--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> Looking for something else, I found in an article about something
> else:
>
> Mongolian
> xxx 1sg 2sg 1pl,incl 1pl,excl 2pl
> nom bi c^i bid bid ta
> acc nam- c^am- biden- man- tan-
> gen min- c^in- biden- man- tan-
> dat nad- c^am- biden- man- tan-
>
> Interesting 1pl(excl) and 2pl oblique.
It shows we should be looking east for pronouns.
Now I've wanted the mark of the 1st person to be *-n,W-, so I
looked at Pulleyblanks 'Historical and Prehistorical Relationships
of Chinese'
"
Additional note on mín .. 'people'.
Chinese mín .. 'people,' EMC mjin < *mj`&n,J < *mj`&n, Tib. mi,
earlier myi 'man (homo),' Gyarung termi, etc. (Benedict 1972:107).
... . A final palatal nasal is indicated by the OC rhyme category but
some xiésheng derivatives rhyme in *-&n. Karlgren reconstructs two
readings, *rnyen and *my&n, for mín .. (1957 no. 457a-b), but only
*my&n for mín .. EMC min and min .. EMC min, which rhyme in *-&n and
where the Grade III vowels in Middle Chinese point to a medial *-r.
(Baxter reconstructs three different rhyme vowels in .. *mjin, ..
*mrjun and .. *mrjïn, with a query). Other derivatives are Type A
syllables mián .. EMC men (no early rhymes) and hun .. .. EMC xW&n.
It seems clear that by the time of the Shijing final *-n had been
palatalized by medial *-j- except where it was inhibited by *-r- and
where the initial *m was devoiced to *xW.
"
Not that I get much of it, except that the initial consonant in the
word for people is m, not n,W. But on the other hand, when devoiced
it becomes xW.
Some have proposed that the final -n is a plural suffix, which is
also claimed for the cognates of "dog", Chinese quan .. EMC khwen`,
Tibetan khyi, Burmese khwe, but not many other words. Perhaps the
language that gave the world the words for "dog" and "man" had a
-n plural suffix, whichever it was.
Torsten