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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Chinese Contrary to John Halloran's Thesis?
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References: <5184eg$p8a@halley.pi.net> <seagoat.569.00872857@primenet.com> <51uf3n$np3@dove.nist.gov> <R.seagoat.571.00B396DE@primenet.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 07:18:31 GMT
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In article <R.seagoat.571.00B396DE@primenet.com>,
John A. Halloran <seagoat@primenet.com> wrote:

>This is precisely why I think that the short words of Sumerian describe the 
>world of the language's original speakers.  Following is a collection of 
>culture words which have no more than a single consonant or vowel.  I would 
>argue that these words describe the place and time when the language was 
>invented.  With what could they have spoken, before the invention of the 
>single consonant words?

	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. 

	However, that is not the case, and Chinese (Mandarin Chinese at
least) is a significant counterexample. The majority of words / word roots
in that language are CV or CVN (ending with a n or a ng). However, ancient
Chinese had, or at least is deduced to have had, a greater abundance of 
final consonants, some of which survive in some Chinese "dialects" and in 
borrowings in neighboring languages like Korean. For example, Mandarin 
Chinese has guo for "land, nation", while Korean has guk.

	I'm sure that many of you people can find similar counterexamples
in whatever languages you are familiar with; the English words I can think
of that are V or CV or VC are almost all very basic sorts of words, such
as pronouns and prepositions. Examples: I, me, my, we, us, you, he, she,
her, it, the, who, a, an, two, eight, to, too, at, as, in, on, up, out,
no, so, be, am, are, is, see, saw, eye, ear, eat, ate, cow, key, bee, 
sow, ... 

	Yet English has nearly 1500 years of recorded history, and its 
oldest clearly-established ancestor, proto-Indo-European, goes back 
about 6000 years or so.
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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