 Okay, well Nathan said that he invited three kinds of people and I suppose that I may count as a Force since I fall to the category of random guy that he happens to know I'm not really a synologist By training originally. I'm a japanologist Actually, but I stopped doing that a long time ago. In fact, I stopped doing linguistics for me a long time ago This is actually my comeback. I haven't had a job in the in the academic in 11 years So coming in as a sort of outsider this talk will be somewhat unorthodox in that It will be in two parts the first part is Is sort of a cautionary and autobiographical story, which is relevant. Don't worry And if you know anything about how Maltese is spelled that's a big clue right there the GH And this will tie into my remarks on Oh Chinese reconstruction in the second half I Prepared this talk Thinking that some of you may not be super familiar with Oh Chinese reconstruction and all the decades of wars and arguments about it. So for some of you this may be rather boring But I'd like to provide some background anyway, at least from my by my experience when I first started learning about Chinese phonology in the early 90s My only exposure to it was through the works of Bernard Colburn I borrowed every carbon book I could find in the library and I regarded it as like a religion. I totally believed it and In the carbon in carbon and carbon type systems of both Chinese reconstruction There are two kinds of syllables that in the notation. I use here, which is not problems one type I Will call after pulley black who came after Colburn a Has no yaw or J and type B has a yaw That is a J in it. I'll be using this color coding throughout this PowerPoint presentation So red means type a blue means type B now for decades. This is this is the reconstruction that people outside Synology use if you look at Japanology stuff if you look at look at Korean studies stuff You will see that carbon stuff is still religiously quoted today as if Baxan cigar had never happened Which really really irritates me, but that's the way it is and that's that like I said I I originated as a japanologist. So this is this is where I started from I was totally unaware of Baxan 1992 Even as I was reading these books by carbon. I had just no idea. I mean in Japanese studies. Nobody mentioned it Then I started looking around and I discovered other interpretations Pulli black in 1962 Interpreted and in terms of vowel length There have been other interpretation since I'm not going to list them here I mean, I'm not going to list them here, but I'm not going to read them I just want to I just don't even have to read this. I just want to point out that there's been lots and lots of ideas about what And you are now 1995 one of my Japanese professors sent me a Journal of the American Oriental Society article by Norman from 1994 and He said oh mark. I think you'd be interested in reading this So I said okay, and and he thought it was so important that this is pre-internet, right? So he mailed it to me in an awful loop to my house and I opened it up and I was absolutely shocked I have never seen anything quite like this before according to Norman All Chinese had three kinds of syllables. Yes, you see two here. I know it says three up there bear with me What I've been calling E and B corresponds to Norman's perennialized consonants and his plain consonants Norman has a third type that I'm going to Ignore which is his retroplex class this I only have half an hour of speech I just can't go into it. So for our purposes I'm going to concentrate on the pharyngealized versus plain Distinction that Norman proposed. So this is 1995 I had just started to emerge out of a whole call gradient religion and This to me just came as just total heresy and unbelievable bizarre and Norman wrote that in his theory His idea was that If a syllable is plain that is he has no pharyngealization It will develop in Palombe deal unless for initialization blocks this Palombe now Here he's argument was based on it was partly based on Arabic This absolutely blew my mind at the time now the crazy things is that I had to take I took a course In which I was introduced to air Arabic phonology morphology, etc. etc So you would have thought I would have been receptive and this is why I say this is a cautionary tale I did have to acknowledge but in my mind it was severed from all this East Asian stuff So I didn't want to listen to Norman. I just thought this just cannot possibly be relevant It didn't help also that Norman possibly due to space constraints or something didn't really explain His Arabic argument as much as he could have and so he didn't get any specific example and so to me this just seemed really bizarre and Moreover by this point Since I was emerging out of the whole call graining religion I had started to question the whole concept of the yaw being the defining characteristic of the AB distinction and At that point I thought well Norman still believes in this yacht stuff even not at the old Chinese level, but at a later level and Since I was becoming skeptical of this job stuff. Thanks to pulley blank. I was starting to switch religions from carbon to pulley blank I was like well, this just can't possibly be right What good could the supposed parallel Arabic be if almost all this Pathalization didn't even exist as pulley black had been arguing so I just totally Put this in a file and kind of forgot about So that was 1995 So for years, I just played almost fully agnostic about the AB distinction I was certain that it did not involve J I was not convinced by the other hypotheses like vowel length that had been proposed