The merger of Proto-Burmish *ts and *č in Burmese

Although Old Burmese is the earliest attested Burmish language, more recently attested kindred languages preserve archaic features which Old Burmese has lost. This paper examines one such Burmese innovation, the merger of *ts and *č

Review of Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction. By James A. Matisoff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003

Proposing many new cognate sets and building on many decades of his own previous research, Matisoff (2003) represents a major contribution to Tibeto-Burman linguistics. Unfortunately, Matisoff’s use of Tibetan is marred by errors of fact and analysis, which together undermine confidence in his reconstructions

“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of h. dug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard’s “mediative” (1999) or Johanson’s “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis

Evolution of the Burmese vowel system

Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics has relied heavily on the spelling of Burmese and Tibetan words as found in standard modern dictionaries, at the expense of the earliest attested records. This examination of the development of the Burmese vowel system, in the light of early Burmese philological data and comparisons to Old Chinese and Old Tibetan, facilitates a refined understanding of Burmese historical phonology and the reconstruction of Tibeto-Burman

Aspirated and Unaspirated Voiceless Consonants in Old Tibetan

Although Tibetan orthography distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants, various authors have viewed this distinction as not phonemic. An examination of the unaspirated voiceless initials in the Old Tibetan Inscriptions, together with unaspirated voiceless consonants in several Tibetan dialects confirms that aspiration was either not phonemic in Old Tibetan, or only just emerging as a distinction due to loan words. The data examined also affords evidence for the nature of the phonetic word in Old Tibetan

A note on the phonetic evolution of yod-pa-red in Central Tibet.

Despite the current inconsistent spellings such as yod-red (Tournadre 1996: 229-231 et passim, 2003), yog-red (Denwood 1999: 158 et passim), and yoḥo-red (Hu et al. 1989: 64 et passim) of the existential copula and auxiliary verb which is pronounced as yɔɔ ̀ ree ̀ (Chang and Shefts 1964: 15) or yo:re ' (Tournadre 1996: 229-231) there is widespread agreement that yod-pa-red is the etymological origin of this morpheme (Chang and Chang 1968: 106ff, Tournadre 1996: 229). It is regularly spelled yod-pa-red in the newspaper articles collected from the Mi dmaṅs brñan par (人民畫 報 Peoples Pictorial) by Kamil Sedláček (1972, e.g. p. 27, bsam-gyi yod-pa-red ‘he was thinking’). The pronunciation of this auxiliary is not what one would predict from the spelling. In all likelihood it is the frequency and unstressed syntactic position of the word which led to this deviant phonetic development. The existence of studies and handbooks for the language of Lhasa over more than a century permits us to trance the phonetic development of yod-pa-red with surprising precision

Tibetan <ḥ-> as a plain initial and its place in Old Tibetan Phonology

Beginning with de Kőrös (1834) many researchers have held that the Tibetan letter འ as a simple initial represents a voiced fricative. In 1881 Jäschke initiated an alternative view, which holds that this letter has no phonetic value, instead representing vocalic onset. An examination of the reflexes of relevant Old Tibetan words in the modern Tibetan languages, the order of the Tibetan alphabet, and Old Tibetan phonotactics confirms the earlier tradition of scholarship. It is concluded in addition that in Old Tibetan represented a voiced velar fricative in all syllable positions and that the Common Tibetan values of prenasalization before consonants and vowel lengthening as a final are due to sound change from Old Tibetan to Common Tibetan

ḥdug as a testimonial marker in Classical and Old Tibetan

DeLancey (1992) and Hongladarom (1994) suppose that ḥdug means 'sit' in Old and Classical Tibetan, and that these languages entirely lack the evidential use of this morpheme well known in 'Lhasa' Tibetan. In contrast, Denwood (1999) sees the Classical Tibetan use of ḥdug as broadly in keeping with its function in 'Lhasa' Tibetan. An examination of examples from Old and Classical Tibetan suggests that evidential uses of ḥdug emerged late in the Old Tibetan period and that the meaning 'sit' is idiosyncratic to the Mdzaṅs blun