 Okay, so today I'll be talking about old Burmese. The Burmese are relatively speaking latecomers to, let's say, to the Irawadi Valley. And before Burmese, the Pew, which is the sign of Tibetan language, and Maan, which is not a sign of Tibetan language, were already spoken and written in what is now Burma for several centuries. The Burmese came down from the hills around the turn of the millennium and established the Pagan dynasty at Pagan. And we know they came from the north for two reasons. One is that the most closely related languages to Burmese, the Burmish languages, are all still spoken in the Sino-Burmese borderland. So basically you have sort of six, seven languages. They're all still there at the border in the hills, except for Burmese. But also, and I think this is just kind of cute, which is why I'm pointing it out, the word for south in Burmese is the same as the word for mountain. And of course, if you're in Burma, the mountains are to the north. So we have to presume that at one point when they came up with the word south, the mountains were to the south, and then they crossed the mountains and kept the word south as meaning mountain, or as synonymous with mountain, even though now the mountains were to the north. And the oldest document in Burmese is from 1113. It's called the Miyazadi inscription. And it is not quite true, but basically it's also the youngest Pew document. So it's quadrilingual, and it shows you that transition, where at that moment it was important to do things in both Pew, the sort of traditional language, and Burmese, the new language. And it marks that transition point. Okay, here's the Burmese alphabet, and you say, well, it kind of looks like what you expect in the lands influenced by Indic culture. And it has all of the things necessary for Pali, and even in fact Sanskrit, although those really rarely come up. In spoken Burmese, and as far as we can tell, through all of its time, these kind of particularly Indic features like voiced aspirates and retroflex stops were never pronounced as such. It's just a sort of orthographic conceit to write Indic words the way they're spelled. So what do we need to know in terms of actual Burmese phonology? Well, here are the old Burmese onsets. There's no voicing contrast, but instead an aspiration contrast in the stops. But in the resonance, there's what's also written as a aspiration contrast, but where there's good reason to think that the aspirate resonance are voiceless. And actually, I'll just sort of tell an anecdote from my own life, which is that Nawar has things written as, say, NH, and Burmese has things written as NH, but when you speak the two languages, you realize they're very different sounds. So in Burmese, it's really nah, right? So it's voiceless. And if anything, the aspiration starts before the onset, whereas in Nawar you really say nah. So it's voiced and the aspiration follows the release of the stop. I had this terrible problem when I was learning Nawar of using the Burmese style aspirate nasals, which made my teacher just think I was terribly odd because it's not a problem that they usually get with English speakers, I guess. So that's just the point about the phonetic interpretation of what are written as aspirate resonance. And then here are some clusters. These are nice, I think, because it's more medial distinctions than a lot of signer Tibetan languages have, including old Chinese. This is the state of affairs in old Burmese. On the way to what we can call written Burmese, the L clusters disappear, and they disappear in an interesting way, which is that after vealers, they merge with the ya, so kla changes to kya. And after the labials, the kla merges with pra. So you have to be a little bit on your toes when you're looking at a kya in Burmese. Is it secretly a kla? And when you're looking at a pra, is it secretly a kla? But old Burmese does distinguish them, so it becomes a philological question, and there are some resources for looking into this. I put the r-h-y in parentheses because it really only comes up in one word, and that word is actually never written at r-h-y, but you can sort of phonemically analyze it in that way. And that's the word for eight, the number eight. So here are the vowels. Super exciting, although you might say that you find this i followed by a y, so e, a little strange in contrast with the simple e. Old Chinese is also reconstructed by Baxian cigars. Having the sequence, they write i-j, but I don't think it contrasts with i. So probably actually the realization of the i in these two situations was different, where it was kind of closer to a schwa before the y, but in any case, they write these two things as i and i-y, and I think in