From: Francesco Brighenti
Message: 59957
Date: 2008-09-11
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> --- On Wed, 9/10/08, Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...> wrote:
>
> > [citing a historical linguistics hypothesis advanced in Tsung-
> > tung Chang's paper at
> >
> > http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf ]
> >
> > ... during the third millennium BCE, a Proto-Indo-European
> > vocabulary showing a Germanic structure became dominant in
> > Old Chinese, ...
>
> Pre- or post-Grimm shift Germanic, acc. to CTT?
You should better go through the lexical comparisons offered in the
paper to better evaluate this question. All I could find in the text
of Chang's paper in connection to what you ask is the following:
"Characteristc of Old Chinese consonantism is the absence of r-
initial which changes mostly t o l-, z-, d-, h-, whereas the
laryngeals h- and H— suggest an intimate relationship to Germanic
initial h-.
[...]
The initial /h/ in Germanic corresponds mostly t o /h/ and /H/ in
Old Chinese. Though Germanic /h/ has hitherto been interpreted as a
shift from Indo-European /k/, it must have existed already in Proto-
Indo-European, since interrogatives both in Germanic and Chinese
have laryngeal initials (cf. p. 6, 645; p. 20, 644, 647, 648)."
Check out also the section "Proximity of Chinese to Germanic".
Best,
Francesco