--- John Cowan <cowan@...> kataba:
> We think so, yes. The native terms were "clear" and
> "muddy".
That's a fascinating contrast; I'm very tempted to
co-opt that for a future conlang.
> We don't really know. We reconstruct multiple
series of
> coronal stops, but their exact phonetic values are a
matter
> of conjecture -- or convention.
Like the reconstructed Indo-European laryngeals,
which, I'm told, were most likely [x], [x_w] (or their
pharyngeal equivalents) and [h].
> It had syllables ending in -p -t -k (as in Cantonese
and
> some other modern Sinitic languages), which probably
first
> all changed to glottal stop (as in modern
Shanghainese)
> and then vanished, at which point the words in that
tone
> were reallocated to the other three tones
(first/second, third,
> and fourth). Then the first/second tone split, with
the
> breathy/"muddy"/voiced initial syllables moving into
the
> modern second tone.
Then how does Cantonese have like nine tones? Were
some other tonogenic forces at work here?