Nathan W. Hill

“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects

Abstract Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazards “mediative” (1999) or Johansons “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis.

An Inventory of Tibetan Sound Laws.

Scholars of Indo-European historical linguistics have long found it convenient to refer to well known sound changes by the name of the researcher who first noticed the correspondences the sound change accounts for. Because of the proven utility of such sound laws in Indo-European linguistics, the explicit listing and naming of sound laws in the Tibeto-Burman family could be expected to bring similar benefits.

A Note on Voicing Alternation In The Tibetan Verbal System

A recent paper on the prehistory of the Tibetan verbal system by Guillaume Jacques (2012), in keeping with many previous authorities, presents Tibetan verbs as occurring in pairs, with a voiced intransitive and a voice-alternating transitive member. However, as noticed by Uray, Tibetan verbs occur in triplets with no relationship between voicing and transitivity.

Grammatically conditioned sound change

In the first half of the 20th century following the Neogrammarian tradition, most researchers believed that sound change was always conditioned by phonetic phenomena and never by grammar. Beginning in the 1960s, proponents of the generative school put forward cases of grammatically conditioned sound change. From then until now, new cases have continued to come to light. A close look at the development of intervocalic -s- in Greek, reveals the divergent approach of the two schools of thought. All examples of grammatical conditioning are amenable to explanation as some combination of regular sound change, analogy, or borrowing. Neither the Neogrammarian belief in exceptionless phonetically conditioned sound change nor the generative inspired belief in grammatical conditioning is a falsifiable hypothesis. Because of its assumptions are more parsimonious and its descriptive power more subtle, the Neogrammarian position is the more appealing of these two equally unprovable doctrines.

The six vowel hypothesis of Old Chinese in comparative context

Gong Hwang-Cherng in two papers (1980, 1995) collected a number of cognate sets among Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. This paper reexamines these cognate sets (base on Gong 1995) using a six vowel version of Old Chinese, specifically the Baxter-Sagart system. In light of six vowel theory it is possible both to be more confident about some cognate sets and possible to reject or revise others.

Tibetan -las, -nas, and -bas

In descriptions of Tibetan grammar it is common to treat -las and -nas together in the discussion of case marking, signalling merely that -las is capable of forming comparisons whereas -nas is not. Similarly, in the discussion of comparison most authors make no distinction between the suffixes -bas and -las. A look at a few examples of these three morphemes demonstrates that they have quite distinct syntax and semantics.

The converb -las in Old Tibetan

In contrast to its description in available grammars and manuals, the converb -las in Old Tibetan is used primarily to mark off the following clause as surprising given the background of the preceding clause. The converb -las enters into two distinct syntactic constructions: after a reduplicated verb it indicates the interruption of a continuous event; and in a three-clause pattern with the converb -kyis, -las introduces a surprise or contrast in the second clause, but -kyis in the third clause returns the sentiment to that of the first clause. Although the examples which demonstrate the use of -las are drawn from Old Tibetan texts, this use continues in later texts.

Challenges of annotation and analysis in computer-assisted language comparison : A case study on Burmish languages

Abstract The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics is growing in popularity. The increasing deployment of such methods draws into focus those areas in which they remain inadequate as well as those areas where classical approaches to language comparison are untransparent and inconsistent. In this paper we illustrate specific challenges which both computational and classical approaches encounter when studying South-East Asian languages. With the help of data from the Burmish language family we point to the challenges resulting from missing annotation standards and insufficient methods for analysis and we illustrate how to tackle these problems within a computer-assisted framework in which computational approaches are used to pre-analyse the data while linguists attend to the detailed analyses.

Tibetan palatalization and the gy versus g.y distinction

The Tibetan script allows two ways of writing followed by , the one normally transliterated and the other .This graphic distinction presumably corresponds to a phonetic distinction in Old Tibetan; revealing that the nature of this phonetic distinction is an essential component of a thorough and accurate description of Old Tibetan phonology. Alternatively, the two letters can be written side by side. In the traditional terminology the here is the sṅon-ḥjug whereas the is the miṅ-gźi. It could be suggested that and do not represent different pronunciations, and that this is a phonetically meaningless although lexicalized difference of orthography comparable with the synchronic difference between and in the orthography of English. This last possibility would have the least explanatory power, and is contradicted by the divergent reflexes of and . Keywords:G.Y distinction; Old Tibetan phonology; Tibetan orthography; Tibetan palatalization; Tibetan script

Tibetan √lan ‘reply’ - ADDENDUM

The authors gratefully acknowledge the UKs Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research as part of the project ‘Tibetan in Digital Communication’.