Language Log

29 Comments

1. Victor Mair said,

   December 23, 2017 @ 10:05 pm

   From Hiroshi Kumamoto:

   =====

   Martin Schwartz wrote:

   It occurred to me that in the obscure Av. passage with sâ∂aiiaNtî-, the word which looks like 'reeds' can probably mean 'canes', which figure in some kinds of armor and shields.

   =====

   See the Dec. 20 post on téng jiǎbīng 藤甲兵 ("soldiers [wearing] cane / rattan armor") here:

   https://twitter.com/Chinaswordbot

   The story referred to there from Sānguó yǎnyì 三國演義 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Chapter 90, is, according to the translation of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor, as follows:

   =====

   His warriors wear rattan armor. This rattan grows in gullies, climbing over rocks and walls. The inhabitants cut the rattans and steep them in oil for half a year. Then they are dried in the sun. When dry they are steeped again, and so on many times. Then they are plaited into helmets and armor. Clad in this, the men float across rivers, and it does not get wet. No weapon can penetrate it. The soldiers are called the Rattan Army.

   =====

2. Victor Mair said,

   December 24, 2017 @ 7:20 am

   Another publication that would fit well in this series of posts is:

   Robert S. Bauer, “Sino-Tibetan *kolo 'Wheel',” Sino-Platonic Papers 47 (Aug. 1994), 1-11. (free pdf)

   http://www.sino-platonic.org/

3. Paul R. Goldin said,

   December 24, 2017 @ 8:36 pm

   Two comments.

   "Further evidence that fá 瞂 is merely an attempt to record the sound of a borrowed word or a word that was being passed around in the oral realm without a fixed written form is provided by the fact that this same word is also tellingly written with bá 犮 ("pull up") as the phonophore on the right, but gé 革 ("leather" [N.B.!]) on the left as semantophore.  Equally revealing is that the same word may also be written with dùn 盾 ("shield") on the left as semantophore and fá 伐 ("cut; chop; attack; strike; cut down; fell") on the right as phonophore."

   The same is true of virtually any Chinese word, whether Sino-Tibetan or borrowed. Show me a word that has, throughout history, been written in one and only one way! So the fact that the word is written in different ways does not, in and of itself, tell you that it must have been borrowed from another language.

   Better evidence might be the fact that neither 伐 nor 犮 normally means "shield." (If anything, they mean the opposite: "strike" and "uproot.") But this is also far from sufficient to establish that the word was borrowed. (Another word undoubtedly related to 伐 is 發, but of course that doesn't normally mean "shield" either.)

   So … maybe the word really is borrowed from some other language, but this can't be determined by analyzing the graph(s) used to write it.

   "[OS reconstructions] are only very rough, theoretical approximations of OS pronunciations."

   This statement is misleading because reconstructions are phonemic. Treating them as though they were pronunciations fosters serious confusion. And the phrase "OS pronunciations" reflects a category mistake, doesn't it? As I understand it, the reason why you use the word "Sinitic" instead of "Chinese" in these contexts is to emphasize that Sinitic is a language family, not a single language. So then "Sinitic" cannot have a single set of pronunciations. Maybe you mean Proto-Sinitic, i.e. the single language (if there was one) from which all the Sinitic daughter languages derive?

4. Chau said,

   December 25, 2017 @ 8:49 pm

   I thoroughly enjoyed reading this magnificent post.

   Regarding 盾 'shield' I might add a bit about an historical aspect of its pronunciation. Currently it is pronounced dùn in MSM and tún in Taiwanese. The differences in tones (去聲 in MSM vs. 上聲 in Tw) and the initial (d- in pinyin vs. t- in POJ) between the two topolects pare greatly when it is compared with what is given in Kangxi 康熙字典. For the meaning of 'shield', historically, the 切韻 system indicates 食尹切 or 豎尹切 and a 上聲 tone. This would lead to sún in Tw. or shŭn in MSM. From the Classical times all the way down to the Early Qing, it was presumably always this way. Only in a special usage – a personal name 晉卿趙盾 – is it pronounced something like dùn in MSM (tún in Tw). Something must have happened between Kangxi's time and now that allowed a minor alternate reading dùn to usurp the long-established reading shŭn for the 'shield' meaning.

   If we look at words with 盾 as the phonophore, we see that its pronunciation vacillates between t- and s- initials (in Taiwanese):

   t-: 楯 tún, 輴 tun, 遁 tūn, 腯 tún/thún;
   s-: 偱 sûn, 循 sûn, 䋸 sûn, 揗 sûn/sūn.

