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Re: A curious wordlist

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 27, 2007, 7:16
On 3/27/07, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/parkinson/239.html > > Supposedly of the "natives of Sumatra", but there isn't a recognizable > Austronesian word in sight. I believe "sea...Hai" is Chinese. How about > the rest? Does anyone recognize anything? Bear in mind, it was published in > 1773, apparently the result of one of Capt. Cook's voyages. The forms, of > course, must be pronounced as if they were English words, so "oo" is > apparently [u], "ee" is [i], most likely :-)))
Quite a bit of it looks rather Chinese to me. Not Mandarin, to be sure, due to the presence of syllable-final stops, but still Chinese. For example, look at Cantonese. "Jet, the sun" looks like 日, jat6. "Hoïn, The clouds." looks a bit like 雲, wan4. "Ho, Rain." looks vaguely like 雨, jyu [jy] "Lang, People." looks like something I had read about Hokkien, about how it is sometimes called "lan-lang-oe" or "lan-nang-oe", with the lang/nang meaning "people". "Taow, The head.", cf. Cant. 頭, tau4 "Pee, The nose.", cf. Cant. 鼻, bei6 "Vacvaï, The eye-brows." reminds me a bit of Cant. 目 muk6 "eye" + 眉 mei4 "eyebrow". "Tsooë, The mouth.", cf. Cant. 嘴, zeoi2 ("beak, snout, mouth" in Mandarin) Tsooë toon, The lips.", cf. the above + Cant. 唇, seon4 (嘴唇, zui3chun2 = "lip" in Mandarin) etc. etc. I imagine that you'll find a Chinese dialect that's even closer. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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Leon Lin <leon_math@...>