{"word_count": 342, "character_count": 2158}
Old Tibetan had lost a -j ending (Hill 2014:107). Thus some Tibetan words ending in vowels had a -j after that vowel at some point before Old Tibetan. The words for ‘water’ and ‘lip’ are cases in point: their Tibeto-Burman cognates point to a palatal semivowel coda, and their Chinese cognates point to *-r being the source. WTBodo (Bhat)Lushai (Lorrain)Proto-Karen (LuangThongkum)OC (Baxter-Sagart)ཆུ chu ‘water’dəy ‘water’tui ‘water’thej A 'water'水 *s.turʔ ‘water’མཆུ mchu ‘lip’(gusu)təy ‘lip’(not cognate)n.a.脣 *sə.dur ‘lip’These data point to a correspondence of codas WT zero : Bodo -y : Lushai -i, Proto-Karen -j, OC *&#160;r. The same correspondence can be detected in ‘dog’ after a different vowel, provided the *-[n] coda in OC can be disambiguated to *-r: WTBodo (Bhat)Lushai (Lorrain)Proto-Karen (LuangThongkum)OC (Baxter-Sagart)ཁྱི khyi ‘dog’səy(má) ‘dog’ui ‘dog’thwi B 'dog'犬 *[k]ʷʰˤ[e][n]ʔGuillaume Jacques (2013) proposed that pre-WT initial *wi- and *Cwi- changed to WT ji- and Cji-, citing ‘dog’ as an example of the second part of the law: he reconstructs pre-Tibetan *kwi. The vowel *[e] in the Old Chinese form is ambiguous for *i and *e. With this proviso, our three examples have high vowels on both sides of the comparison. I will conjecture that they reflect PST *u (‘water’, ‘lip)’and *i (‘dog’). Hill’s examples of the OC *-r : WT *-r correspondence all involve nonhigh vowels: that correspondence therefore is complementary with the correspondence just described.The following scenario is suggested: the PST coda *-r remained as *-r in OC after all vowels. In PTB it changed to -j after high vowels, merging with original *-j; after nonhigh vowels it remained as *-r. In WT *-j was lost. Acceptance of this scenario implies that words with WT *-ur or *-ir either did not have high vowels in PTB or did not end in *-r. If the scenario stands, change of PST *-r to *-j after high vowels is a PTB innovation.Hill, Nathan. 2014. Cognates of Old Chinese *-n, *-r, and *-j in Tibetan and Burmese. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 43 (2). pp. 91-109.Jacques, Guillaume. 2013. On pre-Tibetan semi-vowels. BSOAS 76, 2: 289-300.[cite]