Happy birthday to our new open access paper 🥳
We argue for an early and strong influence of Javanese on Eastern Indonesian languages (including North Halmahera), which mostly has been overlooked so far in the literature.

evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/df11f5...

New blogpost

sinoxenic.wordpress.com/2025/07/27/a-s…

Cantonese diphthongisation One of the principal defining sound changes of Cantonese is its conditioned breaking of the open rhymes /i u y/ into /ei ou øy/. This sound change was mainly determined by the preceding initial con…

New blog post abt diphthongisation in Cantonese
sinoxenic.wordpress.com/2025/04/26/c...

It is a fascinating look at the diverse weaving traditions of Southwestern China in particular and Asia in general

Additionally it also attempts to reconstruct its history via what is basically the comparative method and how it intersects with the language families of the area

Interesting #BookOfTheDay

The roots of Asian weaving: the He Haiyan collection of textiles and looms from Southwest China by Eric Boudet & Chris Buckley

Aspirated fricatives in Bai Bai refers to a group of languages spoken in Southwestern China. They are in origin likely very early-branching Sinitic languages, perhaps arriving in Yunnan sometime during the Han dynasty (perhap…

Aspirated fricatives in Bai

sinoxenic.wordpress.com/2025/04/05/a...

#Irish ☘️🇮🇪☘️ word of the day: nathair /ˈn̪ˠa.həɾʲ/ “snake”, from OIr. nathir /ˈNa.θʲərʲ/ “snake”, ultimately from PIE *nH̥tr-ík-s “adder”

Despite Ireland famously not having any snakes, this lexeme managed to persist all the way from PIE down to the modern day

On the other hand, if you show a reconstructed Middle Chinese reading you mid start a brawl amongst the Sinologists 🤣

Wonder if there has been a more recent study in Tibetan fortition of /*j/ than Gong (1977)

Hill (2019) has a brief discussion on it but it only includes Li Fang-kuei’s law: *rj- > rgʲ- and not the other proposed sound laws in Gong: *sj- > skʲ- and ɣj- > ɣkʲ-

Are you kidding me…

Hong Kong legco just passed a non-binding motion to “defend the one husband one wife, one man one woman framework of marriage” in the name of “protecting Chinese culture”

Wonder has there been a more recent study in Tibetan fortition of /*j/ than Gong (1977)

Hill (2019) has a brief discussion on it but it only includes Li Fang-kuei’s law: *rj- > rgʲ- and not the other proposed sound laws in Gong: *sj- > skʲ- and ɣj- > ɣkʲ-

The existence of evidently related roots རིས ris and རི་མོ ri-mo, both “painting” also suggest the initial b- is of secondary origin

The former evidently zero nominalised from the ‘imperative’ stem (likely original a stative passive) རིས ris and the latter from the root plus the nominal suffix -མོ -mo

This seems to suggest that in Old Tibetan, the underlying root is √རི √ri with the epenthesis of <d> when adding the prefix ɣ- as seen in the root √རལ √ral “to tear” with stems འདྲལ ɣdral (v1) and རལ ral (v2)

However, this is evidently an innovation as in Old Tibetan, instead of Classical འབྲེལ ɣbris and བྲེལ bris, we instead find the verbs forms འདྲིས ɣdris and རིས ris

In Classical Tibetan sources, this verb is reported with the stems འབྲེལ, བྲེལ, བྲེ and བྲེལ (ɣbris, bris, bri, bris), fitting into Coblin’s Paradigm I with the loss of preinitial b- before a labial consonant

#Tibetan word of the day:

√བྲེ √bri “to write”

This root is apparently related to the lexemes རིས ris and རི་མོ ri-mo, both “painting”

This root was apparently reformed from Old Tibetan √རི √ri based on analogy to the past and future stem