Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rutgers!news.sgi.com!swrinde!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Chinese Contrary to John Halloran's Thesis?
Message-ID: <petrichDyDMCr.87B@netcom.com>
Keywords: Sumerian, Language Origin
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <5184eg$p8a@halley.pi.net> <R.seagoat.571.00B396DE@primenet.com> <petrichDyBwAv.1z0@netcom.com> <seagoat.581.0086518A@primenet.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 05:38:51 GMT
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Sender: petrich@netcom4.netcom.com

In article <seagoat.581.0086518A@primenet.com>,
John A. Halloran <seagoat@primenet.com> wrote:
>In article <petrichDyBwAv.1z0@netcom.com> petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich) writes:

>>>This is precisely why I think that the short words of Sumerian describe the 
>>>world of the language's original speakers. ...

>>        This would be a more impressive argument if it could be shown that
>>this "feature" is absent from all languages with a long recorded or at
>>least reconstructible history. 

>The form of the Sumerian vocabulary is known since their invention of 
>both syllabic and logographic writing in the third millenium B.C.

	That's NOT my point. My point is that Mandarin Chinese has *lots*
of words with the form CV or CVN, including most of the basic ones -- but 
that many of these were reductions of more general CVC forms, which makes 
John Halloran's thesis a big fat non sequitur.

... I don't 
>believe that Chinese writing is syllabic, which would tend to lead to the 
>truncation to which you refer. 

	Each Chinese symbol stands for a one-syllable word or word root. 
The internal structure of each syllable is irrelevant here -- it could be 
V, CV, CV, or CVC.

... Also, didn't the Chinese vocabulary have a 
>much longer time to undergo transformation, since our evidence for the 
>phonetic structure of Chinese is from much later in time than is our 
>evidence for Sumerian?

	My point is that if one had access to Mandarin Chinese and knew
nothing about other Chinese dialects or the history of the Chinese
language, then John-Halloran arguments would demonstrate that the Chinese
language is a recent invention. 

>The bottom line is that you are trying to make statements about one language 
>by adducing examples from a completely unrelated language. 

	No, I am supplying a counterexample to your thesis.

... There is plenty of 
>evidence within Sumerian that many of its single-consonant words are original 
>to the language instead of being truncated forms of longer words.  The 
>evidence is in the many polysyllabic words that can be analyzed as compounds 
>of the monosyllabic words, many of which were single-consonant monosyllables.  

	Chinese has *exactly* this sort of compounding.

	Furthermore, if some Sumerian ancestor had had severe phonetic 
reduction, then a lot of words could well have become indistinguishable 
in sound, forcing the coinage of new words in order to preserve phonetic 
distinctiveness.

>urgu2: 	ferocity, rage (ur + gu3, barking dog).
>ur: 	dog; carnivorous beast; young man, warrior; enemy; to tremble.
>gu3: 	to exclaim; to utter a cry (said of an animal); noise, sound.

	Semantically OK.

>gada: 	flax; linen (clothing) (gu + da5).
>gu: 	thread; wool yarn; flax; hemp; net.
>da5: 	to surround, beset, besiege.

	Semantically OK, though not quite obvious. The phonetics require 
gu > ga, however.

>muhaldim: 	baker, cook (mu3 + hal + dim2).
>mu3, ma5: 	to mill, grind; to burn.
>hal: 	crotch; to stream, run; to divide; portion, share; secret; divination 
>            expert.
>dim2: 	to make, build, fashion.

	Semantically OK.

>sahar: 	earth, dust, sand, mud, loam; rubbish; sediment (sa5 + hara).
>sa5: 	red, red-brown; red ocher.
>hara, ara3,5: 	to pulverize (in a mortar); to make groats; crushed, pulverized 
>           (har/ar3 + ar3).

	At least possible.

>ans^e: 	male donkey; onager; equid; pack animal (an + s^e).
>an: 	sky, heaven; high; to be high; grain ear/date cluster.
>s^e: 	barley; grain.

	Pure SteveWhittetLinguistics (he lives in sci.archaeology). The 
semantics just don't fit here. Sky + Grain != Donkey.

>s^angar: 	standing clay jar; hunger (s^e + ngar).
>s^e: 	barley; grain.
>ngar; nga2: 	storeroom; to store, accumulate; to deliver, deposit; to place, 
>          set down upon; to make, restore, establish.

	Semantically OK.

>zabar: 	bronze (za + bar6).
>za(2): 	stone, rock; precious or semiprecious stone; hailstone; pit; kernel.
>bar6,7: 	to shine, be bright; to break (of the day); white.

	Semantically OK.

>zubu, zubi: 	sickle (zu2 + bu).
>zu2: 	tooth, teeth; ivory; flint, chert; obsidian; natural glass.
>bu(6): 	to tear, cut off; to pull, draw; to be drawn; to tear out, uproot.

	Semantically OK.

>This tells us that at the time that the Sumerians invented their word for 
>sickle, the words zu2 and bu were in the same form in which they have come 
>down to us.  These are not truncated versions of longer original forms.

	That's a totally empty assertion -- and demonstrably false in the 
case of Mandarin Chinese.

>So please analyze the language in question, instead of discussing how you 
>think it could be, based on another language that you know.

	That's not the point. My point is that your conclusions are pure 
non sequitur, as judged by not only Chinese, but also English.

>If you have evidence that any of the Sumerian single-consonant words that I 
>listed as early culture words are actually truncations of longer words, I will 
>be happy to examine your evidence. 

	The trouble here is that there would be no written evidence for 
the non-truncated forms, and one's best hope here is to do comparative 
linguistics.
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
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