Re: Gwr Lexicon uploaded

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:52:32 -0400, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

>http://cinduworld.tripod.com/gwrlexicon.pdf
>
>Temporary, not complete or in finished form, by any means (ignore random
>notes to self and highlighting etc.; the proto-forms are there mainly for my
>own guidance but will probably stay), but I thought it a good idea to get
>some feedback, in light of the recent discussion of "completeness". This is
>a language with almost no productive derivational processes, aside from
>compounding and a handful of affixes; consequently at this stage most of the
>definitions are very simple, if not one-word. Presumably each entry could
>later be amplified with exs. of usage.
Very nicely done!  (Much like your sound changes, which I don't think I got
around to commenting on.)  Seems to be reasonably comprehensive; but since
Gwr's been through numerous relays I guess I tend to think of it as
well-developed anyway.

>The various "see XXX" cross refs. are the closest we have to derivation;
>these are forms related usually by initial vs. final stress proto-forms with
>attendant sound changes.
Did the stress variation have any systematic function in pre-Gwr?  (Maybe
you've mentioned this before, and I've forgotten.)  And what's the function
of the m-, s-, i/y- that pop up in some of the etymologies?

Are there any pairs of initially- and finally-stressed forms that show a lot
of semantic drift?  I'd expect some, given that as I understand it the pairs
become doublets with no synchronically evident connection between them.

>I'm not 100% enthusiastic about such a process but
>it seems reasonable.  Does anyone know-- does e.g. Chinese have such related
>forms? Or other monosyl. isolating languages?
Old Chinese certainly had affixing morphology which have left these sort of
related forms, showing up often as changes in tone or initial (generally you
don't get quite the wide divergence between two related forms that Gwr has,
with its two different stressed syllables): e.g. Mandarin zhi1 'weave' <
*t@k vs. zhi4 'woven material' < *t@ks, or luo4 'fall, incl. of leaves' <
rak vs. tuo4 'fallen leaves' < hrak.  Plus there are related forms in Old
Chinese which aren't related by language-internal morphology but by
borrowing: tan3 'dark' < hl@m? and gan4 'purple' < kl@ms, both borrowed from
the same Tai word at different points.  And there's a lot of variation which
just isn't understood.

(Examples from Schuessler, _What Are Cognates and What Are Variants in
Chinese Word Families?_.  Wouldn't surprise me if most of these Mandarin
words are unseen outside dictionaries and Classical contexts, either.)

Alex

Reply