Re: Chinese again (was VMs: excessive frequency of doubles...)

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, Philip Neal wrote:
> What interested me is that Sagart claims to show that the lost initial
> consonant clusters of Old Chinese (kl- pl- and so on) frequently survive
> as disyllabic words in the modern dialects. He has examples of the same
> two-syllable word from as far apart as Shanxi and Fujian with
> etymologies in Old Chinese.

This reminds me of things that happen in Australian languages.  Most of
the continent has languages in which roots tend to be polysyllabic -
bisyllabic or better.  In certain areas in the north there are languages
with shorter roots.  Initially these looked like they might not be related
to the others.  But it turned out that they had developed from something
like the southern pattern by syncopating or deleting the initial syllables
of words in certain regular ways.  We see signs of something similar in
the Siouan languages, except that we've got all "northern"  types of
languages (in Australian terms).  It leads to languages with short roots
and a tendency to initial clusters, with not many medial ones.
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