Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

Kristian Jensen wrote:

>Roger Mills wrote:
>
>>There are AN languages in Hainan, but I'm not sure they can be classified
as
>>_Chamic_ -- that usually applies to the better known langs. of inland
>>southern Vietnam.
>
>Here's the Ethnologue entry for the language in question:
>
>TSAT (UTSAT, UTSET, HUIHUI, HUI, HAINAN CHAM) [HUQ] 4,500 (1991 I.
Maddieson). >(snip)
        Very interesting.  I'll have to look thru Ethnologue again, to see
if there's a bibliographic ref. to Maddieson.  I wonder if s/he is SIL--
their people get into some really off-beat places, though I can't imagine
Viet Nam is terribly eager to let them in.

>> Years ago, in fact, one of my students unearthed a
>>journal article from North Vietnam (in Vietnamese, unfortunately)
describing
>>a language of interior NVN that was clearly AN.
>
>That's interesting! Is it listed in the ethnoogue? Its probably tonal,
>right?>
        Alas, I can't help.  It was a one-time occurrence; I encouraged him
to check out a VN dictionary and go at it, but nothing came of it; and I was
in the midst of diss. so didn't follow up.  All I recognized for sure were
the numbers and IIRC the 1st person pronouns, and the bisyllabic shape.  If
Ethnologue is organized by country, maybe we could find a reference-- it
would date from the 60s, early 70s.

Come to think of it, "interior NVN" is probably just an assumption (or a dim
memory) since we never could read the article.  So it might in fact have
been this Hainanese language!