 for five which is the topic of my talk today Nathan started today's event by talking about the problem of time with transcription and I have a system that I use which is probably a familiar to almost all of you or all of me so I should probably explain how it works here it incorporates some aspects that are influenced by the system of professor here one of those aspects is that I mark target tones in the beginning of the syllable so the first number in the topic forms in this presentation are tones and there are two possible tones one and two which are conventionally called level and rising even which are the topic names for the tones but whether those are the actual forms of the tones is uncertain as these names are had become highly conventionalized in the Chinese tradition the middle of the syllable in my system is fairly simple it's the constants and vowels of the syllable the one exception is that I use the lecture Y to represent some sort of all like it's a deliberately non committal symbol my transcription is not intended as phonetic notation it's somewhat abstract so I use numbers for the tones because I'm not committal about how tone sounded and I want to use why because all I know about why for sure is that it's some sort of central vowel it's not he is not a it's not it's not cool but exactly what it was I don't know the last number last number in my system at the very end of the syllable is the grade of the syllable Shungong just talked at great length about grade two and in my system I have four grades rather than three but these represent what I used to think why with the different grades where I don't actually believe this anymore but these are some ideas I used to have for a number of years you can think of the grades as flavors of the rhymes so a grade one two three or four why is they have some kind of common quality obviously but they sound slightly different and exactly how they sound different is something I'm non committal about I mean here I threw in some own suggestions of mine that I don't even believe anymore so I prefer to just use the abstract numerals instead to speak of a grade one why or grade two why rather than commit to saying that this rhyme is you've realized or whatever although I am now strongly tempted to to adopt Shungong system I further for this presentation I will be not now when I first started learning Tongue over 20 years ago one of the first things I did was learn the numerals for one through ten and I was kind of a mused with Professor Al-Qa began his talk on Tongue last week with these very numerals and it's and so these are the very first time characters I learned how to write and the first ten words I learned and these are their readings in my system and one thing I noticed immediately was that some of the numerals are very obviously resemble the written Tibetan which in part sought mark the similar pairs in green year one of the one pair that has bothered me for over 20 years and which is the top subject of today's talk is the number five here you can see in two and three and nine there's a pretty close to that sort of obvious resemblance with five there's something strange going on there's a W in the Tongue that corresponds to nothing in Tibetan and these other cases they have similar vowels like e kind of close oh and o kind of close kind of close but and then there's this strange W so this is bothered me for over 20 years now I showed that there are only a few pairs that are really obvious comments but if you trace back the history of the Tibetan numerals which I did with Nathan's help and and tracing back the earlier forms of the target numerals using the system that I published five years ago you can see that most of these except for seven and ten which are completely hopeless and unrelated most of these are actually the confidence and the resemblances are pretty good in most cases except five is still a problem even if you go back in time you still end up with differing different vowels and e and an ah and how can this be reconciled assuming this these are really confidence and I'm pretty sure they are why is it time with five and an ah and why and why does it have a medium W using my sis using my system if I take this back to time I end up with me with the e but throughout some Tibetan the word for five in the oldest languages you universally has ah Chinese Tibetan Burmese and the language I've been working on for the last couple of years pew which is an extinct some Tibetan language that was once spoken in Burma so we have all these votes for ah and com that has an e here what's going on why is time that the odd man out let's suppose for the sake of argument that all these other languages are conservative in their numerals for five and that time that at one point used to have ah let's just pretend this is the case and interestingly this we could this reconstruction which is what I proposed about five years ago looks like pew which I never saw until two years ago so that makes me kind of feel good so let's just adopt this hypothesis for the time being that that times are used to have ah but somehow it changed to this but why how can we bridge the gap between this with or whatever it was and I the answer is you can't do it it's not possible what normally should come from pre-tangud or but not as demonstrated in his book so what is going on here I mean we should I just give up on five and just say that oh that you know it kind of looks like the other words it hasn't no like the other words but the vowels just simply make no sense at all so it's just complete