Re: [tied] West bird

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

>
> On 2006-01-31 14:16, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >>Of course a loan from OC to
> >>_PIE_ can be ruled out for chronological reasons (as opposed to,
> >
> > say, a
> >
> >>loan from some eastern IE dialect into OC),
> >
> >
> > Please elucidate.
>
> The term Old (or Archaic) Chinese as used by Pulleyblank, Baxter

and

> many other authors refers to Chinese as spoken from the end of the
> second millennium to the third century BC, i.e., roughly

contemporaneous

> with the Zhou Dynasty. OC phonological reconstructions are

inherently

> tentative and controversial, and vary considerably from author to
> author, since they are based mostly on risky extrapolations from

Late

> Middle Chinese, patched up with whatever can be inferred from

sources

> such as the rhymes in the Book of Odes (Shijing). Of course if

anything

> was borrowed into PIE (or pre-PIE) from some linguistic ancestor

of

> Chinese, that ancestor was not OC but some kind of pre-Proto-

Chinese

> predating the reconstructible stages by (at the very least) a

couple of

> millennia. In fact, you would need something like the

chronological

> horizon of Proto-Sino-Tibetan if you want to look for a possible

source

> of loans into PIE, but PST words (to the extent that they can be
> reconstructed at all) looked very differently from their OC

descendants.

>

Argumentum e silentio. Or almost ("very differently").

Pulleyblank:
Chinese quan EMC khwen', Tib. khyi, Burm. khwe "dog". Benedict
reconstructs TB *kwij or *kw&j and explains the final *-n of the
Chenese form as a 'collective' [also, 'individuating'] suffix.
EMC kwen' "watering channels"
Now, is does that -kw- of the last word come from some Tibeto-Burman
labiovelar? I think yes. It's not that different, and a loan is
possible.


Torsten