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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
wrote:

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.

> --- 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.

I've just got confirmation from a Thai source that in the Teochew of
Thailand it is pronounced [lM:_F].

Richard.