In this paper, Guillaume Jacques proposes that the Old Tibetan semi-vowel –w– as part of a word onset is secondary, and that it has its origin in words ending in -u followed by -ba: he supposes the evolution Cu-ba > Cuwa > Cwa, for instance zwa ‘nettle’ < zu-ba, rwa ‘horn’ < ru-ba, grwa ‘corner’ < gru-ba. Another example is ‘grass’, OT rtswa, which must then come from an earlier rtsu-ba. Tibetan rtswa is compared to Chinese 草 *[tsʰ]ˤuʔ > tshawX > cǎo ‘grass, plants’ by Matisoff (here, p. 177) under a reconstruction PST *r-tswa-n, as part of a list of mostly spurious comparisons. In the case of ‘grass’, Matisoff got lucky, but only Jacques’s proposal makes sense of the phonology of this comparison, since OT -a does not otherwise correspond to OC -u.
Tibetan sgro ‘large feather’
Written Tibetan (WT) སྒྲོ sgro means ‘large feather, tail feather, quill’, as in སྒྲོ་མདོངས sgro-mdongs ‘peacock’s feather, as a badge of dignity’ (Jäschke). Benedict (1972) compared this word with Jingpo shagrau [ʃă31kʒau31] ‘outer skin’, apparently taking outer skin (of fruits etc.) and bird feathers to be different kinds of organic coverings. Coblin (1986) preferred comparing WT sgro with OC 羽 ‘feather’, OC *gwjagx in the reconstruction of Li. Coblin’s proposal seems to provide better semantics than Benedict’s: for this reason it has enjoyed broader support. A third interpretation is proposed below.
WT sgro སྒྲོ is a verb, meaning ‘to elevate, exalt, increase, exaggerate’. It is a homophone of the word for ‘large feather’. Compared with normal featers, tail feathers are increased in size, strikingly so in the case of the pheasant or peacock: a derivation out of the verb is likely. Probable external cognates are Jingpo shagrau [ʃă31kʒau33] ‘to praise, extol’ and OC 喬 *[N-k](r)aw > gjew > qiáo ‘lift, elevated, high’. In the phonetic series of 喬, one finds 鷮 *[k](r)aw > kjew > jiāo ‘kind of pheasant’, said by 郭璞 Guō Pú (276-324 CE) to have a long tail and whose feathers were used as ornaments.
In yet another meaning, སྒྲོ sgro designates the bark of a species of willow; this, at least, is a good match for Benedict’s shagrau [ʃă31kʒau31] ‘outer skin’. There is no clear Chinese cognate.
Despite superficial resemblance, WT གྲོ་བ gro-ba or གྲོ་ག gro-ga ‘the thin bark of the birch tree’ is distinct from the preceding: it is reduced from grog-ba (Guillaume Jacques, p.c. 2016).
|
WT |
OC |
Jingpo |
|
|
increase, elevate |
སྒྲོ sgro ‘elevate, exalt, increase, exaggerate’ སྒྲོ sgro ‘large feather, tail feather’ |
喬 *[N-k](r)aw‘lift, elevated, high’ 鷮 *[k](r)aw ‘kind of pheasant’ |
ʃă31kʒau33 ‘to praise, extol’ |
|
outer skin, bark |
སྒྲོ sgro |
ʃă31kʒau31 |
[July 10, 2021: see the sequel to this post and dicussion here]
The strange case of Tibetan thul ‘egg, testicle’
In a recent post on ‘water’ and ‘lip’ (https://stan.hypotheses.org/20) I identified a correspondence indicating PST *-ur:
OC *-ur, Bodo -əy, Lushai -ui, -Proto-Karen *-ej, WT *-u.
‘Egg’ would fit into that correspondence beautifully —the coda in the OC word is ambiguous for *-r—if it was not for a rare WT word for ‘egg’:
| Written Tibetan | Boro (Bhat) | Lushai (Lorrain) | Proto-Karen (Luang.) | OC (B-S) | PST (tentative) |
| ! thul ‘egg, testicle’ | dəy ‘egg’ | tui ‘egg’ | Ɂdej B ‘egg’ | tʰu[n] ‘egg’ | #tʰur |
| chu ‘water’ | dəy ‘water, river’ | tui ‘water’ | thej A ‘water’ | s.turʔ ‘river, water’ | #s-turʔ |
| mchu ‘lip’ | (gusu)təy ‘lip’ | (not cognate) | n.a. | sə.dur ‘lip’ | #m-tur |
The expected rhyme correspondence for WT is -u, as shown by ‘water’ and ‘lip’. What is going on ?
Here is an idea. OC had an <r> infix that it shares with Austronesian and it would make sense if TB did, too. Some minimal pairs involving medial -r- and showing semantic alternations very much like Chinese can be found in TB languages: medial -r- calls attention to the distributed character of objects or actions. I treat medial -r- as the <r> infix in the pairs below:
Written Burmese: pok ‘a drop (of liquid)’ : p<r>ok ‘speckled, spotted’
Chepang: pop ‘lungs’ : p<r>op ‘lungs’
Jingpo: phun31 ‘of lumps or pimples, to appear on the body’ : ph<r>un31 ‘pimples, lumps on the body; to appear on the body, of pimples or lumps’
Such pairs are never found with alveolar initials; Zev Handel has claimed that *tr- clusters do not reconstruct to PTB or even PST (Handel 2002). Another possibility exists: *tr clusters (including infixal *t<r>- clusters) existed in PST but merged with *t- in PTB (this would constitute a TB innovation).
There are no WT words of the shape CrVr, that is, with both medial -r- and final -r. In my first post to this blog (https://stan.hypotheses.org/11) I suggested that when that situation arose, for instance after the metathesis of preinitial -r, final -r dissimilated to -l. Supposing that a constraint on medial and coda r already existed in PST, a PST doublet involving a root *thur and the <r> infix would alternate *thur vs. *th<r>ul. By the changes described in my earlier posts, this doublet would evolve to PTB *thuy vs. *thul. In WT, *thuy would evolve to thu (chu if palatalized); but WT actually thul reflects PST *th<r>ul, the infixed variant.
References
Handel, Zev. 2002. Rethinking the medials of Old Chinese: Where are the r’s? Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 31.1:3-32.
Sagart, Laurent. 1993. L’infixe -r- en chinois archaique. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, Tome LXXXVIII, fascicule 1, pp. 261-293.
Sino-Tibetan ‘water’, ‘lip’ and ‘dog’: a new TB innovation ?
Old Tibetan had lost a -j ending (Hill 2014:107). Thus some Tibetan words ending in vowels had a -j after that vowel at some point before Old Tibetan. The words for ‘water’ and ‘lip’ are cases in point: their Tibeto-Burman cognates point to a palatal semivowel coda, and their Chinese cognates point to *-r being the source.
| WT | Bodo (Bhat) | Lushai (Lorrain) | Proto-Karen (LuangThongkum) | OC (Baxter-Sagart) |
| ཆུ chu ‘water’ | dəy ‘water’ | tui ‘water’ | thej A ‘water’ | 水 *s.turʔ ‘water’ |
| མཆུ mchu ‘lip’ | (gusu)təy ‘lip’ |
(not cognate) |
n.a. |
脣 *sə.dur ‘lip’ |
These data point to a correspondence of codas WT zero : Bodo -y : Lushai -i, Proto-Karen -j, OC * r. The same correspondence can be detected in ‘dog’ after a different vowel, provided the *-[n] coda in OC can be disambiguated to *-r:
| WT | Bodo (Bhat) | Lushai (Lorrain) | Proto-Karen (LuangThongkum) | OC (Baxter-Sagart) |
| ཁྱི khyi ‘dog’ | səy(má) ‘dog’ | ui ‘dog’ | thwi B ‘dog’ | 犬 *[k]ʷʰˤ[e][n]ʔ |
Guillaume Jacques (2013) proposed that pre-WT initial *wi- and *Cwi- changed to WT ji- and Cji-, citing ‘dog’ as an example of the second part of the law: he reconstructs pre-Tibetan *kwi. The vowel *[e] in the Old Chinese form is ambiguous for *i and *e. With this proviso, our three examples have high vowels on both sides of the comparison. I will conjecture that they reflect PST *u (‘water’, ‘lip)’and *i (‘dog’). Hill’s examples of the OC *-r : WT *-r correspondence all involve nonhigh vowels: that correspondence therefore is complementary with the correspondence just described.
The following scenario is suggested: the PST coda *-r remained as *-r in OC after all vowels. In PTB it changed to -j after high vowels, merging with original *-j; after nonhigh vowels it remained as *-r. In WT *-j was lost. Acceptance of this scenario implies that words with WT *-ur or *-ir either did not have high vowels in PTB or did not end in *-r. If the scenario stands, change of PST *-r to *-j after high vowels is a PTB innovation.
Hill, Nathan. 2014. Cognates of Old Chinese *-n, *-r, and *-j in Tibetan and Burmese. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 43 (2). pp. 91-109.
Jacques, Guillaume. 2013. On pre-Tibetan semi-vowels. BSOAS 76, 2: 289-300.
A possible case of dissimilation of -r to -l in Written Tibetan
There exist occasional cases of alternations between words with preradical d- and r- in Old/Written Tibetan (OT/WT), for instance dba vs rba ‘wave’, dgu ‘nine’ vs. rgu ‘many’. I am uncertain of the nature (phonological ? dialectal ?) of these alternations. At the same time, rb-type onsets are rare in Written Tibetan and rp- onsets are entirely absent. In a blog dated 19/11/2015 (https://panchr.hypotheses.org/527) Guillaume Jacques proposed that a metathesis has affected pre-Tibetan *rp-, changing it to WT phr-; this is supported by a comparison between WT phrag-pa and Japhug tɯ-rpaʁ, both ‘shoulder’, both forms being derivable from an earlier *rpak. Combining Jacques’ hypothesis with r-/d- preradical doubleting stimulates us to look for db-/br and dp-/phr- doublets. Here is an apparent instance of a db-/br- doublet: dbur ‘to grind, pulverize; flour’ vs. brul ‘very small broken pieces’. These two forms could go back to a dbur vs. rbur doublet, assuming the evolution from rbur to brul involves a dissimilatory change of final -r to -l.
Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian
Ce blog de recherche se donne pour but de présenter des idées, hypothèses et observations sur la formation, la diversification et l’histoire du sino-tibétain-austronésien, une macro-famille de langues dont l’ai proposé l’existence en 1990, selon deux versions successives. Dans la version actuelle, qui date de 2005, elle est constituée de deux branches, le sino-tibétain et l’austronésien. Le tai-kadai est ue sous-branche de l’austronésien. Ce blog portera sur la reconstruction phonologique, morphologique et lexicale, les cibles principales étant le proto-sino-tibétain et le proto-sino-tibétain-austronésien. Il portera également sur les relations phylogénétiques, utilisant les innovations dans le vocabulaire de base comme matériau principal. L’étude des changements internes à la langue sera mise en relation avec les développements actuels en archéologie, génétique et domestication.