   This vacillation may have facilitated the initial sound shift to the current reading of 盾 for the meaning of 'shield'.

   Taking the historical reading sún for 盾, then it is quite straight forward to connect it with Latin scūtum 'an oblong shield, made of wood covered with leather'. With sk- turning into sh-/s- (Cf. Danish waskmaskine and English wash machine) and -t into -n by homorganic nasalization, we have:

   L. scūtum > scūt- > Tw sún / MSM shŭn for 盾 'shield'.

5. ~flow said,

   December 26, 2017 @ 8:50 am

   @Paul concerning phonemic vs phonetic reconstructions, single vs multiple language comparisons—I think you're throwing hairballs at the wrong target.

   'Phonemic' can mean a number of things, depending on the author and the subject of study, but generally what people come up with and label as 'phonemes' will be roughly what can be paraphrased as 'group of sounds that are somewhat similar in nature and linked by historical / synchronic processes or morphophonemic alternations'.

   Secondly, I understand those historical reconstructions of earlier stages, at least in the case of Chinese / Sinitic, as being less of 'inventories of sounds that were used in a single language at a given point in time', but more as 'inventories of systematic sound classes that hint at the phonologies as were prevalent among speakers of more or less closely related variants of a language, such that these inventories and their internal relationships suffice and are phonetically plausible to explain the data points (historical and present-day) that we can observe' (e.g. modern Korean /pul/, Japanese /butu/, Mandarin /fo/, Sanskrit /buddha/ point to a reconstruction where that word had a bilabial plosive in initial and an alveolar stop in the final in some earlier stages of Chinese).

   I do not think that such reconstructions should be taken to mean necessarily that any individual speaker ever used the full gamut of distinctions as are present in the system (impossible if you look at e.g. Karlgren's vowel systems); rather, I take these projections (like the classical rime tables) as amalgams of several 'dialects' that try and show what can, was, and should be differentiated in order to explain the data (or write poems such that they work for speakers from far flung quarters).

   This, I imagine, is not unlike a cross-dialectal sound system of modern English where you might come up with as many Lexical Sets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set) as there are different groupings of vowel phonemes in the many chief varieties of (Southern British, Scottish, American, Australian, Indian…) English.

   So then "[OS reconstructions] are only very rough, theoretical approximations of OS pronunciations." becomes a perfectly cromulent statement.

6. Chris Button said,

   December 26, 2017 @ 9:11 am

   @ Flow

   'Phonemic' can mean a number of things..

   I would agree with that sentiment since it really depends on how deep your phonemic analysis goes. For example, Baxter & Sagart reconstruct a phonemic /e/ vowel but I would say that is too "surfacey" for want of a better word and definitely overly prescriptive. For me the phonemic representation would be /ʲa/ or /ja/ with their "e" sometimes surfacing due to assimilation, but this should not ignore all the other surface phonetic representations that may result too at any synchronic stage (e.g. /ia/ /ie/ /je/ etc etc)

   @ Victor Mair

   Another publication that would fit well in this series of posts is:

   Robert S. Bauer, “Sino-Tibetan *kolo 'Wheel',” Sino-Platonic Papers 47 (Aug. 1994), 1-11. (free pdf)

   It's interesting to see how the word represented by 車 was completely appropriated in Chinese as something native regardless of its Indo-European origin. Sagart (1999) rightly points out a word family with 車, but I don't see this as any reason to doubt the original external origin discussed by Bauer. I would view 牙 as a similar case due to its Austroasiatic origin, although I'm aware it has been proposed that the loan direction was the other way.

7. Paul R. Goldin said,

   December 26, 2017 @ 10:28 am

   One response to "~flow," then I have to move on to other things.

   "I do not think that such reconstructions should be taken to mean necessarily that any individual speaker ever used the full gamut of distinctions as are present in the system (impossible if you look at e.g. Karlgren's vowel systems); rather, I take these projections (like the classical rime tables) as amalgams of several 'dialects' that try and show what can, was, and should be differentiated in order to explain the data (or write poems such that they work for speakers from far flung quarters)."

   First, sorry, you're wrong about Karlgren. Karlgren made it perfectly clear that he was trying to reconstruct real pronunciations. Just read his introduction to Grammata Serica Recensa, where he leaves little doubt that he was trying to establish phonetic values. In fact, I chalk up the indefatigable Sinological misconceptions about modern reconstructions to scholars who think Karlgren still represents the state of the field.

