Kaer Glyn,
First of all, I shall say I am very ashamed. I relied on my memory for
the word "eight" in MC, I said it was baet. In fact, I looked up in a
dictionary of MC readings, this syllable does not exist in MC. The good
reading for "eight" is /peat/ in MC, but the vowels -ea- and -ae- have
merged in all dialects so I got mistaken; I can sometimes get wrong
even simple words, well, I admit my MC is not perfect yet. 'eight' has
thus to reconstructed a/pret, it seems, although other options could be
possible also (a/prat or a/prot).
I would like to tell you something about tib. brgyad. the b- preinitial
in tib. has no voicing opposition, as the final consonants did not
have. Tibetan used the voiced symbol to represent it but it doesn't
mean it is a real voiced consonnant. In triple clusters, the preinitial
b- can appear only with -r-, -s- or -l-, that is, consonnants that have
phonologically sonorant properties (s often behaves as a sonorant, even
though it is acoustically an obstruent). You cannot have bgd- clusters.
It seems that br- was a unaccented presyllabe. Difficult to say, no
modern dialect I know still has triple initials, even ladakhi or balti.
Conclusion : it is not surprising that chinese pret was loaned as
brgyad in tibetan. The b- in tibetan was not voiced. Sorry for giving
you false data, I shall check my MC readings before telling you things.
> John dicet:
> >I too was under the impression that Austronesian, Mon Khymer and
> >possibly the Daic family show more connections with each other than
> >with Sino Tibetan.
Dai and Austroasiatic - that is normal. The majority of thai speakings
are ancient Austroasiatic speakers. Half of the population of thailand
spoke khmer four centuries ago. So genetics can demonstrate that
siamese and mon-khmer people are close, but it is an artefact.
>
> in contrast to the conservative MonKhmer. It happened in Uralic and I
don't
> recall any CVC words in AN... hmmm.
>
>
Well Glyn, read Blust 1982, 'austronesian root theory'. The basic
autronesian root was CVC in general...
Guillaume