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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2021
Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2021
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2021
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The Duhumbi perspective on Proto-Western Kho-Bwa onsets
Author(s): Timotheus Adrianus Bodtpp.: 1–59 (59)More LessAbstractThe eight Western Kho-Bwa varieties are spoken in western Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India and form a small, coherent sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan / Sino-Tibetan) language family.
This paper presents 96 sound correspondences, mainly between the two Western Kho-Bwa varieties Duhumbi and Khoitam, with additional evidence from other Western Kho-Bwa varieties and other Tibeto-Burman languages whenever deemed illustrative. On basis of these sound correspondences, I propose 282 Western Kho-Bwa proto-forms including a total of 92 onsets. The less common reconstructed Western Kho-Bwa onsets are the uvular onsets and the voiceless nasal and approximant onsets.
A unique innovation of the Western Kho-Bwa languages, and indeed the Kho-Bwa languages in general, is the correspondence of initial *s- in other Tibeto-Burman languages to a vocal onset in Proto-Western Kho-Bwa and its descendent varieties. Another relatively unique innovation is the correspondence between Western Kho-Bwa obstruent onsets *b- and *g- ~ *kʰ- ~ *k- and other Tibeto-Burman nasal onsets *m- and *ŋ-, respectively.
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Clitic pronouns in Archaic Chinese
Author(s): Redouane Djamouri and Waltraud Paulpp.: 60–101 (42)More LessAbstractThis article provides evidence for the so far neglected existence of two clitic pronouns, yǐ 以 and yǔ 與, in Archaic Chinese (10th c. – 3rd c. BC) in immediately verb-adjacent position: ‘yǐ/yǔ-V’. While yǔ only encodes the comitative/associative, yǐ encodes all kinds of (argument and adjunct) roles, depending on the semantics of the verb involved. We argue that the clitic pronouns yǐ and yǔ can neither be analysed as stranded prepositions left behind after extraction of their complement (as, e.g., in English) nor as orphan prepositions, i.e., PPs with an in situ null pronoun as complement (as, e.g., in French). This ties in with the general ban against prepositions lacking an overt complement, observed throughout the history of Chinese.
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Modeling gradient processes in Polabian vowel chain shifting and blocking
Author(s): Roslyn Burnspp.: 102–142 (41)More LessAbstractThis paper presents an analysis of two interacting sound changes in the extinct West Slavic language Polabian. Polabian is known to have two types of vowel innovations: (i) the incorporation of acoustic properties from consonant secondary co-articulations (either palatalization or velarization) and (ii) a systematic rotation of vowels (Timberlake 1995). This paper argues that the innovation in (ii) is a vowel chain shift similar to those analyzed in Labov (1994). Unlike the other languages surveyed in Labov (1994), Polabian has phonologically predictable exceptions to the general direction of vowel movement through the acoustic space. Unlike previous work on Polabian, this paper proposes that the vowel chain shift operated simultaneously with the innovation in (i) resulting in phonologically predictable exceptions. This paper tests Timberlake’s (1995) proposal and the current proposal in a Harmonic Grammar (Flemming 2001) which uses Purcell’s (1979) acoustic data from Russian as a proxy. The model only captures the correct distribution of vowel reflexes under the assumption that co-articulatory based innovations and vowel chain shifting were active at the same time.
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Review of Hill (2019): The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese
Author(s): Guillaume Jacquespp.: 143–158 (16)More LessThis article reviews The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese
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