Re: (Wandered from) Re: English as a creole.

Darkstar wrote:
On Jul 7, 3:21 am, Bart Mathias <math...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]

Presumably you are suggesting that Japan-bound or -located speakers of
post-proto-KJ had turned the ancestor of "nunmul" (Yale "nwunmul")


What's Yale? I must be forgetting something.

Yale transcription of Korean, invented by Sam Martin. It has the distinct advantage of avoiding ugly things like "eo" and "eu" for the vowels written that way in a popular system (use "e" and "u" respectively instead; I guess you'd use /o'/ and /u'/), but one pays for it by writing the round high back vowel as "wu" except after labials.

into something on the way to "namida" and the bare word (that has now become)
K "mwul" into "midu," and then replaced their word for "eye" with a new
word from south-east Asia/Austronesia.


First of all, one should note that J has open syllabels, while
Korean, Tungusic and Mongolic have closed syllables, so anything like
nun/na; myr/mida is perfectly regular as far as the number of phonemes
are concerned. The second Japanese vowel is either a recent
development or a recent loss, and the second /-n/ could not survive in
Proto-Japanese (something like *nanmida was forbidden phonemically).
Also cf. na-ku (to weep), possibly the same root.

Bob Ramsey has argued that Korean also goes back to an open-syllable language.

When dealing with closed syllables those clever Japanese simply added a vowel. In many cases where the final consonant was a nasal the nasal-vowel combination got replaced by a newly developed final "n," but the vowel shows up sometimes in old fossilized spellings for words like "Shina-no." I'd expect "nwunmul (nunmyr)" to come out something like "nunumitu/nunamitu/nunamiti/nunamita/..." if borrowed. If you're saying instead that they go back to a common ancestor in proto-KJ, then you should really cite rules from, say, Martin or Whitman, or demonstrate the validity of new sound-change rules.

"Na-k-" has to do with sound, not moisture, let alone eyes!. It has the same root as "ne" < *na-?i = "sound, tone, chirping." It must be related to "nar-" = "to (re)sound, ring" although just how is not clear to me.

Is the final "n" in Korean "nwun" a post-proto-KJ addition?


Proto-Tungus-Manchu has *(n)yisal and Proto-Mongolic *nidu"n (eye),
which seems to confirm that Korean *nun is more archaic.


Korean "u" to Japanese "a"?


K /nugu/ (who): J /nan-/ (what),
K /kudyn/: J /katai/ (hard),
K /ya-ru/ : J /chuo'-/ (give)
Here, *a > u looks like a relatively rarely occuring proto-Korean
innovation, e.g., /para-m/ (wind), but /pul-da/ (to blow) [of
course, /l/ = /r/ in Korean, because they are designated by the same
letter.]

Actually, that's [r] = [l] in Korean. You have to choose either /l/ (as Yale does) or /r/. There's only one phoneme between those two sounds, and it's not because of how people *write* but how they *talk*.

Of your three comparisons, only K /kwut-/ : J /kata-/ doesn't look silly to me.

/palam/ goes back, as I hope you know, to a word I'll type as /p@l@m/, where /@/ stands for the old dot vowel. That vowel has come out in NK sometimes as /a/, sometimes as /u/. But better cases than "wind" and "blow" for an intra-Korean /a/ : /(w)u/ can be found in the families of words like "red/clear/bright" (/p(p)Vlk(V)-/).

I assume you got "K" and "J" backwards in your third comparison. Even so, don't recognize your /chuo'-/, which is presumably related to K /cwu-/.

Why isn't J "water" "mida" instead of "midu,"


Proto-Japanese and Korean */a/ is regular for OJ /u/ in many cases
[such as /kada/ (go): /kuru/ (come), /hada/: /suru/ (do), /tal/ : /
tuki/ (moon), etc.]. This seems to be a recent development in proto-
Japanese. Also note that Japanese /u/ still has little labialization
and is much closer to /y/ (back vowel). So this part seems plausible.

"Go" and "come" are sort of interchangeable in English, but pretty distinct in Japanese and Korean. I don't buy that comparison. I would point out that there is little evidence for a particular vowel in the Japanese word for "come"; the best evidence suggests perhaps an original schwa or mid front vowel. Pretty much the same for J /s-(uru)/, but in this case the MK was /@/ in /h@-/, which makes a better case for a relationship than MK /ka-/ = "change location to somewhere else" and OJ ?/ko2-/ = "change location to here."

Japanese has a long history of delabialization; it's quite likely that an earlier /u/ was round. I'd say "no longer has much labialization" rather than "still has little ..."

But getting back to my query, the fact is that OJ "water" *was* /mi1du/.

How many other cases of Korean "l/r" to Japanese "d" can you cite?

MK /-tyr/ : OJ /-tati/ : Proto-Tungus-Manchu */-sal/ (plural),

K /l/ : J /t/ I wouldn't have questioned. /t/ ~= /d/. (Not that I buy that particular comparison, but I'd have accepted it for /l/ : /t/.)

