Cher Guillaume,
>Still not convinced : chinese also had prefixes : some were even >iambic
>presyllabes, other were tighly attached to the root.
First, we both acknowledge the strong force of surrounding areal influence
or borrowing with AN, MonKhmer lgs, etc. These iambic presyllables _must_ be
either internal innovations or borrowings from surrounding languages. I can
say with certainty that this feature is not ancient. The very origin of the
monosyllabicity we see in ST and eventually in lgs like Cantonese is based
on the fact that these kinds of extraneous syllables were severely and
systematically reduced. Other "more tightly" packed prefixes are probably
inherited in part either from earlier prefixing or from whole words that had
been smashed into the SinoTibetan syllable compactor machine.
It would help if examples were given so that I know what I'm fighting
against though :) Maybe I'm missing something.
>And you had also (in my personnal opinion, that is not shared by >Sagart
>1999) complex initial clusters such as br- in brat.
I fully explained "brat" already as syllabic contraction of an affixless
word and have also given an example of the evolution of a word with prefix
*m-. Your only contention is that of iambic presyllables which I can't help
you with being that this is not relevant to Dene-Caucasian studies but a
matter internal to Chinese or SinoTibetan itself.
I'm also aware of the lack of voicing of stops in SinoTibetan, your mistake
is acknowledged but does not hinder the logic of the comparison.
>You still didn't answer my question about the origin of x- in >chinese.
Ah, I was confused about the vagueness of your questions. You mean "Explain
the _general_ origin of the phoneme /x/ in AC"? If there is an opposition
between /h/ and /x/ then I can't with certainty until I find correspondances
that reveal these origins. I can only supply lists of correspondances or
grammatical comparisons and work from there. I will suggest though that just
because the *-h- in DC *m-hutL "eye" would seem to become AC -r- (and thus
suggest that the ST *r was at one time uvular) it doesn't mean that DC *h
ALWAYS becomes AC r. Certainly DC *h would account for at least one type of
AC laryngeal as well as some instances of AC -r- from voicing of *h in
consonant clusters.
But then, why should phonology be the be-all-and-end-all to accepting the DC
hypothesis or AC's membership to it, just because I can't explain every
detail about the origins of the phonological system? This is the last thing
to worry about. The phonological system is the last thing used to connect
one language with another, n'est pas? It's the worst way to prove or deny
linguistic relationship.
There still remains good grammatical correspondances and terms relating to
body parts that give a strong case. BTW, *m-hutL isn't the only example.
There may also be a connection between *m-lir "ear" (Basque belarri, NEC *Li
(I recall Chechen lerg), Hurrian lele, etc) and a SinoTibetan reconstruction
I have listed in my notes *g-Na which may contain a different prefix (the N
means an unascertainable nasal phoneme). You may have a different view in
light of your knowledge of AC. I would be interested in your take on this
etyma. If the forms are truely connected I would expect instead to see **mla
or **nla in SinoTibetan unless maybe *-r actually did survive in some form
which would give me much titulation.
>[...] a cluster m+h- in "DC" should give hm- in AC, should'it ?
I don't recall saying that, do you? Who told you this? Some other DCist
perhaps? Give your examples of hm-. I have a SinoTibetan *r-hming "name"
listed in my notes and the lack of voicing in these cases might not be
original but perhaps linked to the phonemes' exposure to the neighbouring
"prefixes" (in other words, being medial and part of a consonant cluster).
Is there a case of a /hm-/ prefix in AC? Or /hn-/? Does this phoneme occur
in absolute initial position anywhere?
>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.
An acceptable hypothesis from what I've deduced from these word
correspondances so far.
>Some of its basic vocabulary comes from an unknown substrate and >there is
>also a layer of recent indic khmer loanwords in standard >siamese.
Erh, maybe that's just Dong-Tai itself then? Especially if it constitutes
the _basic_ vocabulary. Taking away loanwords in any language will leave you
with the pure (so to speak) language itself void of any present influences
:)
>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).
Well, that example bites but certainly I welcome such an investigation.
>die : AC tsyet < b/tet , AA : vietnamese ch�/t
Hey, I just went by that word in a Vietnamese dictionary! This one looks
like borrowing too.
>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.
Yes, I have this listed under an ST form *ng-lei in my notes. It's a mystery
to me too though. If *ng- is unmotivated, it's important that the original
initials are known in order to correctly recover the origins of the word. As
in the cases of AC /brat/ "eight" (*mnrit) and AC /mriwk/ "eye" (*m-hutL)
would show, only the last syllable of a polysyllabic word remains unscathed.
Thus, /lejs/, if it is DC at all, may only represent the final syllable of
the original term.
Why must the word start with d-? Is this /dijH/ attested?
Guillaume counters, to my thoughts on *matsa "eye" and its syllabics:
>Well Glyn, read Blust 1982, 'austronesian root theory'. The basic
>autronesian root was CVC in general...
I can't recall exactly how I stated this but I wanted to make clear that I
was speaking of _full_ words in AN, not parts or roots of words. I know that
CV(C) is a normal syllable structure in AN but are there monosyllabic words,
considered _complete_ in themselves, in AN? I recall Dempwolff's *enem
"six", *mata "eye" and *panDu "coconut" listed in the Enc.Britt. and none of
them consist of less than two syllables. Thus my explanation of *matsa
stands unless this "Austronesian Root Theory" you're telling me about is
really the "Austronesian Complete Word Theory" and just badly named. :)
And finally:
>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.
Erh, I have a problem understanding how this /brat/ can get loaned into
Tibetan as /brgyad/ because then we would have to explain the nasty, ol' -g-
phoneme. Ooh, and actually, it's kinda hard to explain that phoneme anyway
unless you cave in and accept that the Chinese r was uvular at one time
(whether from SinoTibetan's uvular *r or some other more fanciful
construct). Thus SinoTibetan *bryat (with voiceless *b :P) becomes Tibetan
brgyad with an extra -g- from the uvular *r. In phonetic terms it would look
like */pRjat/ > */pRgjat/ - Quite natural. A borrowing explanation is
unnecessary.
- gLeN
PS: John, stop with the genetics! It doesn't work with AustroAsiatic
linguistics and it doesn't work with Nostratic/Dene-Caucasian
linguistics... or any linguistics for that matter. Please for the
love of God (or the entity of your choice), get out some
dictionaries or linguistics books and start supporting your
theories with linguistic-related evidence. ARghHh...
______________________________________________________