deference to the phonological analysis that the Burmese themselves proposed in their orthography, I think we should keep it that way. So here are the vowels a and e, and then here are the vowels o, u, and e, let's say. Here we need a few more remarks. So particularly, there's an instability in early Burmese orthography that eventually gets resolved as this o-one being written wa, w-a, but the o-two always being o. But in early old Burmese, both o's, o-one and o-two, are written as o with some instability. So I think partly on etymological grounds, it's clear that what happened was we start writing down the language at a point where some sound changes are just about to happen or maybe in progress, I don't really believe in sound change in progress for methodological reasons, but leave that to one side. So the o-two can be seen phonologically just as the o- vowel before velars, and then suddenly, if you wrote it that way, it would look simple, right? You would just have a full set of o's and a full set of o's. But because the Burmese themselves write the aliphon of o before velars as o, then we should do that. And that's why I distinguish this o-one and o-two. Maybe worth saying that this analysis, I'm not at all the only person who's done this. Pang Wuyun does it. Maung Woon, I think as far back as the 30s, follows an analysis like this. But it's an analysis that James Matisoff has a distinct kind of a very strong, very strongly felt objection to. And he has an article from 2015 about what an idiot I am for having this analysis of the old Burmese vowels, which you can look into if you want. And then finally, this last vowel, it has a wider distribution in middle, let's say in written Burmese. But in old Burmese, it only occurs before w. And let's say it's a schwa probably. I mean, they write it as a combination of a u and an i. So we would transliterate it as ui, but we could just as easily transliterate it as an iu. The i is written above and the u is written below. So it's some kind of diacritic four vowel that the script that let's say Indic languages don't have to simplify. It probably comes from Maung, both the vowel and the orthographic device for writing it, and it's probably a schwa. Okay. And now a tricky thing, which is that in modern Burmese, we can distinguish between a, n, tilde, with just one nha, and a, n tilde, n tilde, with two nhas. I won't get into it. There's actually the pronunciation of these in modern Burmese is actually a little complicated. Let's not get into it. But in any case, there's a kind of distinction that is made orthographically that does index at least one real phonetic distinction in modern Burmese. But this practice of clearly distinguishing the two really only stabilized very late, as Nietzsche has proven in the 1950s. But the distinction goes a long way back. So in old Burmese, the first one, so the an, corresponds with y-a-n, so yan, with a medial ya, if you like. And the second one is just written an. So in my cognates, you will see that I always write the double nha, kind of for the sake of clarity, right? Because then you always know that the double nha is the thing that ends up as double nha in modern Burmese. And the old Burmese yan is old Burmese yan. So then we can kind of avoid having to deal with this issue. But anyhow, I want to flag it for you. So yeah, so generally you can understand the Burmese letters as the nice thing about a language on Alphabet is the phonological analysis of the script has a few little things that I've discussed, but it's pretty simple. So a few changes from old Burmese to written Burmese, the first one I've already mentioned. So o-one becomes wa, i-y becomes the vowel e, u-y becomes weh. So one thing you notice is that old Burmese doesn't really have the vowel e, yeah? This u-i-w is, it might just be orthographic, is rewritten as u-i. It's less, it's more economical, if you like. And then yat changes to yach and yan changes to yan-nyan-nyan-nyan. OK. Also, because of loan words, we start getting this u-i vowel before vealers. And I should say everyone seems to think this. And it's extremely hard, basically impossible, to find Sino-Tibetan cognates for words that end in this u-i-villainazel or u-i-k in Old Burmese. But it's not the case that we have good etymologies for all of them. So that's one sort of thing, some disiratum in Sino-Tibetan linguistics is to really prove that all of the Old Burmese words that have this rhyme are loans from Maan or other languages. OK. So that was it for Old Burmese Synchronic Phenology, if you like. Now, just a word about the Burmese family. So I think I did some of this on the first day. This is a list of Burmese languages. They're all spoken, as I said, along