Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

H.S.Teoh/Kristian Jensen wrote:
>>> Some of the languages in the Himalayan branch of Tibeto-Burman don't.
>>
>>How about Malay/Indonesian? They are non-tonal. Or are they regarded as a
>>different language family?
>
>Completely different. Malay and Filipino are Austronesian. Chinese
>and Burmese are Sino-Tibetan. Thai is Daic. Khmer and Vietnamese are
>Austro-Asiatic. Austronesian langs are almost all non-tonal (except
>for a few exceptions like the Chamic subfamily). Same goes for
>Austro-Asiatic but its most well known member, Vietnamese, is certainly
>tonal cuz of its strong influence from Chinese. Both Vietnamese and Cham
>are tonal due to Chinese influence.>
As to the latter, more likely Chinese influenced VN, which influenced Cham,
but that's just my guess.  I've heard Khmer described as being en route to
becoming tonal-- vowel are diphthongized, voiced stops are breathy (heading
toward voiceless?) and supposedly produce different "registers", whatever
that means.

IF Daic is ultimately related to Austronesian (I'm not wild about that
theory), then it's a case of bisyllabic bases becoming mono/tonal.  From
what I've been told, the tone correspondences between the various Thai
languages/dialects are incredibly difficult to figure out.  One language's
high tone will be another's low, and so forth.