Re: new book on the spread of IE

benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx skreiv:

On Feb 17, 5:24 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 16, 6:09 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

You obviously have not been following any of my postings on Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer. Who has been talking more about Mon-Khmer here recently in sci.lang if not me? Your stereotyping people is
amazing.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/3ea88b36a314cdd6

You know zero Mon-Khmer language yet you want to lecture someone that can speak a Mon-Khmer language.

As I said, I know more than you do in this area.

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?

Get your Chinese stereotype out of your mind. Southern Min has exactly 6 vowels, just like Austronesian. Again, I know more on this than you do.

There is a cultural awakening in Mainland China. People are getting
more and more interested in finding out about themselves. Finding out their true heritage. I'd say in mainland this is happening at the college and graduate school level. In Taiwan it's already shifted down to the elementary school level. A lot of past lies are now dwindling at lightning-fast speed. And people like you are becoming outdated fast enough.

I guess it's about time we had a Chinese ethnomaniac telling us that linguistics has got it all wrong, to go with our Indian, Slavic, Greek and other specimens of the type.

The fact that Peter, Brian and you read his posts the same way makes me doubt my own reading capacity. But still:

First I read ekkilu's "Vietnamese, which is not exactly a Chinese dialect" as a classic understatement, parallel to e.g. when making the case for the Iraq war, describing a liberal politician supporting the war as "not exactly a rightwing nutcase".

Then I read his "Your stereotyping people" (to Peter) as a reaction to Peter's reaction upon the missed meaning of the understatement. (Misunderstatement?)

Finally I read his "cultural awakening" as a hope for a renaissance for Chinese minority cultures. His observations may be false, as may the tooth fairy tale, but I didn't catch any Chinese ethnocentric sympathies. If anything, I'd suspect them to be Pan-Austronesian.

But I'm far from being a native speaker of English and may well have got it all wrong.

--
Trond Engen
- turning prosaic
.

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