Re: Mandarin pronouns (ta1) [Was: a question about names]

Roger Mills scripsit:

> Tonogenesis is a problem; I know some of the principles, but need
> to find good sources for some of the subtleties.  I note that in
> Tiemish, tone seems to be determined by the _coda_; do the initials
> have no affect?
In Sinitic, the original creation of tones (from Old to Middle Chinese)
was probably due to the loss of codas -s (for creaky/high) and -h
(for breathy/low).  The tone splits between Middle Chinese and the
current Sinitic languages mostly had to do with loss of voice in the
initials.  Wu kept its voiced initials and now has basically only two
fully contrastive tones (five officially, but one is tied to voiced
initials and breathiness, and of the other four, two are associated
with final glottal stop (the remnant of -p -t -k codas) and two with
vowel or [-N] endings (m, n, N have collapsed)).

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