Re: Malay for two: dua

On 19/01/2025 6:46 a.m., Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:

Today I have been thinking about my childhood in Singapore nearly 80 years ago. Something that has puzzled me over the years has been the Malay word for 2, dua, which looks remarkably like the Latin word for 2. I suppose that it's no more than a chance similarity, as it's hard to imagine that such a basic word should have been borrowed from a European language. But does anyone know?
 

Yes, it's a chance similarity. Cognates of dua are found all over Austronesian (Maori rua etc etc).
The chance similarities go a little further: 3, telu (not the basic word in Malay) and 4, empat.
dua, telu, empat could sound a bit like Latin du-, tri-, quat-. One of the great early Indo-Europeanists, Franz Bopp, was sufficiently impressed with this, and with words like kepala 'head' (which are actually borrowed from Sanskrit), that he proposed a relation between the two families. This was not generally accepted.