THE MACRO-COMPARATIVE JOURNAL
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Volume
4 No. 1
December
2013
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CONTENTS
EDITORIAL NEWS
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ARTICLES
A
Comparative Survey of Chinese and Yeniseian tonogeneses
Arnaud Fournet
Abstract: The paper compares the tonogenetic properties
in the touchstone cases of Chinese and Yeniseian languages, where the nature of
tonogenetic phonemes is well-known or little doubtful.
A Comparative Approach of
Balto-Slavic Tonogenesis
Arnaud Fournet
Abstract: The paper deals with the particular
subset of Proto-Indo-European phonemes called laryngeals. It is generally hypothesized that PIE had three or four
such laryngeals, the nature of which has been studied mostly in respect with
their segmental features. In the paper, Balto-Slavic data and tonogenesis are
analyzed so as to determine which tonogenetic features can be retrieved for the
laryngeals hypothesized in PIE. The second part of the paper compares the
tonogenetic properties of PIE laryngeals with the processes attested in Chinese
and Yeniseian languages. This source of information on the phonetic nature of
PIE laryngeals has never been harnessed before.
Assessing Laurent Sagart’s
approach of Sino-Austronesian
Arnaud Fournet
Abstract: The paper assesses the
Sino-Austronesian family proposed by Laurent Sagart. This idea raises several
issues. The first point is that there exists no reconstruction of Old Chinese,
that would account for all Chinese dialects. What exists is reconstructions of
Pre-Proto-Mandarin, but they cannot account for a number of divergent dialects,
especially Min. What is more, it is obvious that the
“reconstruction” of
“Old Chinese”, used by Sagart in his comparison with
Austronesian, seriously fails to account for Chinese dialects in the first
place. Several words which Sagart reconstructs with the same word-final *-a(ˀ) have neither the same tone nor
the same vowel nucleus in present-day dialects, and quite certainly none of
them had *-a(ˀ) as main vowel in
Old Chinese.
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