Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000 22:31:11 +0200, Boudewijn Rempt
<bsarempt@...> wrote:

>One interesting recent theory is that Old Chinese was quite highly
>inflecting, but that the speakers simply didn't see the inflections
>as important enough to write down, in the same way vowels are not
>written in Semitic scripts.
There is something against this: versification. AFAIK, Old Chinese
verse follows faithfully certain metric schemes. And some poems have
feminine rimes (e.g. with the *ti > modern _zhi_ 'his etc' in the
end of each line). Therefore, the characters denote the atonic syllables
as well, and the latter were counted in the scheme.

So, if any inflections had remained unmarked, they must have
been non-syllabic.

<...>
> Many
>alterations in readings in Chinese characters can be related to
>Limbu alternating verb stems, too.
<...>

Again, AFAIK, all types of alternations in readings of one character
are also represented in pairs of cognate words denoted by different
characters. So they cannot be connected with any elements
*systematically* left unmarked.

Finally, the Old Chinese rime classes are known in detail. They do
account for all known elements that occur as suffixes and are sometimes
responsible for the alternate readings.

So, any element that was systematically left out in writing could only
be both *non-syllabic* and *prefixed*. Which seems hardly possible,
with proven initial clusters not lacking in Old Chinese.

But indeed, the idea should have tempted at times everybody who tried
Old Chinese syntax!


Basilius