Lack of thorough and reliable reconstructions Debate over prosodic form of the proto language

3.3.2 Lack of thorough and reliable reconstructions

Only two scholars to date have attempted full reconstructions of Proto-Kam-Sui, Thurgood 1988 and Peiros 1998. Both of these refer to data from only two Sui dialects and one Kam dialect, despite the internal diversity of both of these languages. Peiros 1998:31 admits that his reconstruction is “remarkably similar” to Thurgood’s, which is not too surprising given that most of his source data are identical. Both Thurgood and Peiros focus primarily on reconstruction of PKS onsets; neither of them provides any detailed analysis with regard to the PKS vowel system. Supplementary to these two works, Edmondson and Yang 1988 and Ferlus 1996 give suggested onset reconstructions for a number of PKS etyma. No Chinese scholar has published a reconstruction of Proto-Kam-Sui. Throughout chapters 4 and 5 we refer extensively to Thurgood’s Proto-Kam-Sui forms, but our data highlight the limitations and occasional inconsistencies of his reconstruction mainly arising from a lack of data. To clarify our analysis, we occasionally suggest other Proto-Kam-Sui forms, drawing on Thurgood 1988, Ferlus 1996 and Edmondson and Yang 1988, as well as on Zeng’s 1994 Proto-Sui, Li Fang-kuei’s 1977a Proto-Tai and more recent reconstructions of Proto-Tai-Kadai Liang and Zhang 1996 and Proto-Tai Pittayaporn 2009.

