The Six Vowel Hypothesis of Old Chinese in Comparative Context

Hill, Nathan W.

doi:10.1163/2405478x-90000100

Cited by 23 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The former is difficult to evaluate without a more detailed description of this language, but if true it would be quite isolated in Tani, where the etymon for 'red' is rather *lɯŋ (in Sun's 1993 system). As for the Chinese etymon, the comparison is not compelling in terms of phonology: OC ə normally corresponds to -a in non-Sinitic languages in most contexts, as noticed by many scholars (H.-c. Gong 1995, Hill (2012), Hill 2019, and although not impossible semantically, it does not constitute strong evidence for an extra-Burmo-Qiangic cognate.…”

Section: Burmo-rgyalrongicmentioning

confidence: 83%

Phylogenies based on lexical innovations refute the Rung hypothesis

Jacques

Pellard

2020

DIA

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Sino-Tibetan (Trans-Himalayan) is one of the typologically most diverse language families in the world, one of the few comprising all gradients of morphological complexity, from isolating to polysynthetic. No consensus exists as yet on whether the rich morphology found in some languages, in particular person indexation, should be reconstructed in the common Sino-Tibetan ancestor or is a later innovation confined to and defining a particular “Rung” subgroup. In this article, we argue that this question is fundamentally a problem of phylogeny, and that the results of recent works on the phylogeny of Sino-Tibetan, supplemented by a more refined investigation of shared lexical innovations, provide support for the idea that person indexation morphology is not a recent innovation and that the languages lacking such a feature are thus innovative.

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Section: Burmo-rgyalrongicmentioning

confidence: 83%

Phylogenies based on lexical innovations refute the Rung hypothesis

Jacques

Pellard

2020

DIA

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“…Baxter and Sagart (2014: 75) reconstruct *srum for this character reading, but no evidence either from loanwords or phonetic series rule out the reconstruction *sr m, which is the one adopted by other scholars (Schuessler 2009). Old Chinese *sr m is a perfect match for proto-Rgyalrong *sr m and proto-Kiranti *s m (as shown by Gong 1995 andHill 2012, Old Chinese * regularly corresponds to a in Tibetan and other languages).…”

Section: A New Example Of Proto-sino-tibetan *Srmentioning

confidence: 88%

On the cluster * sr – in Sino-Tibetan

Jacques¹

2015

jcl

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“…One of the reviewers remarked that according to 'Schiefner's law' (*ʥ-> ʑ-; *ʣ-> z-; cf. Hill 2012Hill : 5, 2014aHill : 171, and 2019b ) One has to consider its possible relationship to verbs like ɣchugs, zug, and ɣȷugs but also maybe ɣȷud and ɣchud. In the former, zug might be another case of 'Schiefner's law'.…”

Section: Transitive Verbs Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Old Tibetan verb morphology and semantics: An attempt at a reconstruction

Bialek¹

2020

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The paper presents the first complete reconstruction of the Old Tibetan (OT) verb morphology and semantics. Old Tibetan had a productive verb inflection with meaningful inflectional affixes b-, g-, ɣ-, d-, -d, and -s. The distribution of the prefixes was asymmetric and closely related to transitivity of a verb. Verbs of highest transitivity formed four distinct stems, whereas intransitive verbs inflected for one or two stems only. Grammatical voice is the only category that can explain the disproportion in the markings of transitive and intransitive verbs. Because the basic opposition was that between active and passive voice, intransitive verbs could only form active forms, whereas both active and passive forms were available for the majority of transitive verbs. In addition, both groups of verbs inflected for aspect, distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect. The OT inflectional system seems to have been a local innovation, only marginally related to verb morphology of other Trans-Himalayan languages.

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The Six Vowel Hypothesis of Old Chinese in Comparative Context

Cited by 23 publications

References 19 publications

Phylogenies based on lexical innovations refute the Rung hypothesis

Phylogenies based on lexical innovations refute the Rung hypothesis

On the cluster * sr – in Sino-Tibetan

Old Tibetan verb morphology and semantics: An attempt at a reconstruction

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