at all.

So, if a word that we want to check as a possible loan lacks both the starting "s" and the ending "o" from Spanish _salado_, that's two arguments against loaning for me.

Examples of Spanish words that are in use in this way include _sabado_ and _santo_.

But I admit, lacking hard facts, I am not including or excluding anything, just arguing for a very low probability that the word is a loan from Spanish.


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