From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 50659
Date: 2007-12-02
----- Original Message -----From: fournet.arnaudSent: Sunday, December 02, 2007 5:47 AMSubject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [tied] Anser (was: swallow vs. nighingale)
<snip>============ =A.FSandawe dao = BeiJing dao4 (no need for explanation)Sandawe de = BeiJing duo1 from Baxter taj (a + yod = e)Sandawe diHa= BeiJing dan4 from A.F : to-x-an (x velar spirant unvoiced)dan4 is suffixed in Chinese and is from a 2-syllable word.Words rhyming in -an in BeiJing have ua in HaiKou and uing in JianOu,a clear indication that they come from o_an not just -an.As you know, Historical linguistics is the only science were coincidences are treated as valuable data, while others fields consider they are just random.***I have acknowledged in another posting the possibility of a connection between Sandawe de: (what happened to the length of the vowel in the above) and Starostin's pre-classical Old Chinese *ta:j.Now, the Sandawe form cited originally is di?a (not diHa as "emended" above). The Sino-Tibetan form Starostin has for 'egg' is *t[u]j. While it might be of interest to compare ST *ti with di?a, Fournet's own reconstruction of "to-x-an" leaves the non-correspondence of the vowel qualities unaddressed.Patrick Ryan***Now as far as Arabic is concerned,this language displays a very high level ofsegmental "instability" :Verbs meaning to cut :batta, batara, barata, batala, balata, sabata, bataka.r and l are both infixes and suffixes.And there are hundreds of examples like that.Most affixes can appear anywhere :rashsh : sprinkle watert?a-rashHamâ : to be angryHa-t?-amHamm : blackHama-t?a : black bloodIt is always hard to know which two consonants might be the "real" root.============ =***The process described above is not one I have ever seen described in a text on PAA or Semitic. No expert in either mentions "segmental instability" as far as I know.If this is the view of an expert ("real" root), even a minority view, I would like a reference.========A.FYou can get plenty of it here :but it is written in French.============ ===***Nothing I can see at the link given above addresses the point I made.Patrick Ryan***I have no idea what "t?" is supposed to mean in an Arabic word if not a sequence of /t-?/. Perhaps the writer above means Humatun, blackness, where the final -t is the feminine inflection.============A.F-t?- is emphatic tI chose to write it this way for the sake of clarityother symbols may fail to go thru unicode.And by the way,I can tell -t- from -t?-,so your last sentence is somethingwe can all make do without it.============ ====***Since no one in PAA or Semitic studies (except Fournet) indicates 'emphatics' with, e.g. t? for dotted t, it can hardly serve the purpose of clarity to initiate such a usage - particularly with notification.Patrick Ryan***