THEORY: Tonogenesis (?) from PIE (Was: The rebirth ofm"/21awasmql21aw)

FFlores wrote:
> Just do to PIE what French did to Latin. :) And then chop the few codas
> that you spared. In any case, you'll end up having a lot of homonyms, but
> that happens (AFAIK) in Mandarin too, and somehow they still understand
> each other.
Well, with Mandarin, they've developed a lot of disyllables, formed from
two near-synonyms or by using now-obsolete derivational affixes like
diminutive.  Incidentally, the English colloquialism "look-see", as in
"I'll just go and have a look-see" comes from a Chinese pidgin where it
was a literal translation of a Cantonese (?) pairing.

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