coincidence that that time has this no word which is totally unrelated to all these other words should we do that let's see if we have to give Jacques solution to the five problem was to was to reconstruct five in time that has had a who which is okay according to his rules in which what comes from who or put and job book a library that should go has referred to which is a relative of time good in has an in its word for five so this is not this is kind of plausible but we still have another problem okay so Jack will get people can't agree but they still agree with all these other languages what's going on now I will present a very different solution to the problem of five go home from pointed out that time good has a number of pairs of words in which one word has no medium W so this ties into our first thought today and the second word which has a similar meaning or like for example this case read to turn red to blush or something has a W in it so go found a number of these pairs in 2012 I publish a paper in which I theorize that these media W's were from earlier P prefixes so so this turn red is from the root for red plus a prefix put put that becomes new way the P weakens to a what and kind of switches places so maybe the media W in five which is weird is also from some kind of P prefix so just as punnett becomes new a punna becomes what well the volume is still weird but this could explain it up and as I've seen before Pugh does have a syllable before the knot so this corresponds to that I propose here and I propose this thing for time years before I ever looked at Pugh at all so this is not some kind of circular thing so I think that's how the W originated but we're still stuck at the problem of why sorry I was circling the wrong word of why five has a for the bow it shouldn't part once again cannot be derived from a geojak spoke on target demonstrates that can have a whole bunch of different sources eat and ought but not ah so we still have a problem here this is impossible you how can how can my claim that five related to all those other our words work if if five has a it's not possible you may have noticed that in the program there is an extremely generic title for this talk that's because I I've been working on Pugh for the last couple of years and when it came time to write up something for so ass I was asked what I want Nathan asked me what I wanted to do and I said I don't know so he just made up some generic filler and as as the talk approach he and I were on a bus in Burma working on our Pugh project and I still have no idea what to do and for some reason I was babbling about Tom good because Pugh is my day job currently and Tom good is what I do is hobby and I was saying something about Tom good and and Nathan can correct me if I'm remembering wrong but at some point the numerals came up for some reason maybe because of that the Pugh numeral for five which was has been very much in my mind and I pointed out the are vowels in the Pugh numerals and Nathan suggested that maybe the number of the five was influenced by about four and that is his contribution to this because everything else after this is all my fault so don't blame him for anything after this but I thought yeah this is that there might be something to it because look they both have birds but on the other hand there are some problems they have different grades for one thing and four also has a retroflex so this is something like something and there is a marker here for a mysterious vowel quality that I have yet to identify so yes they're both romanized in my system was wise but they're not really the same rhyme this is something so now I'm facing a different problem how do I reconcile these two rhymes and why would this even happen in the first one would you get the ball like that from in the first place well it well let's just see if I can try to make this work so once again let's suppose for the sake of argument that the P word for five excuse me the time good word for five is like all the other really sounds dead words and has an odd if we trace back the word for four the goes back to an E so in the earlier stage they have completely different bottles they're just nothing in common with these two at all now in time good there is a change shift in which E becomes so the e of four became became a and then the original ah becomes the new E so Panna became so Rodee became Rodee and Panna became so in stage two the balls have changed but they're still distinct from each other on the other hand I should note that are kind of diff are very different but E and E are becoming phonetically more similar they're still distinct but they're not as distinct as as high and low in stage three five or four are adjacent numerals and the suggestion was that the vowel four kind you know kind of right off on the valve for five so at this stage they have now they have the same ball and the E has been replaced by a which is a different ball but kind of similar so now these two words rock they are precedents for this sort of thing cases of what I call adjacent neural influence for instance in English four and five have the same initial consonant but if we're going to be European the two words have very different initial constants qua and puh theoretically what to war should have become English whore which is kind of disturbing but we're in fact have four the initial five has spread to four this is the case of initials though the time the case involves rhymes so there are any cases of the ends of numerals becoming adjacent numerals becoming similar yes we do in