Basically, I had no real idea. I'm not I just rejected some ideas, but Um for me it was an algebraic thing Now in 2000 of Wolfgang bear Showed me a unpublished list of later on Chinese reconstructions by Axel Schuessler This completely blew my mind Until then I switched religions again from point blank to Starristan and so I was a big believer in Starristan's 1989 book and its reconstruction and In the unpublished version of my PhD dissertation Starristan has quoted all over the place if you've seen my 2003 book. I chopped out a lot of that stuff Starristan's old Chinese reconstruction looking back strikes me as really complicated I actually wrote diagrams for myself to try to make sense out of it What's done to me about Schuessler was that his his his account of Chinese historic analogy was so simple and It just struck me as currently elegant Here's what I need by elegance Now you may be thinking what why are you talking about? Well Well bear with me One of the key concepts of Schuessler that I just fell in love with instantly. Yep, it's religion changing time again Was what I'll call vowel bending the Schuessler system vowels warp or bend in Schuessler starts off with a six vowel system. That is pretty much familiar to anyone who's worked with Jung-jung or Starristan or backstop cigars. So this is the starting point Bending refers to how in during history of Chinese these simple vowels become More complex in a type syllables and at this point in 2000, I didn't know what a type was. I just said, I don't know High vowels bent down And those low vowel lower vowels stayed low. They're already low and you really can't they and it's like you can't push them any lower Congress we can type these syllables and again at this point. I didn't know what type he really was We have the opposite change where lower vowels are pulled upward And vowels that are already high more or less stay high We can argue these phonetic specifics here. The point is is that the two different types of syllables are associated with two different kinds of warping patterns The details these patterns are arguable put it very by dialect Now What impressed me was that these these workings or bendings were reminiscent to me of Khmer now Khmer One could it could try to project Chinese style terminology. Do not do this But but just for the next two minutes just bear with me In Khmer you could claim that there's two kinds of syllables. In Khmer the type A syllables are have voiceless consonants originally and The type B syllables had voiced consonants originally in the type A Constance in Khmer. You're the same kinds of bendings as in type A Chinese and Similarly the type B now in Khmer again the conditioning factor is the voicing of the initial constant This is not a factory Chinese so the parallels stopped there, but what struck me as me was the was the patterns of bending So Chisler's proposal struck me not only as elegant, but also as Typologically highly plausible I am not trying to say that these two phenomena are related in any way that Khmer's influence by Chinese or anything This is just a pure typological Comparison these did not even happen in remotely the same era Which is why I have older versus newer the Khmer phenomenon happened Perhaps with prayer happened within the last millennium long after this happened in Chinese The point is just that the vowel patterns are quite similar and that in both cases you have a You have a two-way distinction that is characterized in the later stage by different patterns of bending now if we take this bending as a fact and The question becomes What is this happened at this point in 2000 I was agnostic I had no idea Something was pushing It's something was pushing all up Well, it wasn't I didn't know now What I call the Maltese moment happened in the University of light and light the Lighting University library I was looking through linguistics books there at random one day with no real purpose at all I just grabbed some book that had the word Maltese on it on the side I mean, this is just completely Thoughtless I opened it up and again completely at random. I Packed it to be on the section of phonology And I pointed out that in Maltese historically where you had earlier Arabic pharyngeal and the earlier Arabic The bow's bent In the same way that the Chinese More or less For our purposes for the next couple of minutes, we can call this Maltese type A Now in Maltese words that didn't have these The pharyngeal this usually these that these barrier back consonants You'd have Chinese like bendings in the other direction So eyes went upwards to ear This phenomenon of Arabic is called Imala Norman mentioned it in his article, but he didn't say what it was And I had read about Imala a couple of years ago in another article in Arabic But because of the wall in my brain, I just refused to put the two things together The shock we've seen this in Maltese and the Shusei article all within a matter of weeks Just set my brain on fire If Norman had mentioned a specific example of Imala in his article, he might have told me Five years earlier, but no So now they ask us what Imala looked like. I was really excited. I I thought wow, look at this Pharyngeal's conditioning about lowering So I concluded That Imala was happening in Chinese and I'm not really sure it surprised me because Imala means bending Which is exactly what I've been showing you for the last few minutes But at this point, I still don't And at this point I started to think now I finally know what A and B is A is capitalized by pharyngealization I would rightly use the vaguer term that some Arabic linguists use Emphasis because