the Sino-Burmese border area. And then low-lowish, I only mentioned, because you might be wondering, there's this thing, low-low Burmese, one half is low-lowish. It was reconstructed by Bradley in 1979. I'm in my book here. I just leave it entirely to one side because I don't feel very impressed with the work that's been done so far. But I don't have the time or interest to totally redo it. So I'm just setting it to one side. So now we're going to go from Burmese backwards through some sound changes to Proto-Burmese. And there's a stop along the way, which is that Akshan and Shandao seem to be particularly close to Burmese. So we'll sort of start from Old Burmese. We take a look at Akshan and Shandao. We see where we are. Then we look at the other Burmese languages. We see where we are. And then we add to looking at Tibetan and Chinese to get all the way back to Santa Tibetan. So it's a kind of path from Burmese to Santa Tibetan with two stops along the road. But as the very first thing to say, we will end up looking at a tonal split in the Burmese languages other than Burmese in order to prove that this aspiration distinction that Burmese has began life as a voicing distinction. So a pH, so a Puh in Burmese. And by that, I mean any stop, right? Aspirated stops in Burmese correspond both to Lashi high-checked tones. And I'm using Lashi here, but I could use any of the Burmese languages other than Akshan and Shandao. So you see the evidence. So both languages have Aspirate initials and Lashi has high tone. But we've also got non-aspiration correlating with low tone. So the argument is really a phonetic one, which is that aspiration versus non-aspiration do not cause this kind of tonal difference. You may be wondering, look, the encoding of the tonal difference in Lashi is redundant with that non-aspirate initial. So maybe it's not even a phonological issue. That's because we're only looking at checked syllables. But these tones exist in other syllable types. So it is a phonological distinction. Just have my reassurance. But we're not looking at Lashi phonology here, so we don't worry about it. The point is that reconstructing a voicing distinction explains where the tonal split in the Burmese languages came from. So yeah, so that's why even though nowadays everybody in the whole family agrees it's a P versus pH distinction, we have to reconstruct a B versus P distinction. OK, now that was the first sound change. Now we're moving backwards in time. And I call this next one Matasov's Law. So it's the change of shah to sa and chah to tsah, which are mergers. So some examples. To be reconstructed S, this is quite straightforward. Burmese has S, Lashi has S. We reconstruct S. But in these cases Burmese has S and Lashi has shah. And you notice that it's not like there's an obvious phonological conditioning for the palization in Lashi. It happens before different vowels. So we have to reconstruct a sa versus shah distinction that Burmese lost. And similar now for tsah. Let's just look at it because we have a nice sound to incognize there. It's really clear that Burmese chah goes back to tsah and tsah in Lashi. But there's also these cases where Burmese chah goes back to chah, as we can see from the cognates in other Burmese languages. And I default to Lashi because Lashi preserves a lot of these contrasts in more phonotactic environments than other languages. But where a Lashi cognate isn't available, I pull them from other languages. So now we've established that there's this law, Matasov's law, where Burmese merges shah and tsah, merges chah and tsah. And we ask ourselves, what do a chah and tsah do? Because that should point to a point intermediate. And the answer is, well, no surprise. They have tsah for tsah. And they seem not to have changed tsah into tsah. So you look at some of the relevant words. And they have some kind of, let's say, something more complicated than tsah. But it's a little more complicated because they've undergone their own palatalizations, like you see in the word for liver, where Lashi doesn't have a palatal, but a chah and a chah do. I mean, that's not a shock, right? Because a chah and a chah now, we may be using to undo sound changes in Burmese, but they underwent sound changes of their own. Yeah. So in this environment, their testimony is not reliable. And this change sets Burmese apart from the whole family. Now, one very interesting complication is the achang word for tree. So it's sang, yeah? And why is it interesting? Well, it has a non-palatal initial, whereas all the other Burmese languages have a palatal initial for this word. And also its final agrees with Tibetan and Chinese against all other Burmese languages. So it's strange. And