probably European nine and ten had different final consonants and to this day English nine still has the final end and in Latin America we have no decade as in November and December in which the ending of ten has spread to nine theoretically the Latin word for now should be no van with the end from port of india European but it's not let's go back to Tonga with one warning which is that I'm going to mention a series of changes and the order of those changes is uncertain the order that I present here is arbitrary because I have to present them in some sense order I can't dump them all in front of you would say apply the most at the same time it's not going to be but I really don't know the word of these things at all so this is my old type my only hypothesis about the greats which are presented how Morgan which I am pretty skeptical about now that the grades were partly conditioned by earlier loss about I won't go into huge detail on this I'll just stay here that in in this old theory of mine which is in my 2012 paper low vows conditioned the lower number of grades and high vows conditioned the higher number of grades so this this level has no low vows in it whatsoever so it gets a high number of grade this level has a low vowel so it develops a low grade so at this stage then the the rhymes start to diverge earlier these two words would have a lot in my house but once the grades start to develop they diverge I mean they're still they're still similar vows which is why I still use the same symbol why for them but now they belong to different grades I have different flavors of some sort the low vowel that conditioned grade one disappears completely so now you can no longer predict the grades at all they've become completely phonemic in the next stage I've already mentioned how peak how I think media w develops from prefixed p so the prefix p of five and the earlier prefix before conditions a retroflex vowel so this is so now the rhymes are very very different this is a grade one why and this is a grade four or then they diverge even further have proposed a mystery suffix in time that I call x and this suffix accounts for work work families that go home discovered and that he thought involved short and long so one of his work families was wind with in gong's reconstruction a short ball and blow so verb based on wind with a long ball in my system I don't have our legs and I propose that gong's so-called long ball derivatives have this mystery suffix x it's a mysterious suffix because I cannot figure out what its phonetic value was using the affliction Tibetan Chinese or Sanskrit materials it doesn't seem to correspond to anything all I can say is that syllables with this mysterious x body cannot be used to write Sanskrit so whatever it was must have sounded very unsan script in my time good notation I use x to indicate the mysterious the mysterious source of this distinction and I use apostrophe to to indicate it in my time of transcription so this is the source and this is the outcome phonetically what these things were I have absolutely no idea I call this apostrophe symbol prime even though it's not really a mathematical prime symbol but it's a lot easier to type so there it is for so what's this after just out of the four I don't know what I was doing there really it made them the rhymes extremely different so now we have grade one why on one hand and great for why with retroflection and the mystery quality I've added the tone numbers here because in my version of time of language history time the tones develop depending on the presence or absence of a final age and since none of these words on a final age they develop tone one by default so in my full solution I include a number of changes that give you some idea of how my larger tone good reconstruction system works so this is a review of what we've seen so far there's a change shift from first and then so it's as if when he goes to this leaves a blank because there's no more he that's filled by the off the vowel for spread to five really care for this great for this version of the grades anymore but it's in the park so we're kind of stuck with it for the next few minutes so in my old system low vowels condition low number grades and high vowels condition high number grades with variation depending on the initial these great conditioning vows in some cases disappeared a prefix P is a source of media W that is found in some word families and in five a prefix are conditions vowel retroflection that I write as a suffix R but it's not a real R just quality of the vowel there's a process of adding some kind of mysterious affix that I write as X and that this X in turn in my transcription is written as a pseudo prime symbol and finally I propose that Tonga tones reflect the presence or absence of final laryngeals as in Chinese and that we go back to the number 10 we can see one example of final H conditioning tone 2 all the other ones at home one because they don't have any final orange they don't have any final laryngeals in my system so my hope here is that not only have I more or less solved the problem of Wi-Fi is a really strange rhyme I say more or less because now that I don't like this great system here this has to be somewhat revised but I think much of this presentation is still solvable but beyond that very very specific problem I thought it might be interesting to give a demonstration of some of the changes and rules in my view of the history of Tonga using five as an example five and four as examples and with that summary I have come now to the draw or the end