there was a huge literature upon emphasis in Arabic And there's this huge debate on whether it involves pharyngealization or uberalization or this or that I mean, there's just books on this and I prefer using the vaguer term because when we deal with an extinct language, we cannot pretend to Write exact IPA transcriptions of what it was. I mean, so All that matters to me is that these emphatic consonants I'll call them Are somehow different from the others the exact details of this was it where they be lowerized or whatever I think Are open to debate So from this point on I'll mostly use this vaguer term emphasis deliberately Now my next question I'd like to ask one question where where does type A come from type B being non-emphatic I'm pretty certain of that now. I've been certain of that for 15 years I've been looking into Into Semitic historical phonology and just done by stuff I see So now the next for the next 15 for the 15 years after this question for me became What was The source of this all this for immunization Is it primary or is it secondary? Has it always been there? So in part two now, I'm going to get more hardcore in Chinese and less biographical Oh, I was hoping to do that. I made a mistake of not reaching anything during the break now We have the key of my teas We have the friend the fertilization Adversive type A symbolized by high Key there So what happens when we know about this door? What awaits us next? What's behind the the door in Maltese an example of work on bending itself Now rereading more norm in 1994 with a more open mind than I had years earlier I noticed this That a two degree a two-way division of words Is a common phenomenon all over the Eurasian continent this made me think rethink the whole question in terms of Irreal technology now One characteristic of the new background back since the car reconstruction that strikes the strikes me and Possibly others as very unusual is the huge system of 36 inch fatic consonants Or pharyngealized or whatever as you may prefer All of these consonants have type B or non-fatic counterparts except for this rare one there I don't know of any language which has more in fatics than non-fatics now For some time I was that I tried to Reconceive with fewer in fatics than this and I will confess I fail I can't really beat this system. So I'm going to take this as a given what you see here I Do know like more more over the more thought of life This isn't as crazy as I thought it was initially I do know of languages with similarly structured constant inventories. So typologically this is not As bad as it looks When looking into Semitic, um, I found a I found the work of Islam Yusuf who writes a lot about the Arabic of Cairo Now in a description of standard Arabic you have very very few fatics Yusuf's description of Cairo Arabic is stuffed with emphatics. There are 23 of them And they have near total symmetry with the non-emphatics. So superficially this almost looks like the old chinese inventory However, there is a key to this difference so Most of these emphatics are elephants of non-emphatics and not phonemes. Most of these emphatics are predictable They are conditioned by the five True emphatics and by and by something else which I will mention shortly The point though is that it is possible to have a language with tons and tons of emphatics and it's spoken right now it's just that I I mean this just Probably eludes people because of course, there's no way in the Arabic script to write all these emphatics But my assumption is that if you try to pronounce Cairo Arabic without them, you'll sound really bizarre Norman mentioned Russian and I think Russian put me off at the time 1995 because I because in russian the two way distinction is between palatilized and non-palatilized Norman described the russian non-palatilized process as pharyngealized I don't know if I would agree with that but Once again, we have near total symmetry And this time like back since the god of Chinese most most all these pairs really are phonemic But like I just said the russian section post palatilization and old chinese It is true that some type beat syllables palatilizingly old chinese but unlike The calgrenians. I don't define type beat as palatilized so there are limits to these powers of russian A third example that I studied after I initially read norm's article was old turkic Old turkic is written in a runic script and It too has And it too has a two-way opposition But there is no phonemic So the point is that these systems demonstrate that The back since the god system is not typologically as odd as they may seem at first and I will stop there Without actually going into all the original stuff At the end You can just take it out of your question time. Yeah And if you have further get through your slides Really? Yeah, okay Yeah, now What all the three previous systems have in common is this These large systems turkic russian and kairi arabic derive other Diachronically or synchronically from a less complex system In in the case of old turkic the back is in front of the two types of constants are entirely predictable In kairi most of them are predictable And it is true that composition is currently community russian, but it wasn't it wasn't like some permanent eternal thing It's secondary So the question becomes then if these large systems come from small systems What about old chinese? Do we have to assume that the 36 constants are I just have forever from sound Tibetan? I don't know Maybe there maybe old chinese was like classical arabic and had a few core In fads and things just grew and grew and grew or maybe hadn't known that