Re: new book on the spread of IE

On Feb 16, 12:00 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 15, 10:31 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Feb 15, 10:34 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Case in example. The arrival of voiceless labio-dental fricative /f/
to Chinese dialects is ubiqutous (this even happened in Vietnamese,
which is not exactly a Chinese dialect.)

It isn't the least bit a Chinese dialect.

I think I know more about Vietnamese and its relationship to Chinese
than you.

It is very, very obvious that you do not.

Vietnamese is, with not the slightest doubt or question, an
Austroasiatic language, belonging to the Mon-Khmer division. It has a
large number of Chinese loanwords.

When you are missing some front upper teeth, you can't really make
the /f/ sound.

What do "canines or lateral incisors" have to do with [f]?

Oh please.

Maybe you don't know exactly which teeth are the "canines or lateral
incisors,"

Or maybe you don't know how an [f] is formed.

How does tooth removal in some individuals affect an entire language
family?

It's not *some*. Not too long ago it was nearly universal in Taiwan's
aborigine groups. Same practice is observed all over Austronesian
civilization areas. Tooth extraction in Southeast Asia has already
been discussed more than half a century ago by people like Ling Shun-
Sheng (凌純聲).

Even if every tooth in the head of every speaker of an Austronesian-
speaker were extracted, what effect would that have on the utterly
unrelated Chinese languages?

What effect on _any_ language does _any_ physical characteristic of
its speakers, whether inborn or acquired, have? How does tooth-
extraction affect the neural organization of the human brain?
.

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