   Second, suppose you're right: suppose it's true that reconstructions are "amalgams of several 'dialects' that try and show what can, was, and should be differentiated," just like rime tables. It's an interesting idea (and credit for it should go to Jerry Norman and David P. Branner). But look at the consequence of what you're saying: if you're right, then such reconstructions are assuredly not pronunciations. The phrase "Old Sinitic pronunciations" makes about as much sense as "Old Germanic pronunciations."

   It's been fun, but I have to move on. I think we can agree that (a) 瞂 is an interesting word, (b) we don't know where it comes from, and (c) the shape of the graph(s) used to write it won't tell us the answer.

8. ~flow said,

   December 26, 2017 @ 5:32 pm

   @Paul I think in fact it was Karlgren himself who dismissed those new-fangled phonological / phonemic trends of the field, but that doesn't preclude that whatever he came up with isn't better understood as a 'phonological amalgam' of several dialects, e.g. when he proposes to distinguish, for his Ancient Chinese:

   kən, ki̯ĕn, ki̯ən, ki̯əm, kuən, ki̯uĕn, ki̯uən, ki̯ʷĕn, kien, ki̯ɒn, kʻi̯än, kan, kân, kuân, kʷan, gʻi̯ʷän, ngi̯ʷɒn, ɣiʷen, kâng, ki̯ang, kång, kʷâng, kʻi̯ʷang, kung, ki̯ung, ki̯ʷong, ki̯ak, kåk, ɣʷɒng, kʻi̯ʷäng, χi̯ʷɒng, χi̯ang, ɣiʷeng…

   it's hard to imagine a single individual's speech.

   Sure others have come up with other, hopefully simpler solutions.

   You say, "The phrase "Old Sinitic pronunciations" makes about as much sense as "Old Germanic pronunciations.""—but sure that does make sense. Today we can very well go and compare 'sounds' like p, b across languages and sure is that valid. If we don't do that it'd make no sense to state that e.g. "/ð/ and /θ/ are found in English but not in German". Sure you can abstract phonetics out of phonology and treat it all as a glass-beads game of logic and relationships, but you then foreclose any way to take phonetic plausibility into account, too.

   That is to say that such an ethereal phonological theory which denies that I can compare, say, pre-modern Chinese /ki-/ with, say, early Romance /ki-/ *on the grounds that they sounded very much alike*—also denies us to say that the respective historical developments of these sounds share a common auditory and articulatory base that makes their parallel evolutions plausible.

9. Jonathan Smith said,

   December 26, 2017 @ 8:49 pm

   "We should not take OS reconstructions too literally […] [they are] formulaic representations of phonological relationships and principles."

   This is not entirely wrong… but mostly it has become code for "don't take my reconstructions too literally wherever they're phonetically preposterous; in those cases the IPA representations (cough cough) are just symbolic and shit."

   Phoneme systems are subconscious — insidious — analyses on the gestalt that hits our ears. The 36 zimu of traditional yinyunxue, to take one example, are obviously more contrived but nonetheless parallel sorts of analyses for which "phonemes" is thus a reasonably adequate (certainly best available) characterization. Ditto for other traditional categorizations. So yes, Old Chinese reconstructions feature wrong stuff and fake stuff, but at their core are trying to be phonemic. If one wants to be formulaic, one might consider purely symbolic devices — in OC, capital "A", the dash "-", Schuessler's A/B diacritics, etc., are examples.

10. Victor Mair said,

    December 27, 2017 @ 5:58 am

    Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978) was a pioneer in the reconstruction of Old Sinitic. When I was talking about historical phonologists who do not take such reconstructions literally as representing speech sounds more than two millennia ago, I was thinking of contemporary scholars such as W. South Coblin and David Prager Branner, and I'm sure their views would not differ much from that of the late Jerry Norman (1936-2012).

    —–

    "Better evidence might be the fact that neither 伐 nor 犮 normally means 'shield.'"

    [VHM: I said as much in the o.p.]

    —–

    "I think we can agree that (a) 瞂 is an interesting word [VHM: that's what this post is all about, and so far everyone who has read the post and communicated with me concerning fá 瞂 {pelta; small shield — Middle Sinitic bjwot} thinks that it is well worth discussing], (b) we don't know where it comes from [VHM: well, goodness, that's what we're working at], and (c) the shape of the graph(s) used to write it won't tell us the answer [VHM: couldn't agree more; that's why I'm focusing on sounds, not the graphs, as explained in the o.p.]."