3.3.3 Debate over prosodic form of the proto language

As with other branches of Tai-Kadai, unlikely onset correspondences among the daughter languages, as well as various tone category alternations, pose a problem for Kam-Sui historical linguists. Based on the assumption that the ancestors of present-day Tai-Kadai and indeed Hmong-Mien languages were, just as they are today, prosodically monosyllabic, older reconstructions made by Chinese linguists often posited a large number of complex onset clusters in the proto languages to account for these sets of corresponding reflexes Li Fang-kuei 1977a, Liang and Zhang 1996, Wang Fushi and Mao 1995, the articulatory range of which seem unlikely in natural spoken language. 4 Furthermore, they do not necessarily account for all of the sound correspondences in the daughter languages Pittayaporn 2009. More recently, there has been a growing consensus among Western linguists that the ancestors of the Tai-Kadai languages were in fact “sesquisyllabic”. This term was originally coined by Matisoff 1973 to describe the iambic stress pattern of a word which consists of an unstressed minor syllable followed by a stressed, tone-bearing syllable. Modern sesquisyllabic languages include Burmese and many Mon- Khmer languages. Sesquisyllabic forms can account for the wide range of onset reflexes found in the modern languages far more neatly than monosyllabic forms. The surprising initial onset voicing and tone category combinations in many Tai-Kadai languages can also be more easily explained by a series of voiced and voiceless minor syllables or preconsonants in the proto languages which caused the major syllable to take on an unexpected tone during the Great Tone Split see chapter 4, section 4.2. Recent reconstructions in the Tai-Kadai family such as Ostapirat’s 2000 Proto-Kra, Norquest’s 2007 Proto- Hlai and Pittayaporn’s 2009 Proto-Tai all posit sesquisyllabic proto-forms. With regards to Proto-Kam- Sui, Edmondson and Yang 1988 proposed a series of preconsonants to account for some reflex alternations, e.g., ‘to wash’ s-lak D , ‘skinny’ p-rum A and ‘late, delayed’ kh-we A . Ferlus 1996 also proposed sesquisyllabic forms in Proto-Kam-Sui such as ‘to plant’ Cmra A , ‘locust’ tsⁿrak D and ‘early’ ksam A . A monosyllabic prosodic form in Proto-Kam-Sui would be more consistent with the typology of most documented Kam-Sui languages. Thurgood’s 1988 reconstruction is basically monosyllabic, although it includes a few etyma containing presyllables, such as ‘flea’ k- hmat⁷ and ‘dog’ k-hma¹, for which he proposes a k- “animal prefix”. 4 Li Fang-kuei’s Proto-Tai has 76 initial consonant and consonant clusters Li Fang-kuei 1977a:viii, even more than modern Sui which has the most lavish set of initials of all the Kam-Sui languages, Edmondson and Yang, 1988:145– 146. Liang and Zhang 1996 posit 163 onsets for Proto-Tai-Kadai. Wang Fushi and Mao’s 1995 Proto-Miao-Yao has a fabulous 272 different onsets. It is worth noting that modern Sui itself is not entirely monosyllabic. Our wordlist includes several glosses which elicited iambic sesquisyllabic forms in various locations. Many of these forms are demonstratively “reducing compounds”, in which the first syllable of a bimorphemic compound has lost its final consonant if it had one, its contrastive vowel quality and its tone, becoming in essense a “minor syllable”. Some examples are given in 1. 1 Reducing compounds in Sui dialects. a. k ə⁰ ʔdjup⁷ ‘spirit, ghost’ SD kwan¹ ‘spirit, soul’ + ʔdjup⁷ ‘fresh’ b. p ə⁰ laːp⁷ ‘lightning’ DJ ᵐbən¹ SD ʔbən¹ ‘sky’ + laːp⁷ ‘lightning’ c. l ə⁰ wan¹ ‘sun’ PD ⁿda¹ ‘eye’ + wan¹ ‘day’ d. k ə⁰ lo⁶ ‘congee’ AT qeːŋ¹ ‘congee’ + lo⁶ ‘soup’ e. ᵐbə⁰ lən² ‘behind’ TN ᵐbjaːŋ⁵ ‘side’ + lən² ‘behind, after’ f. ts ə⁰ nau² ‘where?’ SY tsum² ‘place’ + nau² ‘which?’ g. q ə⁰ tsoŋ⁵ ‘knee’ JR qam⁴ ‘head’ + tsoŋ⁵ ‘knee’ h. s ɿ⁰ vjen¹ ‘to dream’ TZ saːn² ‘night’ + vjen¹ ‘dream’ Sometimes mother-tongue speakers were able to identify the morphosyllable in which the minor syllable originated. At other times, the original meaning of the minor syllable seems to have been lost entirely, although we could occasionally identify it in corresponding items collected from other locations where both major and minor syllables of the compound were preserved. Some “reduced” minor syllables in Sui are perhaps better described as nominal prefixes which occur in groups of semantically related nouns. For example the qa ⁰- prefix in Shuiyao dialect, which is perhaps a reduced form of qam⁴ ‘head’ or qum⁴ ‘slope’, in words such as qa⁰pjaːk⁷ ‘forehead’, qa⁰haːk⁷ ‘armpit’, qa⁰ȶun² ‘fist’, qa⁰ȶoŋ⁵ ‘knee’ and qa⁰laːk⁷ ‘bone’. A similar, more fully developed system of prefixes some of which are demonstratively reduced forms of morphosyllables is found in Buyang, a Kra language spoken by around 2,000 people on either side of the Yunnan-Guangxi border. Some words in Buyang for comparison: qa⁰ðu¹¹ ‘head’, qa⁰tiŋ²⁴ ‘nose’, qa⁰ʔba¹¹ ‘shoulder’ and qa⁰ʑo³¹² ‘neck’ Li Jinfang 2000. The phonological processes of compound reduction are observable in our data, with many “in- between” forms, in which minor syllables retain a contrastive vowel nucleus or tonal component, clearly identifiable. For example, the first syllable in m ə⁴to¹ SY ‘door’ mai⁴ ‘wood’ + to¹ ‘doorway’ retains the tonal pitch quality of the source morphosyllable mai⁴ ‘wood’ in Buyang, ‘door’ is ma⁰tɔ³¹², the prefix ma⁰- perhaps has the same etymology; the first syllable in ȶi⁰ljən⁶ RL ‘pangolin’ appears to retain some of the contrastive vowel quality of a presumed source morphosyllable possibly tsjen⁶, occurring in PD as part of ȶen⁶ ljen⁶ ‘pangolin’. These reducing compounds in Sui appear very similar to those in modern Burmese, some examples of which are given in 2. 2 Reducing compounds in Burmese Green 2005 a. t ʃəbó ‘bug’ tʃáN ‘floor’ + pó ‘insect’ b. ŋəʔṵ ‘roe’ ŋá ‘fish’ + ʔṵ ‘egg’ c. n̥əla̰ ‘two months’ n̥iʔ ‘two’ + la̰ ‘month’ d. θəjè ‘saliva’ θ wá ‘tooth’ + jè ‘juice’ e. n əno̰ ‘milk’ nwá ‘cow’ + no̰ ‘udder’ f. k ələbjè ‘India’ kəlá ‘Indian’ + pjè ‘country’ Green 2005:13 observes that in compound reduction in Burmese, “tone is lost, all vowel place features are lost … a coda consonant is lost … and an onset cluster is simplified.” The exact same phonological processes can be observed in the Sui examples given in 1 above. Sesquisyllabic languages proliferate in the Mon-Khmer family. One example is Kammu, spoken mainly in northern Laos and north-western Vietnam, but also in a few villages in southern Yunnan Chen 2002. Kammu sesquisyllables are far more developed than in Buyang or Sui. The minor syllable often consists of a complex consonant cluster in the form of obstruent + liquid, or obstruent + nasal, for example kl. ʔak ‘crow’ and tɕn.tlɤŋ ‘horn’. As with sesquisyllables in Sui, Buyang and Burmese, the stress pattern is clearly iambic, and although epenthetic schwas often occur within or after the minor syllable, there is no contrastive vowel nucleus. In Northern Kammu, the minor syllable can carry contrastive tone Svantesson and Karlsson 2004. The existence of sesquisyllables in some South-East Asian languages, coupled with some well- documented examples of non-tonal disyllabic proto forms which have acquired tone and reduced to monosyllabic forms for example Old Cham Tsat, described by Sagart 1993, have both been cited as evidence for the existence of sesquisyllabic forms in proto languages in the Tai-Kadai family Ostapirat 2000, Pittayaporn 2009. Matisoff 1990:547 argued that southeast Asian languages undergo a “millenial dance” between four different types of syllable: 1 consonantally complex monosyllables; 2 consonantally simple monosyllables; 3 disyllabic compounds or tight collocations; and 4 sesquisyllables. The stage in which disyllabic compounds reduce to sesquisyllables is one which we have amply demonstrated is taking place in Sui. Although all of the Sui dialects which we surveyed exhibited some sesquisyllabic forms, none of these forms were consistently elicited across the Sui region. For most examples of a sesquisyllabic word that we found in one dialect, we found the same word in fully disyllabic bimorphemic form in another. Thus we argue that Sui is still essentially a monosyllabic language. Whether Proto-Kam-Sui was monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic is a matter for debate and will probably not be decided until the historical processes of monosyllabification and tonogenesis have been more adequately explained. As we examine the historical development of the Sui dialects in more detail, we do, however, find that Proto-Kam-Sui sesquisyllabic forms are a neat and useful way of explaining some of the sound changes which have taken place.

3.3.4 Difficulty in identifying cognates and loanwords