Sveikas,
Then you are truly a "communist"... many people in this forum come from
former soviet union or from socialist countries, they might dislike
communism. Or maybe you are from the "gauche caviar" as we say in
french.
Can you please talk in Swahili, the pinyin notation is giving
> me a headache and I find myself understanding you all too well. :P
I don't know swahili, but I can write in BIG-5 encoding. If you have a
computer at home, it should'nt be difficult to read chinese caracters
on the internet, you just need to install one of microsoft's (free)
multilingual packages.
> Bizarre. Well, if these reconstructions are "based" on Jaxontov's
ideas and
> Starostin is reconstructing them, then I guess they qualify as
"Starostin's
> comparisons" and automatically one should be weary of the research
he's put
Chinese reconstruction is NOT based on the comparative method. That's
the point. It's 90% internal reconstruction. Modern chinese dialects
are used, but in genral it suffices to know Middle Chinese, which is
not a reconstruction, but a transcription of Sui-Tang rime tables. Wer
know with great precision the phonological system of the chinese of
that period, as precisely as if it were written with an orthography. We
know certainly better MC than, say, sogdian or epigraphic south semitic.
MC is ancetor to almost all modern dialects, although there are 5%
irrégular word (roughly) in mandarin. Only Min dialects and Jin
dialects (of shan1xi) maintain a lot of features that are more archaic
than MC.
Chinese reconstruction is based on :
1 / MC
2 / rimes of the Shijing, bronze inscription etc...
3 / phonetic series
(the phonetic part of the character. For example, lü4 et shuai4 are
written the same, strange isn't it ? in MC they were lwit and srwit and
in AC b/rut and b/s-rut)
4 / word families
5 / ancient loanwords
6 / archaic dialectal features.
So only one sixth of the reconstruction uses the comparative method.
That's were, by the way, Starostin and Baxter's reconstruction differ.
Starostin reconstructs four series of stops, and he reconstructs the
unvoiced nasals in the bad place, where a word with a sonorant initial
comes up with a Yin tone in Min.
In fact, Min evidence is not really reliable for this. Proto-Min is
still "in construction".
> Then what does Chinese belong to? What do you call this "family" then
if TB
> is Austronesian?? I would suggest that you bie2 yong4 the term
> "Sino-Tibetan" and bie2 confusing cao4-de dou1 ren2 on this list with
> SinoTibetan reconstructions that Xi1zan4yu doesn't directly derive
cong2,
> hao3 ma? :P Tuk sa myket, watashi no Französisch-Kinesisch peng2you.
A name has been suggested by Stanley Starosta of Hawaii university :
SinoTibetoAustronesiaN = STAN. I personnally prefer to talk about
chinese, TB, AN, because not much can yet be said about our putative
proto-language. But notice not much can be said for certain either of
ST : a causative prefix, a few basic items (to give, to go, body parts,
etc...). Chinese and AN seem to share an -r- infix marking 'repetition,
intensification'. Anyway, even TB is not yet reconstructed. Even
proto-tibetan is not reconstructed !!! The work by research in TB
linguistics has not been as succesful as ANists, because TB is much
harder to reconstruct. AN spread on islands, so islanders were isolated
from each others... that makes the establishing of phonetic laws rather
easy. In TB, languages intertwine, borrow to each other (eg, rgyarong,
a language of Sichuan, borrowed more than a third of its vocabulary
from tibetan).
>
> Lei bu2 hui4 gagner. Ich weiss troppo di spräche humaines pour
accepter
> sinun idée comme wahr. Capiche?
Très bien. Do you know AN ? That would be a good start to criticize our
theory. Dempwolff's reconstruction should be available to you.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the task is yet to come, because AN
languages of Taiwan have not yet been thoroughly investigated from a
comparativist's point of view. Intéressé ?
>
> >"Mainstream linguistics"... Many people in China (like Zhengzhang of
> >Fudan daxue) work now like me.
>
I have also not seen any books that
> seriously relate Tibetan to Austonesian in my university. The books
there
Of course, it is too new. In ten years, when our work has progressed
and we find cognate of AN and TB, I hope we will receive a wider
acceptation. Who wrote the article in the Brittanica ?
Zhengzhang had personnal problems with Wang Li, the guru of linguistics
in China until twenty years ago. That's why he his research had not the
wide audience they deserved.
> consistently link Chinese and Tibetan together with long lists of
examples
> to show for it and vraisemblable reconstructions that don't use
paranthetic
> phonemes and the like to prove an impossible case.
I'm not using "parenthetic phonemes". (r) means that we can't prove
that an -r- did not exist at that place. It is Baxter's notation.
>
> Japanese did loan Chinese numerals, yes, but boku? The male first
person
> informal pronoun? I recall that this was derived from an actual noun
like
> "servant". How does it derive from AN? Is the word "servant"
borrowed? What
> AN term? I don't recall a first person in AN of that form.
>
Boku is simply a late chinese word, MC buwk. Anyway, it is often
written with this very character.
It has no relationship with AN. In paiwan, you have the following set
of pronouns :
1sg ku-
2sg su-
1pl ex. nia-
1pl ic. tja-
2 nu-
Nobody know yet precisely how the proto-AN pronoun system looked like,
but it was very likely like this.
Anyway, we are going a bit too far away from IE, aren't we ?
Guillaume