    —–

    "category mistake / error"

    [VHM: anti-comparativists are fond of levelling that charge when confronted with empirical data — e.g., archeological, visual, material, genetic, biological… evidence — that they don't know how to process]

    —–

    "One response to ~flow, then I have to move on to other things."

    "It's been fun, but I have to move on."

    [VHM: I'm here for the duration.]

11. Chris Button said,

    December 27, 2017 @ 10:48 am

    I think this will be a tough one to prove conclusively, but here are some random ruminations that might trigger some thoughts by other people:

    – If "pelta" is indeed from PIE *pel- "skin" with a suffix (as Calvert Watkins treats it) then the presence of 革 rather than 盾 noted by Prof. Mair in a variant form of 瞂 is very interesting.

    – Looking at other Chinese borrowings where one character is being used for two syllables, we can probably ignore the final "a" to leave us with something like "pelt". The final cluster -lt is of course a problem since in PIE all the sonorants could pattern as syllabic bases to give clusters whereas in OC only the glides j and w, and depending on its analysis rhotic r, could do so. Since l and t are both coronal, perhaps OC just went with one coronal to cover both.

    – Final -l in OC was not a "dark l" /ɫ/ since it merged with final -j early on (most OC reconstructions unfortunately ignore its existence completely). If the -l in "pelta" was dark (is there a way of confirming this?) then this could perhaps have contributed to the lowering of the vowel to "a" in OC and its segmental omission in favor of -t

12. Victor Mair said,

    December 27, 2017 @ 1:31 pm

    @Chris Button

    Thank you very much for your good comment. I was hoping that someone would notice that (about the leather semantophore).

13. Jake said,

    December 27, 2017 @ 4:08 pm

    I don't know as many as a single thing about Middle Chinese, how should I think of "bjwot" as being pronounced?

14. David Branner said,

    December 27, 2017 @ 9:04 pm

    It's long past time to retire the Karlgren model of Chinese historical phonology. (Dare I hope that people will stop reprinting his reconstructions, too — even in the LFK or B-S recensions?) I'll be presenting about this at the National AOS in March, in case anyone aboard here wants to come for a wrassle.

15. ~flow said,

    December 28, 2017 @ 6:18 pm

    @Jake if bjwot was my analysis for *modern* Chinese I'd intend -jw- (or exchangeably i for j, u for w) to stand for a single vowel or a diphthong (depending on the overall syllable in question) that combines the features (gestures) 'high', 'palatal/front', 'labial/rounded'; all of [ü] (as in French "tu"), [iu] (as in E. "you") and [ui] (as in E. "we") fill that bill.

    (For Mandarin the choice to view [ü] as a combination of /i/ and /u/ is tempting because only one of /i/ and /u/ may co-occur in one syllable; thus, /ni/, /nu/, /nau/, /gua/, /guai/ are all legal, but */-iai/, */-uau/ and crucially */üai/, */üau/ are not.)

    If I had to pronounce bjwot, I'd say [büot] or [biuot] (with /i/ as a glide) ; [buiot] (with /u/ as a glide) seems unlikely (to me for reasons of sonority, syllable complexity).

16. Paul R. Goldin said,

    December 28, 2017 @ 7:41 pm

    Against my better judgment …

    "If I had to pronounce bjwot, I'd say [büot] or [biuot]"

    I'll bet a billion dollars it wasn't büot or biuot, and guess what–I'll get to keep my billion dollars, because nobody can go back in time and record a native speaker in Tang-dynasty Chang'an. That's the whole point. Historical linguistics cannot reconstruct pronunciations, so linguistic reconstructions don't even try. It's a very fundamental mistake (a category mistake) to misinterpret them as though they were pronunciations.

    Jake, don't try to pronounce bjwot. It's a perfect illustration of what I was saying, because (a) it's based on Karlgren's reconstructions, which are hopelessly obsolete (because they were based on invalid assumptions), and (b) see the preceding paragraph. (The -w- is based on a misunderstanding of a phenomenon called hekou 合口.) As David Branner said a couple of posts ago, dictionaries shouldn't mislead their readers by perpetuating monstrosities like bjwot.

    In fact, the very name "Middle Chinese" is misleading. It's not like Middle English or Middle High German because we have texts in those languages that are written in a reasonably transparent phonetic script. Middle Chinese is a construct.

    And this comment reminds me of something else I meant to say:

    "if bjwot was my analysis"

    I think it's pretty tacky to participate in a conversation like this anonymously. If you're going to say something, take responsibility for it.

