[tied] Re: The personal pronouns of PIE (and other families) are lo

This post is best read in UTF-8 (I hope), but you won't miss much if
you leave it as Latin-1, and nothing if you don't read Chinese or Thai.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

> From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>

> In languages with large sets of personal pronouns, foreign loans are
> quite easy. For example, Thai has a second person familiar masculine
> /lM:_H/ (M = high back unrounded vowel, _H = high tone) from Chinese.
>
> ***
> Patrick:
>
> A scan of Mathews' revealed no obvious source to me in Chinese for

such a

> 'loan'.
>
> What is the actual form of the Chinese word believed to be the

source of

> /lM:_H/?
>
> Was there some reason you neglected to mention it?

My source (Ratchabandit) simply gives the transliteration equivalent
to [lM:_F] (i.e. ลื่อ) and gave it as 'Chinese'. I would expect the
origin to be the Teochew dialect of Minnan, but the best match I can
find is [le:_F] (yin shang tone), though the Taiwanese form is
[li:_F]. Thus, it's just the standard ä½  (Unicode U+4F60), as in
Mandarin.

I shall investigate further, as the description I could find implies
that Teochew has no back unrounded vowels.

> English 'I' and 'you' are also reported to be used, but they haven't
> made their way into the (Thai) Royal Institute Dictionary. The usual
> polite Thai second person pronoun, /khun_M/ (_M = mid tone), derives
> from Sankrit or Pali _guNa_ 'thread; quality' (as in the Sanskrit
> vowel grade).

> Patrick:
>
> /khun_M/ from _guNa_? What an odd semantic development!

I must admit the syntax is odd. The semantic connection is the
meaning 'merit'. /khun_M/ is now the spoken formal prefix before the
names of people without titles, and a development from there to the
polite 2nd/3rd person pronoun quite natural.

> Also, I am under the impression that Thai has no formal category
> corresponding to PIE personal pronouns. Is that incorrect?

Determining the parts of speech of Thai is reported to be research in
progress!

However, as a noun /khun_M/ does not refer to people, but has meanings
associated with 'quality' and 'worth'.

Richard.