Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> 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.
It's probable that the Middle Chinese voiced stops produced breathiness,
too; certainly Wu (Shanghainese) has breath-inducing voiced stops, and they
reliably induce low tone as well (although there are other sources of low tone).

> 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.
It's the first order of business when you hit a new Daic language:
get the tone correspondences to Standard Thai.  Usually not *that* hard
to figure out.  Because of rampant lexical borrowing among the Daic
lgs, in fact the segment-level correspondences can be much harder!

Also it is quite typical for there to be very different realizations
of "abstract tones" across dialects, much less languages.  The
Mandarin spoken in Sichuan, e.g., assigns tones essentially with
the same pattern as Standard Mandarin, except that the 3rd tone is
consistently pronounced like a 4th and vice versa!

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter