--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> W dniu 2012-05-05 03:00, Richard Wordingham pisze:
>
> > There's no need to appeal to language contact. b>pH (and ?b > b) is well
> > known from Siamese and Lao.
>
> There was a very interesting conference paper by Michael Weiss about
> possible evolutionary pathways that could have produced the "canonical"
> PIE system, with typological parallels. The accompanying Powerpoint
> presentation can be found here:
>
> http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/weiss/
> [ Cao_Bang_Theory.pptx ]
Thank you.
'Cao Bang' theory is a very strange name for it. From what I know of the situation, the only interesting thing about the Cao Bang dialect is that it is still at a transitional stage. The general change (at least for Mon-Khmer, Tai and ) is that voiced stops lead to breathy vowels, the voiced stops lost their voicing, and then in the Thai-Lao area - but not in the far North of either country - breathiness on vowels was reinterpreted as aspiration on the stop initial.
I don't know how far the breathiness went, but the ultimate loss of voicing contrast also affected Chinese and most of the languages in between, with a resulting doubling up of tones in tonal languages.
I must say that as I read the presentation, I thought we were going to see some dialect of the Mon-Khmer language Khmu being presented - Khmu dialects show at least three different reflexes of the lost voicing contrast - vowel register, aspiration, and tone.
Richard.