originally. I give up with hypothesis that In early old chinese There were few or no true emphatic and that emphasis was predictable on the basis of something i'll call x In a later stage of chinese corresponding to the vassal cigar reconstruction X is partly or wholly gone once a conditioning factor starts to vanish Something else may become fumimic and in that case it was emphasis So we have this huge constant inventory now These constants in turn influenced following vowels and so that vowel alphons developed after constants In the final phase of both chinese Let's say in han times Emphasis is starting to vanish and the bad vowel alphons come into their own and become fumimic And this is then this in turn results in the very complex qianun system of rhymes So what was x? There's another novel trend toward words get toward word structure getting wish in the in East and southeast asian region That's a cigar so we're trying to assess for syllabic meaning that the word structure is one and a half syllables the half syllable is maximally a consonant and a schwa schwa is the only possible vowel in What's called a pre-syllable modern chinese is so called a monosyllabic yes, we can argue about that but It's this is pretty much gone and this kind of reduction can also be found in other lighter regions of the area Given that emphasis Was located on the initial cost of the main syllable I thought that maybe x must be near that initial to cause it to become a fact What if so my hypothesis is this what if in fact are traces of lost vocalic distinctions in pre-syllables which are right before initials I see in fact is a step in the progression between disyllables and monosyllables in chinese language history This is this is now really going on in the middle here and being very dangerous Let's suppose that in very early chinese you can call it core chinese pre chinese whatever They were actual real disyllables not sesquic syllables And over time the first syllables start to lose their distinctions and fell into two categories We'll call them Which the type a and the b category the type a categories typified by a Low vowel short up and the type b category is typified by a high vowel short in in middle chinese which is Equivalent to the back of cigar reconstruction the short out triggered Emphasis and short did not These vowels I have merged with the schwa or lost entirely or even the the pre-syllable just fell off But the quality of the vowel can be determined by looking at the Quality of the consonant Why do I pick low vowels as conditioning emphasis? Some consider low up as a syllabic form of a pharyngeal blood It's Salish the pharyngeal is a syllabic Alphan of I And in korean arabic low conditions pharyngealophones This is the most important for our purposes I think the spreading of emphasis points with aerial friends I've been talking about a low high distinction low a verses high There are low high vowel systems throughout this region There's a lot of harmony in eurasia of feature spreading I'm going to skip that If we look at Dysyllabic morphines in old chinese and these are attested. This is not my hypothetical super old chinese You can see a lot of confatic harmony I call these type 8 words type bp words based on the type of each syllable My thinking is is that what we're seeing here is the same is the same kind of harmony that would be assessed for syllables But on a bigger scale If you find harmony in re-duplication And I've compiled statistics in a 2008 article that I published Now it is true that not all dysyllabic words fall fit into these patterns And in these cases, I wonder if they are loan words or Compounds that have become opaque over time Now I'm going to conclude with some potential issues for What I'll call the extended in fact theory I consider norman's theory to be the the base the original fact theory minus the extended version the overextended version possibly Well, one problem is this If I can supposedly reconstruct vowel qualities based on in fact emphasis Why is it that we have cases like this where The low vowel that my theory predicts Seems to correspond to a high vowel in a possibly related word This is not good for me I could come up with some kind of ad hoc solution to make this work, but I'd rather not this is rather troubling Of course one could just just throw this entirely away and just say well the oxygenation words just a complete lookalike, but I'm not So sure I'm not by the way, 100% endorsing signal oxygenation here I'm just saying that that this could be a loan word. This could be an aerial word. I have no idea But I don't think this is coincidental And this is not the only case there are others that my theory fails to account for Another problem is if my theory is correct supposedly you might be able to determine vowel qualities and prefixes I have failed to do this. I haven't even tried to do this and frankly I'm a little scared But if I'm correct This should be possible another problem is Trying to explain type a b doublets I've come up with ad hoc solutions like this one, but I don't find them entirely convincing To to prove this particular ad hoc solution I have to demonstrate that in every case of the body part prefix. I can make it work with a high vowel pre-syllable and I'll just conclude by saying that I could try to extend my impact here even further From the last decade or so I've been doing a lot of work in tundra And I suspect the tundra may have also had a type adb distinction But whether it has a similar origin is something I'm not sure about yet And that's it And I don't think we have time for questions except maybe at lunch or something