Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China
| From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, December 4, 2000, 0:10 |
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On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Whoa, could you unpack that? I don't think you're talking about
> voiced/unvoiced initial consonants, are you? Because my L1 distinguishes
> between [b], [p], [p<h>] and yet it's tonal. How would that have happened?
There were two tone splits in the Sinitic languages. The one that
produced the four tones of Middle Chinese was probably conditioned by
the loss of final spirants: zero, /s/, and /h/ respectively. The
fourth tone (rusheng) really means "final stop".
The second split happened to different degrees in different Sinitic
languages: in Mandarin, the first tone split into the current tones 1
and 2, causeing the old tone 2 to be called 3, and the old tone 3
to be called 4. The final-stop words were redistributed into the
other tones when final stops fell.
> How about Malay/Indonesian? They are non-tonal. Or are they regarded as a
> different language family?
They are Austronesian, not Sino-Tibetan. But there are non-Sino-Tibetan
families with tone: Miao-Yao, Tai-Kadai, Mon-Khmer.
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
--Douglas Hofstadter