Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian

14/06/201709/07/2020

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 C^ji-, citing ‘dog’ as an example of the second part of the law: he reconstructs pre-Tibetan *k^wi. 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.

12/06/201711/07/2020

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.

07/06/201707/06/2017

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.