Re: AW: Voynichese = Old/unknown/extinct kind of Chinese dialect

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

"Anders, Claus" wrote:
> 
> Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
>         > It would be too good to be true. Chinese de is (roughly) a
> possessive,
>         > like English 's. But daiin often occurs reduplicated, impossible
> in
> > Chinese, at least the Chinese(s) I know. 

Actually, that duplication is perfectly possible in Chinese,
though they tend to avoid it because it sounds bad.  There are
three different 'de' characters that all perform very similar
grammatical functions, so similar they are often written using
the same character instead of specifying.  These characters all
have alternate meanings and reduplication is very possible.  One
of the characters has the 'target' idea, one has 'ground' and
one has 'virtue' and all of these show up in numerous compounds
with these meanings as well as occuring commonly as grammatical
markers.  If you want to play along that line of thinking, look
for a similar pattern of 'yi' at the beginning of words, these
actually have very pronounced and obvious tones ('de's all slide
toward neutral) but there are a bunch of them and I can see how
they might be appended at word beginnings.  In fact, some of
them eventually became standard compounds because this was a
natural thing to do.  They show up alot more in older texts too,
they have dropped out of spoken speach pretty much, except for
newscasts.
Regards,
Brian