I think there are two explanations and they're both possible. One is that for some reason, oh, I misspelled achang in the title. Sorry about that. So one explanation is that, let's say randomly almost, achang borrowed the word for tree from Jingpo. And Jingpo is the kind of lingua franca in this area of Burma. It's also a sign of Tibetan language. And it has a word for tree like sing or song. So that's one possibility, but I think there's a kind of strange word to borrow. So the other possibility is that there was some kind of alternation even in sign of Tibetan between sick and sing as words for tree, which we have to reconstruct anyhow, just because of the Burmese versus Tibetan and Chinese evidence. And somehow achang preserves that as a relic. That's kind of the analysis I would like to go with because it's more exciting. But it could be figured out, I think, by looking more closely at Jingpo. Okay, now we look at the affricates, which is to say we looked at Matasoff's law in achang and shandow in terms of this shatasat change, but we didn't look at the shatasat change. And it's really complicated. So shandow has four different correspondences with Burmese CH. And I'm just not going to worry about it. It's an achang shandow problem. Okay, moving on, which is also broadly speaking, moving backwards further back in time, we have Wolffenden's law. So this is that ic in, I don't know, sign of Tibetan or Proto Burmese changes into ach and ing changes into an. So very clear examples. Neck, name, we've seen name before in other lectures, long, ripe, and here are examples of ic. So let's look at tree, because we were just talking about tree. So you see that Burmese has sach, Otsi has sick. And I think it should be reconstructed as sick in Proto Burmese. Achang and shandow do not undergo Wolffenden's law, which is to say it's like Matasau's law is a particularity specifically to Burmese. And you can see that if we look, let's just stick with tree at the words for tree where we already talked about the strange achang word, but the shandow word ends with a k. So there you go. And that was it for that law. Now, this one I call Mount Wundslaw, which I talked about kind of right at the beginning in terms of sort of phonological analysis, which is that this O2 in old Burmese only occurs before dealers. And it seems like it would be economical to understand it as coming from an Oval. So here's some evidence. It doesn't get better than six actually. Six is krok in written Burmese, and I'm saying it comes from something like krok. And if you look at Lashi, it's kyok, so you get exactly the value you want. And it matches Tibetan and Chinese. And poison is also just one of the, like I've mentioned before, one of the best sign of Tibetan cognates. So let's look at that one. Tok comes from duk, and duk perfectly matches Tibetan duk and Chinese duk. Okay, so that's Mount Wundslaw, also characteristic of Burmese only, yeah? Or maybe I've spoken. It's unclear whether Achrang and Shandow have undergone it in most cases. So we look at six again. Krok, you have chu in Shandow. Looks like it went through Mount Wundslaw, but there are some words where Shandow has an all, where you would say it, you know, so these are examples where Achrang and Shandow seem not to have undergone Mount Wundslaw. And these are examples where Shandow at least seems to have undergone Mount Wundslaw. So, you know, so it's a little unclear. And looking at Achrang, evidence that it has not undergone Mount Wundslaw, and evidence that it has undergone Mount Wundslaw. So the timing of Mount Wundslaw in terms of the split, you know, let's say Burmese clearly underwent it, Proto-Burmish clearly hadn't as revealed by languages like Atsi and Lashi, but it's unclear at this intermediate stage what happened. More work to be done there. Oh, and Achrang has this third vowel, which makes me wonder whether the people who were doing fieldwork on Achrang, maybe just could have worked harder to come up with a phonological analysis. Okay, now, you know, another step backwards in time. Burling's law, the loss of pre-globalized consonants from Proto-Burmish to Burmese. So Proto-Burmish maintains a three-way contrast and obstrance, and Lashi maintains the pre-globalized consonants in the whitest context, which is why I look at it. So, to start with the very simple case, everybody agrees at, I mean, it's a little bit tricky to state because the correspondence is between aspirate voice-to-stops in Burmese and aspirate voice-to-stops in Lashi, which because of the tonal split we mentioned earlier, we reconstruct as unaspirated voice-to-stops. So here you have kuk, kuk corresponding, which we reconstruct as kuk, yeah. Let's look at steel, it's