17. Chris Button said,

    December 29, 2017 @ 12:26 pm

    @ Paul R. Goldin

    Are "cot" and "caught" or "poor" and "pour" homophonous pairs? For some speakers they are, for others they are not. If we were trying to make a synchonic statement about today's English looking back from a couple of thousand years in the future, should we reconstruct them as the same or not? Therein lies one of the major problems with the reconstruction of Old Chinese.

    Further to my first post above, regardless of whether people like Karlgren or Baxter & Sagart claim to be reconstructing surface phonetic realisations or underlying phonemes, the problem is exactly the same when they insist that something should unequivocally rhyme a certain way.

    The statistical data on variations between British and American English pronunciation in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary would have been incredible useful to our hypothetical future selves 2000 years from now if no recordings existed for some reason. However, it would be incredibly foolhardy of us to use the weight of a statistical majority, however big or small, to make a definitive statement in no uncertain terms for all speakers about whether "caught" or "cot" were homophones. As I have said previously on Language Log, the rhyme statistics in Baxter's Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology are an incredibly valuable contribution to scholarship (as is the entire work), but his use of the data to reconstruct immutable Old Chinese rhymes (i.e. there can be but one surface phonetic realization for all speakers) is fundamentally misled in my opinion.

18. Wolfgang Behr said,

    December 29, 2017 @ 3:52 pm

    If you'd like to push these Central Asian 'shield' comparisons even further, you might be tempted to think of a relationship between Tk. kalkan 'shield' and Chinese 干 OC (BS) *k!ar 'shield', of course, which is — speaking of orthographic variation — sometimes written as , i.e. with a determinative ("semantophore") ge1 戈 (OC *kw!aj) 'dagger-axe' and a derived phonopohore 旱. Since the xiesheng series of 干 clearly had final *-r, rather than *-n in OC, the contact with Turkic would have to postdate that change for which there are competing datings in the literature. dun4 盾, on the other hand, which is used as a gloss for in the Shuowen, is likely to have come from *-n, rather than *-r in OC. The reason why it would not have been a good match for Tk. tura is that it clearly came from a lateral series (OC *l!unʔ > MC *dwonX). Even if it was borrowed after the hardening of laterals in Han Chinese by a form of Turkic it remains unclear to me why an unvoiced early MC *dw- would have been rendered by Turkic *t-.

19. ~flow said,

    December 29, 2017 @ 9:05 pm

    @David Branner I'm looking forward to that. I believe I made it clear that I see some issues with Karlgren's analyses.

    @Paul R. Goldin ""if bjwot was my analysis" … tacky ". 'bjwot' as *such* is no monstrosity. It's the packaging of so many similar, yet allegedly distinctive features into the space of single syllables of an allegedly single dialect that is problematic (apart from other details). That Karlgren's reconstructions can be regarded as outdated now doesn't mean we cannot or should not discuss them (without getting personal).

    You say "The -w- is based on a misunderstanding of a phenomenon called hekou 合口"; well, hekou(hu) is all about labiality / lip rounding, isn't it?

20. Chris Button said,

    December 29, 2017 @ 10:22 pm

    It's long past time to retire the Karlgren model of Chinese historical phonology

    True, although I can think of at least one aspect that while requiring modification seems to have fallen by the wayside in many modern reconstructions. As Pulleyblank quite correctly pointed out, there must have been at least some kind of velar component such as an approximant or fricative (albeit not Karlgren's g but still in someways preferable to a completely open syllable) in words like 來. Otherwise, how does one account for the appearance of a j coda in its Middle Chinese reflex or for the k coda in a word like 麥?

21. ~flow said,

    December 30, 2017 @ 6:28 am

    @Chris Button

    If I understand you correctly, then one should rather assume 'degrees' and / or 'modes' of lets-call-it 'harmony in rhyme', correct? Such that E. "hat", "bad" is a worse rhyme than "hat", "cat", and also different in nature from "hat", "hot", which is another 'non-optimal, but still possible' rhyme. We'd have to factor in differences between dialects that may or may not merge some of the words in speech that appear in rhyming positions.

    If we were to build a table of Lexical Sets (a la Wells) from such observations (maybe with the objective of giving sets of words for use in lyrics that do not grind on any listener from any of the considered dialect backgrounds), that table would sure look somewhat puzzling for any speaker of just a single modern English dialect. If we'd then go and condense / reconstruct 'one single true' form of speech from that table—we'd do what you call "fundamentally misled" in the above.