MK /-Vro/ : OJ /-de/ (instrumental case),

There is no such form in OJ. You must be thinking of /-ni-te/ (whence NJ /-de/).

Mod. K /ary-mda-/ : OJ /utu-ku/ : Proto-Tungus-Manchu */uligd-/
(beautiful),

What happened to the /p/ in K /alumtap-/? What kind of morphmeme is /-mda-/? There is, so far as I can determine, no such thing as "OJ /utu-ku/." There is /utukusi(-)/ that cries out for division somewhere (it's too long, and we know the final /si/ or /Vsi/ was a pre-OJ morpheme), but I see no way to justify your hyphen. You apparently like to make things up.

Did you consider OJ /urup.asi(-)/? Well, but that still won't be a case of /l/ : /d/...

Mod. K /po'l/ < ./po'r/ : OJ /pati/ (bee),

I'd give you a point for that one if it were OJ /padi/.

Mod. Kor /arh-/ : J /ita-/ (hurt) : Proto-Tungus-Manchu */en-/,

Now we've got K /a/ : J /i/! What is the rule for when this happens? (If I could justify comparing those words otherwise, I'd want to make it K /al-h-/ : J /ita-si/ | /it-asi/.) Anyway, it's still the more imaginable /l/ : /t/, not /l/ : /d/. Ditto your next examples.

MK /pirys/ (first) : OJ /pito/ (one),
Mod. K /ul-da/ (to cry, weep), /y-m/ (sound) : OJ /oto/ (sound), OJ /
uta/ (song)

"/y-m/ (sound)"? Aren't you thinking of *Sino*-Koorean /um/? K /wul-/ to J /oto/ (granted the second /o/ is almost certainly an echo-vowel) is way too big a leap for me. As for /uta/, I'm inclined to derive it from /ut-/ = "hit, beat." In early Japanese it meant "poem" (possibly sung or chanted, for all I know), and the idea of composing a poem was expressed as counting the uta (/uta-wo yom-/), which I take as "count the beats" to get the meter.

On the other hand, it is not absolutely evident whether /-d/ in
Japanese is particularly archaic or corresponds to /-l/, because OJ
also had /mi/.

Cf. MK /myr/ : OJ /mi/ (water), MK /pyr/ : OJ /pi"/ (fire),

I've always sort of liked that pair of pairs, even if they don't quite work. Technically, your OJ /mi/ should be /-mi-/--it's always attached to something, before or after, but surely it's real and /mi1du/ is */mi1-du/. The nasty problem is the difference in OJ vowels, which I assume is what you are acknowledging with the /"/ in /pi"/ "fire."

Mod. K /
pol/ < MK /por/ : OJ /po/ (cheek), MK /ata-r/ (son) : /oto-ko/
(husband), /oto-san/ (father),

You're making up words again. Whence the hyphen in /ata-l/? Not all /woto2-ko1/ were husbands, but all you need is "mature male." Still, you've got to take the /w/ into consideration! (There was an /oto2-go1/, but that was just "last-born child"--maybe female.) J /(o)to:saN/ is a modern word of mysterious origin.

MK /tar/ : J /to:/ (tower; probably
from Chinese /tai/)

You must be thinking of J /to:/ < /tapu/ from Chinese on the order of /tap/. I haven't the foggiest where you get MK /tal/, but it wouldn't seem to be relevant in any case.

Also Proto-Tungusic *mu, *muke (water)
Also cf. J /u-mi/ (sea) and /a-mi/ (rain) (vowel prefixes are a
typical Proto-Japanese development probably resulting from an
accomodation of the CVCV-structure).

One guy who wrote a book of "atomic" etymologies of Japanese lexemes suggested /u-mi/ "big-water/, matching it with */u-de/ < /u-/ + /te/, redefining /te/ as "arm" instead of "hand" (cf. /asi/ "leg/foot"), and some other examples of */u-/. Once "big-arm" was established for "arm," /te/ could be relegated to the smaller part of the arm. I confess, I kind of liked it.

You can't have your /a-mi/ "rain," though. It's /am(a)-/; /ama-?i/ gave /ame2/.

Although none or few other instances of /-du/ suffix are found in
Japanese (?), so it's still more likely that -da>-du was part of the
root.

It's still too much of a stretch for me, and neither Oono Susumu nor Sam
Martin have felt it worth mentioning, so it's three to one. :-)


Martin from the 60s? Who cares. That article was not particularly
elaborate.

Martin ain't dead yet. I was basing my remark on Martin from 90s.

Correction: matuge=eyelashes (did I say "brows"?)
Also cf. OJ "matu" (to wait < to watch < "to eye")

I'll settle for /ma-mor-/. I see no justification for any */ma-t-/.

Bart Mathias
.

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