preserved as reading forms by experts in traditional Sui script, were borrowed at an earlier stage, well before Early Mandarin. Pulleyblank 1991 reconstructs the Late Middle Chinese pronunciation of ‘horn’
as kjaːwk
D
. Other Chinese loans in Sui show that modern Sui consistently retains -p, -t and -k finals from Middle or Old Chinese loans. Added to this, it seems unlikely that the Sui, who have presumably been
raising livestock for many centuries, should borrow the word for ‘horn’ at such a late stage. We discuss Chinese and other Tai-Kadai loanwords in Sui in a little more depth in chapter 6. Suffice
to say that throughout our analysis we adopt a cautious approach to identifying loanwords from neighbouring languages. At the same time, we do make use of the clues that probable older Chinese
loanwords give us about subsequent sound changes which have occurred in the Sui language.
3.4 Data and conventions
Most of the Sui data we refer to in chapters 4 and 5 were collected during the present survey. The abbreviations we use for the various data points and a map showing their geographical location are
given in chapter 1. For convenience, we group the Sui data into six clusters: Pandong PD, JL, Yang’an TN, BL, LW, Central SD, ZH, GC, Western TZ, AT, TP, Southern JQ, SY, JR, SW and Eastern DJ,
RL, SJ. The latter four clusters fall within Zhang Junru’s 1980 “Sandong dialect” and we sometimes refer to them en masse as “Sandong Sui”. We generally present data from only one or two locations to
represent each of the six clusters. Central and Western are linguistically extremely similar and we often only present data from Central to represent both of them. If there is any other significant variation
within any of these six clusters, we describe it either in the main text or in the footnotes. Occasionally we refer to Sui data from other sources, including Li Fang-kuei 1965, 2008, Zeng 1994, 2004, Zhang
Junru 1980, Lei and Yang 1988, Zeng and Yao 1996, Burusphat et al., 2003, James Wei 2011 and our own field notes.
We make extensive use of Kam data collected between 2002 and 2004 by researchers from Guizhou University led by Professor Shi Lin
石林 , who visited 17 data points in Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi
provinces, covering most of the Kam area Shi and Strange 2004. These data are unpublished to date and we are extremely grateful to Professor Shi for allowing us to cite them in this publication. We
frequently cite Ou 2004, whose Dong-Han Dictionary, although based on standard Southern Kam as spoken in Zhanglu, Rongjiang county, helpfully includes phonetic and semantic variations from five
other Kam dialects three Northern and two Southern. Occasionally we draw from Burusphat et al., 2000
and GZARMLC 2008.
6
Data from other Kam-Sui languages, including Mulam, Maonan, Then, Mak and Ai Cham, are primarily taken from Thurgood 1988, Liang and Zhang 1996, ILCRD 1996 and
GZARMLC 2008. Proto-Tai-Kadai PTK is from Liang and Zhang 1996. All Proto-Kam-Sui PKS forms are from
Thurgood 1988 unless specified otherwise. We have replaced Thurgood’s tone category numbers 1–8 with tone letters A, B, C and D, since all the evidence indicates that the Great Tone Split occurred after
the PKS stage see chapter 4. This also facilitates comparison with other reconstructions such as Proto- Tai. Proto-Sui PS forms are from Zeng 1994, 2004. Most Proto-Tai PT forms are from Pittayaporn
2009 although we also make occasional use of Li Fang-kuei’s 1977a earlier reconstruction. Early Mandarin EM, Late Middle Chinese LMC and Early Middle Chinese EMC forms are mainly from
Pulleyblank 1991 and we occasionally draw from ZGYCX 2011. Old Chinese OC forms are from SGYCX 2011 unless stated otherwise. The latter source gives OC forms proposed by Baxter
白一平 , Karlgren
高 本汉
, Zhengzhang Shangfang 郑张尚芳
and Pan Wuyun 潘悟云
.
7
In the data tables we generally employ narrow transcriptions of our Sui data although we have tried to iron out unusual “ideolectal” pronunciations which we suspect are not representative of the particular
dialect cited. The reader may refer to appendix G for information on pronunciation differences observed
6
Burusphat et al., 2000 is a dictionary based on Southern Kam spoken in Tongdao county, Hunan province. The
data from GZARMLC 2008 were collected from Sanjiang county, at the southernmost end of the Southern Kam language area, about 160 km east of Sandu county seat
7
This data is also provided at Thesaurus Linguae Sericae Harbsmeier, n.d.
between speakers of different ages at individual data points. Narrow phonetic and broad phonemic transcriptions of each wordlist are provided in appendix H. When it comes to following the rime
innovations, the reader may find it helpful to refer to section 3.2.3 of this chapter Sui phonology sketch: Vowels which summarises the phonetic range of each of the vowel phonemes in Sandong Sui.
We occasionally cite data from other sources in the data tables. When the locations of these data do not match our own survey locations, we include the abbreviation of the source after the transcription of
the word. For example, in chapter 4, table 4.5, we include the word ‘last year’ from Zeng 2004. In the JQ column, we have written “
ȵu² SQ” for this word. SQ indicates that this transcription is from the SQ data point see chapter 1, table 1.4 for a list of extra-survey data points. SQ is part of the Southern
subdialect, so we include SQ data in the JQ column, since JQ represents Southern in this table. In chapters 4 and 5 we discuss only the most salient divergent sound changes which have taken
place among Sui dialects. It is not intended to be an exhaustive description of the development of Proto- Kam-Sui tones, onsets and rimes through to the Sui stage. A comprehensive reconstruction of PKS and
analysis of Kam-Sui sound changes and subgroupings is best left until more data has been made available, in particular for Mulam, Maonan and Kam languages and dialects.
28
4 Historical Development of Tones
Andy Castro
4.1 Summary of argument
