Re: A SinoTibetan-Vasconic Comparison: A very, very, very, very len

Kaer Glyn,

> Alright, I think what you're really asking is: "How can a

DeneCaucasian *mr-

> become both SinoTibetan *br- AND *mr-?" Is that right? The difference
> between the Dene-Caucasian words *mnrit "eight" and *m-hutL "eye"

should be

> clear by how I write them - One has a prefix and the other doesn't.

Another

> difference between the two (and this is hard to display in email

form) is

> that the *m- prefix is syllabic and not part of the next syllable.

The term

> *m-hutL therefore is two syllables with a root *-hutL. The term

*mnrit has

> non-syllabic *m-, has no affix and is complete in itself as a full

word.

>
> So... the forms with *mr- in SinoTibetan lgs are ancient, caused by
> appending the word class prefix *m- (a/mrangs, Burmese mrang, etc).

Now, AC

> brat might have been viewed by its speakers as b-rat with a newly

analysed

> prefix b- but the original situation is not the case and the change

of *mVr-

> to *br- is more ancient than SinoTibetan itself.
>

Still not convinced : chinese also had prefixes : some were even iambic
presyllabes, other were tighly attached to the root. And you had also
(in my personnal opinion, that is not shared by Sagart 1999) complex
initial clusters such as br- in brat.
You still didn't answer my question about the origin of x- in chinese.
a cluster m+h- in "DC" should give hm- in AC, should'it ?

> So accepting an AN *matsa for granted, I also have been thinking

about the

> "eye" correspondance between DC and the Asian languages.
> It is possible that the Austric or AA form or what-ever-you-will, is

in fact

> *m-at instead of *m-ata, from the earlier *m-hutL. Thus Austronesian

*matsa

> and KamThai *taa added a syllable in order to fight a monosyllabic

CVC word

> in contrast to the conservative MonKhmer. It happened in Uralic and I

don't

> recall any CVC words in AN... hmmm.
>
> This interpretation would mean that KamThai (-Dai, Dadic, whatever)

is more

> closely related to AN (because of its preservation of a second

syllable that

> might not have existed previous) followed by a more remote

relationship with

> MonKhmer, which would then have preserved the original syllable

structure

> with DC. It may also explain the AN *-ts- (from *-t). The

interpretation

> would also mean that any further correspondances I supply must show a

same

> addition of final vowel due to this syllabic constraint. More fast

food for

> thought.

Anyway I tell you that Dong-tai (the chinese expression that I prefer
personnally to Tai-Kadai; Kam-Dai is just a subbranch of Dong-tai) is a
piginized offshoot of a subbranch of AN. It is not a language family on
its own. It loaned a lot from Austroasiatic : the vocabulary for the
rice and the agriculture. From chinese, it loaned all the technical,
economical and cultural vocabulary. Some of its basic vocabulary comes
from an unknown substrate and there is also a layer of recent indic /
khmer loanwords in standard siamese.
A genetic relationship of AN to AA or Chinese to AA needs be
investigated. I found myself three AA words that look like chinese
(apart from those described in Mei tsulin and Jerry Norman 1976), but I
attribute it to coincidence or loans :
elephant MC zjangX (to be reconstructed maybe b/s-lang? ou b/s-mang or
b/s-dang- difficult to say) AA, eg : Khmer chang (I think this one is
loaned into chinese. So the best reconstruction is s-dang maybe / this
is difficult to ascertain).
die : AC tsyet < b/tet , AA : vietnamese chê/t
earth, AC dijH < a/lejs or a/lijs : this word is a mystery, totally
irregular in MC, but from the phonetic series, we can conclude that he
was a lateral word. Its vocalism is unique, but it is a very ancient
word. The AA word (eg Khmer di "earth" has no lateral, so it should be
a coincidence).

These words are well attested throughout AA.

Guillaume