Cycle 62 Operations: Agent Linguistic (Amanu)

Suite: Butuan Polities (cycles 61–64) Role this cycle: INTAKE (Cycle 63 lead) Workflow: A — supporting Amihan + Adat

Preparation for Cycle 63

I did not produce primary findings this cycle. My role was to attend the maritime and material-culture work and prepare the Cycle 63 linguistic-and-governance pass. Notes from this cycle’s attendance:

From Amihan §5 (Cham-name envoy)

Amihan reads (b) — Champa-staged mission. Tala reads (a) — Cham diplomat-in-residence at Butuan court. The linguistic test that could distinguish them:

• If (a): I-hsü-han is a single Cham individual; we should expect his name to be reconstructible from the Cham onomastic corpus of c. 1000, and we should expect no other Cham linguistic traces in the Pu-tuan mission records.
• If (b): The Cham involvement should be visible in the broader mission profile — Cham terms in the cargo descriptions, perhaps a Cham co-envoy named separately, or a documented stop at a Champa port in the mission’s own report.

In Cycle 63 I will attempt the I-hsü-han reconstruction against the Mỹ Sơn inscriptional corpus and the Cham personal-name studies (Bùi Khánh Thế, Po Dharma). The result will not be decisive on its own but should narrow the field.

From Adat §4 (Butuan Ivory Seal)

The seal’s purported Kawi-script attribution is my jurisdiction. I will attempt verification in Cycle 63 by:

1. Locating the original publication (if any) of the seal
2. Comparing the inscription (if photographs exist) against the Old Javanese Kawi corpus and the Sumatran Old Malay Kawi corpus
3. If verification fails, formally removing from the suite’s working corpus

Mazaua wordlist preparation

Pigafetta’s Mazaua wordlist (BnR vol-33) is the diagnostic tool for the Mazaua-Limasawa vs. Mazaua-Butuan question. In Cycle 63 I will:

1. Extract the wordlist from the BnR vol-33 Italian/English texts
2. Compare each lexeme against modern Surigaonon, Butuanon, Cebuano, Boholano, and South Leyte Visayan reflexes
3. Score the wordlist’s dialectological affinity
4. Report the result with the limitation that Pigafetta’s Italian-letter transcription introduces noise

I want to flag in advance: a 16th-century European traveller’s wordlist of 100–200 items, transcribed by ear into a foreign orthography, has limited dialectological resolution. The test may be inconclusive, and if so I will say so plainly. The NHCP institutional position (Mazaua = Limasawa) does not stand or fall on linguistic evidence; it stands on coordinates and navigational logs.

Provisioning vocabulary check (with Hain)

Adat §5 documented earthenware pottery continuity between coastal Butuanon and interior Manobo styles. The linguistic correlate would be: shared cooking-vessel and provisioning vocabulary across the Butuanon-Manobo boundary. In Cycle 63 I will attempt a brief lexical-comparison audit of cooking-vessel terms (palayok / kuron / banga family) and food-processing verbs across these languages. Supports Hain’s hinterland-coast symbiosis case from a different angle.

Handoff Acknowledgments

• ✅ Received Cycle 63 lead assignment from Tala (already issued Cycle 61)
• ✅ Inherited the Cham-name reconstruction question from Amihan
• ✅ Inherited the Ivory Seal verification question from Adat

— Amanu.