Abstract
This paper provides support for Ratliff’s hypothesis of a highly unusual shift from labio-dorsal to lateral affricates in some Hmongic languages. It proposes that this shift, which results from a series of sound changes, constitutes evidence for positing a ‘Tlowic’ subgroup within Hmongic. In addition, it disproves attempts to use correspondences between Chinese labiovelars and Hmongic lateral affricates in borrowings as evidence to revise Chinese historical phonology.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Martha Ratliff and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on previous versions of this work.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
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- Procliticization as a residual of second positioning: evidence from West Iranian languages
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- The lateralization of labio-dorsals in Hmongic
- Book Reviews
- R[obert] D. Fulk: A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages
- Margaret E. Winters: Historical Linguistics: A cognitive grammar introduction
- Lotte Sommerer and Elena Smirnova: Nodes and networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar
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- IE6.com. Cleaning data with OpenRefine
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Cyclic changes to the negative coordinating conjunction from Latin to Modern French
- Dative experiencers with nominal predicates in Romanian: a synchronic and diachronic study
- Procliticization as a residual of second positioning: evidence from West Iranian languages
- The passive voice in ancient Indo-European languages: inflection, derivation, periphrastic verb forms
- The issue of arbitrariness in syntactic reconstruction
- Loss of intersective gradience as the lifeboat of a dying construction. An analysis of the diachronic change of causative bring
- Norse-derived vocabulary in La estorie del evangelie
- The lateralization of labio-dorsals in Hmongic
- Book Reviews
- R[obert] D. Fulk: A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages
- Margaret E. Winters: Historical Linguistics: A cognitive grammar introduction
- Lotte Sommerer and Elena Smirnova: Nodes and networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar
- Program Review
- IE6.com. Cleaning data with OpenRefine