From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61894
Date: 2008-12-05
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick McCallister" <gabaroo6958@...>
>
Scott DeLancey, in his overview of Sino-Tibetan in Comrie's compendium on
major world languages has a nice piece on this when he discusses compound
words in which the head first becomes a prefix, then an unrecognizable dead
morpheme and finally just a first syllable or first half of a first
syllable. We see this in English lord and lady, where l-, la- is from
Anglo-Saxon hlaf "bread, loaf".
DeLancey claims these decomposed dead morphemes are a major obstacle in the
reconstruction of S-T.
==========
We have already talked about this situation with the book on ST by Matisoff.
The problem is about all ST display a level of phonetic erosion that is
worse that what Celtic exhibits.
And as I stated before, the traditionnal perimeter of ST is not clear, as
these languages may be related or may not,
but the problem is to produce something that could prove it.
With considerable erosion and a complex system of affixation (pre-, in- and
suf-fix)
every word is ""cognate"" with any other.
Just for fun, you can have a look here at the different systems existing for
Chinese alone !!
http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~philology/pdf/Gong.pdf
Then imagine the situation as the scale of ST...
It just does not make any sense to claim that ST is related to
Austro-Asiatic
as some of my fellow countrymen do.
We don't even know what ST really encompasses in the first place.
Arnaud