22. Jonathan Smith said,

    December 30, 2017 @ 2:17 pm

    @~flow
    See List, Using Network Models to Analyze Old Chinese Rhyme Data

    For some reason, Old Chinese "reconstruction," or whatever you want to call it in this special case, is a puzzle which proves hard to resist… witness Pulleyblank or indeed Norman, a some-time advocate for focus on comparative work on modern varieties whose various controversial "reconstructive" proposals at the same time now account for most of what is novel about Baxter & Sagart (2014)…

23. DD'eDeN said,

    December 30, 2017 @ 2:27 pm

    I'm very interested in the most ancient round-shields ever used by early humans. Why? I think that they were the very first shelters, portable, sun-shading, rain-shedding, predator-shielding, prey-hidehunting concave domiciles (dome shields) lifted for entry/exit, only much later becoming permanent structures with doorways. Since I've already explained, I'll give what I think was the name: xyambuangolu. I noticed the term Clipeus Argŏlĭcus. Argolicus/Argos reminds me of arigolu (India: father's/sun bowlboat=coracle = parical/parisal), which I consider the inversion of mongolu (Mbuti: mother's/moon dome hut).

24. ~flow said,

    December 30, 2017 @ 7:36 pm

    @Jonathan thanks a lot for the interesting link! The page also links to https://shh-mpg.academia.edu/JohannMattisList which in turn contains a lot of material on Chinese, historical linguistics and so on. Thanks!

25. Chris Button said,

    December 31, 2017 @ 5:28 am

    @ ~flow

    Sort of.

    If we have for example data for a rhyme -wat showing that it rhymes in the majority of cases with other words with -wat but in a minority of cases with words with -at, then a reconstruction of -ot might reflect a common surface assimilation of -wat > -ot but shows no flexibility in being able to capture the rhymes in -at.

    The irony is that people who reconstruct things like -ot in Proto-Tibeto-Burman / Proto-Sino-Tibetan languages often then call on a supposed "vowel breaking" at later stages of the languages when they need to get back to a -wat rhyme as a result of new phonological/phonotactic considerations. Needless to say, such a miraculously clean split of features (also without positing any conditioning environment) is not how such dipthongization processes (aka vowel breaking) generally works!

    Incidentally, Old Burmese is a prime example of this where the script unequivocally demonstrates a whole series of rhymes with -wa- and -ja- (such j and w distinctions with the ablaut variant -ə- were lost due to its lower salience/sonority) such that people have tried to posit unsupportable wholescale "breaking" to account for it in their desire to posit "regular" triangular vowel systems. I'm not sure what Paul R. Goldin's point above regarding "hekou" in Old Chinese is, but perhaps it is connected in some way to this fact?

26. Paul R. Goldin said,

    December 31, 2017 @ 12:38 pm

    The -w- in bjwot is a phantom because hekou is not contrastive after labial initials, as Yuen Ren Chao demonstrated over seventy years ago:

    "Distinctions within Ancient Chinese," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 5.3-4 (1941), esp. 217-27

    "I'm not sure what Paul R. Goldin's point above regarding "hekou" in Old Chinese is"

27. Chris Button said,

    December 31, 2017 @ 1:44 pm

    @ Paul R. Goldin

    Just for a brief moment there I thought I might have found a ə/a supporter, but alas maybe not :(

    Thank you for clarifying your point. Since the Middle Chinese form proposed does indeed have "o" rather than "a" for the vowel, the "w" is technically redundant (at least phonemically) and I suppose something like bjot would suffice which is how Baxter&Sagart transcribe it in their "notation". However, unless I'm mistaken, don't Baxter& Sagart use "o" to represent an unrounded /ʌ/ anyway? I would of course prefer Pulleyblank's reconstruction of Early Middle Chinese buat with the infamous yod "j" being replaced by "u".

28. Chris Button said,

    December 31, 2017 @ 1:59 pm

    If you want the rounded feature to disappear entirely, you will need to derive the Early Middle Chinese form from an Old Chinese "Type-A" syllable such as 茇 (rather than "Type B" in 瞂) where you would simply have bat in Pulleyblank's Early Middle Chinese and also I believe in Baxter &Sagart's Middle Chinese notation.

29. ~flow said,

    December 31, 2017 @ 2:24 pm

    @Paul R. Goldin that a given phonetic factor is not distinctive according to some phonological analysis doesn't mean it's not there, does it? As in Mandarin 'bo', where more or less of an intermittent -w- is audible across speakers, one can analyze that as /bo/ or else as /bw€/, with '€' being a sign for a mid-vowel that sometimes surfaces as [e] and sometimes as [o] (no narrow transcription used here).

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