Re: Anser (was: swallow vs. nighingale)

----- Original Message -----

From: Richard Wordingham

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 12:28 AM

Subject: [Courrier indésirable] Re: [tied] Anser (was: swallow vs. nighingale)

There's no certainly sign of them in Matisoff's 'Handbook of
Proto-Tibeto- Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan
Reconstruction' (accessible via
http://repositories .cdlib.org/ ucpress/ucpl/ vol_135/ ), though some
languages have acquired them. Incidentally, its Appendix A seems a
good reference for reconciling reconstructions of Chinese phonology.
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A.F :

I have written that Chinese was oxytonic (stressed on last vowel) and that this caused a major syllabic "crunch" in this language.

Now, if you look at pages 607/608 of the above reference,

pleng : flat surface => Cf. PIE pel(H2)

pling : full => Cf. PIE pel(H1/w)

pral : forehead => cf. PIE per(H2)

prut : boil => Cf. PIE bherew-

pwa(:)r : fire => Cf. PIE puH2ar

It is quite clear that these words are cognates not loanwords. They had more than one syllable in ST before the "crunch".

This confirms my conclusion : the mono-syllabic paradigm is false.

Notwithstanding the respect to be paid to people who spent thousands of hours to make their way through the quagmire of Sino-Tibetan, the assessment of their work holds in two words : about worthless. Because they have worked on the wrong premiss : Sino-Tibetan languages do not derive from a mono-syllabic ancestor.

this is a provably wrong hypothesis.

And there is no way out but to discard this damn mono-syllabic paradigm.

A.F

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