{"word_count": 944, "character_count": 5803}
One of the weaker Sino-Tibetan comparisons in the STEDT can be found here:#1160 PTB *ŋ-(w)aːy COPULATE / MAKE LOVE / LOVE / GENTLEThe reconstructed form has detachable *ŋ- pre-initial (not a prefix), and a *w- onset marked as optional by means of parentheses. ((There is nothing wrong in itself with parentheses. Baxter and Sagart (2014) use parentheses in their OC reconstruction to signal phonemes whose presence or absence in a protoform are both compatible with all the comparative evidence at hand: for instance they reconstruct medial-r- between parentheses in 夫 *p(r)a &#62; pju &#62; fū ‘man’&#160; because given Middle Chinese pju it is impossible to decide whether Old Chinese had -r- or not. Matisoff's parenthesized phonemes are different: they are used to make manifest Matisoff's decision to overlook a phoneme in making cognate decisions.)) The possibility that forms with and without reflexes of these elements are unrelated is not given any consideration. In Matisoff's Schrödinger-like version of comparative reconstruction, phonemes can be there, and not there.At Sino-Tibetan level, 'PTB *ŋ-(w)a:y' is compared with Chinese 愛 'to love', Middle Chinese&#160; 'ojH &#62; modern ài.&#160; The Chinese comparandum is vaunted as 'excellent' at the top of the STEDT page for this set.愛 ài expresses a kind of feeling associated with the Confucian virtue of 仁 *niŋ &#62; nyin &#62; rén ‘kind(-ness), benevolence’.&#160; Although its modern meaning is 'to love', and it is often translated by the verb 'to love', its more specific meaning in classical texts is&#160; 'to care for',&#160; as in this famous passage from the Confucian Analects 3.17/6/6, where in response to his disciple Zigong's objection to the ritual sacrifice of a sheep, Confucius is quoted as saying "爾愛其羊，我愛其禮" "You love (=care for) the sheep, I love (=care&#160; for) the rite". Such is probably the original meaning.&#160; The OC word for 'to love' was 字 *mə-dzə(ʔ)-s, correctly compared by Benedict to his PTB *m-dza 'to love'.&#160; In all Chinese dialects except (to my knowledge) the very archaic Waxiang and Caijia dialects, this word has been displaced by 愛 ài. 'Love' semantics, in the sense of a warm feeling one experiences for an individual person, are not old with 愛 ài.A&#160; minimal version of the comparison in STEDT had appeared in Benedict's Conspectus (1972:192, fn.491): it related Proto-Karen *ʔai 'love' with 愛 ài. This would&#160; be phonologically viable if the OC root ended in *-əj. In general, MC words with grave initials and rhyme -ojH (with 'H' for tone C, a.k.a qusheng) can go back to OC *-əj(ʔ)-s, *-ə(ʔ)-s, *-ək-s, *-ət-s or *-əp-s. Of these, only *-əj(ʔ)-s could potentially match forms in -a(:)j&#160; outside of Sinitic. However, Baxter (1992) reconstructed *ʔɨt-s, with root-final *-t. Still, Zev J. Handel maintains at the bottom of the STEDT page for the item under review that *-j-s remains possible because OC rhyming does not provide direct evidence of contacts with *-t. While this is true, one should keep in mind that 愛 ài only rhymes once in the Shi Jing, and 僾 ài&#160; ‘to pant, lose the breath’, whose phonetic is 愛 ài, also once: the opportunities for an unsuffixed final stop to surface in rhyming are thus quite limited. Absence of *-t (or *-p, for that matter) among the rhyme contacts of 愛 ài or 僾 ài&#160; is not in itself evidence for a root ending *-j.Word-families provides strong evidence for excluding *-j-s in 僾 ài 'to pant, lose breath', just cited: this word is the s-suffixed derivative of 唈 *qˤ[ə]p &#62; 'op &#62; yì ‘short of breath’.&#160; This is confirmed by the fact that&#160; 僾 ài&#160; ‘to pant, lose the breath’ rhymes with 逮 modern dài &#60; OC *m-rˤəp-s&#160; ‘reach to’&#160; in Ode 257. 逮 dài itself is the s-suffixed derivative of 眔 *m-rˤəp &#62; dop &#62; tà ‘reach to’.&#160; There can be no question that 僾 ài and 逮 dài ended in *-p-s.Baxter and Sagart (2014) accordingly reconstructed 僾 ài&#160; as *qˤəp-s. This in turn cannot be reconciled with the view that 愛 ài ended in *-j-s: how could a word ending in *-j-s&#160; be chosen as a phonetic for another ending in *-p-s ? evidently the root in 愛 ài&#160; also ended in a stop. But which ?While 愛 ài&#160; 'to care for' was reconstructed with *-t-s in Baxter (1992), the OC contrast between *-p-s and *-t-s was lost at a late stage of OC: if the rhyming of 愛 ài&#160;&#160; and 謂 *[ɢ]ʷə[t]-s &#62; hjw+jH &#62; wèi ‘say, tell, call’ in Ode 228 is based on a pronunciation in which the merger had taken place, 愛 ài may have had *-p-s earlier on, like 僾 ài. Accordingly Baxter and Sagart (2014) reconstructed 愛 ài as *[q]ˤə[p]-s, with square brackets around -[p] to convey the uncertainty between *-p and *-t.Shortly after the publication of their book, and independently from it, Norquest (2015) arrived at the Proto-Hlai reconstruction *ʔə:p 'to love'. He did not notice any connection to Chinese 愛 ài . Norquest's *ʔə:p is not found in the other Kra-Dai branches,&#160; in Austronesian or Austroasiatic. It is probably a Chinese loanword: this leaves no doubt that the Chinese word's root ending was *-p.Chinese root-final *-p is not reflected anywhere in the rest of Matisoff's set: the likelihood that the Chinese form is related to the rest is nonexistent. The superficial resemblance between the Chinese and Karen forms is the fruit of convergence.referencesBaxter, W. H.&#160; 1992. A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology. Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 64. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Baxter, William H. and Laurent Sagart. 2014. Old Chinese: a new reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press.Benedict, P.K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan: a Conspectus. Cambridge: University Printing House.Norquest, Peter. 2015. A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai. Brill.[cite]