Re: IE, Uralic, SinoTibetan and incompetent sources

>

Glen xiangsheng, qing bie2 yong4 "tong2zhi4" zhege ci2, bie2 wang4ji4
ta you gong1chan3dang de wei4dao4. Hao3 kong3bu4 !

> Starostin means well but I hardly qualify him with the ability to
> competently reconstruct proto-languages because he doesn't start

simple and

> lay out an observable pattern of some kind. Every language evolves

under a

> pattern. I find it odd that you would deny Uralic *ki and

IndoEuropean

> *kwei/*kwe and yet accept something stranger like Starostin's
> reconstructions and connections.

I am not accepting Starostins' comparisons, I am talking about his
reconstruction of archaic chinese, which is based on Jaxontov's ideas.
It is basically much the same as Baxter's and Zhengzhang Shangfang's,
one of the most brilliant chinese researcher. I am pleased to see you
don't accept them either. His attempt to reconstruct "sino-tibetan" (I
don't like this word anyway) lacked of rigour, to say the least.

>

Yes, from an IE spoken 3500 BCE in the Pontic-Caspian region as opposed

> however to the IE spoken by the eventual Anatolians which was earlier

but in

> the same area. It depends on how you see it. The IndoEuropeans didn't

just

> "split" and so the linguistic (as opposed to the geographical)

divisions

> could have stemmed much earlier even though the spread of the

language took

> a while.

Even before they split, there were surely already dialectal variation.

>
>
> And what's your point? Mandarin has wo3 with rising-falling tone,

related to

> Cantonese ngo with low-rising tone. The pronoun *nga "I" stands as

before

> with even more examples than this.

But wo3 comes from MC chinese ngaX, so Ac ngaj?. Some thai/kadai and
miaoyao languages loaned this very word, not MC nga, it's a different
word.

> I severely question your sources.

Read Baxter 1992, a Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, and Pulleyblank
1984 Middle Chinese Phonology. You can't do comparative linguistics in
Asia without this basic knwoledge that is accepted by any scholar in
the field.

>

> A book to not waste my time on. Look, you just live in your own

SinoTibetan

> world then and I'll do some real research for the both of us, okay? I

can't

> debate with someone who uses any crackpot source he can find and

claims it's

> correct in blunt opposition to mainstream linguistics. Byebye now.

"Mainstream linguistics"... Many people in China (like Zhengzhang of
Fudan daxue) work now like me.
It is difficult to explain the reason why there are so many loanwords
in TB. You need first to know thouroughly Baxter's work before I can
explain to you.
Basically, siamese also loaned numerals from chinese (and personnal
pronouns from khmer...), although it comes from an AN language.
Japanese and korean also loaned chinese numerals and some personnal
pronouns, like boku in Jp.

In fact, languages of Asia, because of their limited morphology, can
easily loan any word. Some miao yao languages loaned 90% of their basic
vocabulary from chinese, at different periods. But the mia-yao
languages that did not loan that much show that the vocabulariy to be
reconstructed is much more different from chinese.

Guillaume