A.F :
At the time when YueZhi people appear in
history,
It is fairly dangerous to speak about "Chinese" in
general.
If we look at Northern Standard Han Chinese,
NSHC
ancestor of most dialects north of YangZi
river
we can say that :
NSHC had this system :
ng velar nasal
k neutral stop
kh aspirated stop
g voiced
h voiced velar spirant
x unvoiced velar spirant.
? glottal stop.
Any of these could stand alone : C+
vowel
or be followed by some kind of rhotic : r/l :
C-r-vowel.
I think any sinologist will agree on
this.
Now, (Personal point of view :)
I consider that g voiced stop exists only in
loanwords.
It is never inherited.
As regard kn or gn,
I know no example of either borrowed or inherited
kn or gn,
but my guess is that two options are possible
:
kn or gn > n (stops are discarded)
or
kn or gn > assimilated to kr- or gr- (n is
ajusted to native C-r-).
Maybe option two is more probable.
If you had in mind, gn or kn might become
ng-
I think it is not possible.
Very Ancient Chinese sequences like xmok "black"
> NSHC xok > modern hei1.
But this is much earlier than NSHC.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2007 3:16
PM
Subject: [Courrier indésirable] [tied]
Ethnonym Yuezhi (was: "As")
--- In cybalist@... s.com,
"fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@ ...>
wrote:
> YueZhi
autoethnonym was sounding close to *ngjawtsix or *ngiwatsix.
>
Chinese reconstruction is debatable,
> but the surest (non debatable)
thing is : this ethnonym starts with #ng-
> velar nasal : something
especially alien to PIE,
> (and by the way, alien to its closest
relatives).
How would initial *kn- or *gn- have been rendered in
Chinese?
Richard.