a nice one, the third one, steel. So yeah, so yeah, cool. I mean, we don't need to worry, I think, right now about why Chinese has aspiration there, but it's a very clear assignment to be incognito, that's the point. And then there are these examples where Burmese has an aspirate and Lashi has a glottalized, unaspirated voice-to-stop. So there's a contrast in Lashi where there isn't in Burmese, so we have to project that contrast back onto Puerto Burmese. And Burmese law is the sound change, you can think of pre-globalized k, changes to kh in Burmese. So here are examples, maybe let's look at borrow. So key comes from pre-globalized key, there's pre-globalization in the Lashi and there's a good Sino-Tibetan cognate. Okay, so now I can kind of go through this brisely because I just have cognates for sa versus pre-globalized sa and cha, there happen to be no examples of pre-globalized sa, ta and pre-globalized ta, pa and pre-globalized pa. I think it's nice to just take a look at this frog word. So I just invite you to take a look at the frog word because it has a good Tibetan cognate. And then you'll remember that this word fill up came up when we were talking about pre-initials in Chinese when I was first making the argument for the overall plausibility of pre-initials in Chinese because it's one of the examples where you have this boo, probably writing a pre-initial p. Okay, then we also have this distinction between let's say plain and pre-globalized on S. So here we have a tree, which we looked at before and look at three, which is the third one down, just to point out that by this point you're starting to see some of these sign of Tibetan cognates coming up again and again. But if we look at these examples, we see that there was, we can also reconstruct a pre-globalized S in Proto-Birmish. And I would draw your attention to the word kill in particular, where you'll remember that we had this discussion about maybe the Chinese Sarat should in fact be reconstructed something like, so you start to form the impression that pre-globalization might be a sign of lost prefixes in Burmese. Now I will point you to this word because I find it quite interesting that Burmese does not distinguish the meaning breath and the meaning of life, which it makes sense, right? Why not? Why would you? They're clearly related ideas in Latin, for example. But Lashi does distinguish them, where in Lashi the first one is not pre-globalized and the second one is pre-globalized. And I think there's nothing that speaks against pushing that distinction back into Proto-Birmish and potentially even back into Proto-Sino-Tibetan because you see that, let's put it this way, that just semantically speaking, the Chinese cognate means breath and the Tibetan cognate means life. So if there is a distinction between the two Edamon in Proto-Birmish, we might as well keep that in mind when we're doing Sino-Tibetan cognates, although how to fit in this Tibetan word is not totally obvious, but I think it's also unlikely to be unrelated. Okay, and then just to point out that we're sort of pulling apart mergers, they start to interact with each other, right? So we had Suh comes from Suh and Suh and we also have Suh comes from plain Suh and pre-globalized Suh. So then actually we get four possible origins of Suh in Proto-Birmish. So four possible origins of Burmese S in Proto-Birmish which are plain S, palatalized S, pre-globalized plain S, pre-globalized palatal S. And here is our pre-globalized palatal S, the word for Laos. Now a word on Otter just because, so what I'm doing now is just drawing your attention to problems, right? I think that's one of the most important things to do is say when, in a sense, things work for us in terms of an explanation when they throw out problems to solve, but then those problems are problems to solve. So the word for Otter in Burmese, it's pyam, in Lashi, it's sham. And the sham looks like a very good cognate for Tibetan. But a very bad cognate for Burmese. So actually the more closely related language, it's showing a more problematic cognate. So Burmese points to a P or a pre-globalized P and Lashi points to a pre-globalized palatal Sivalent. I don't know how to deal with it, so you tell me. Okay, now just to say that this Burling's law has its kind of analog with the resonance, but for the obstruence, we get a merger, right? We have basically, just to summarize, B goes to P, P goes to pH and pre-globalized P also goes to pH. So you have a merger, whereas with the resonance, there's no merger, it's just a difference. So you have N goes to N and pre-globalized N goes to NH. So this is just to show you the pre-globalized N goes to NH. Let's look at the first two words, so borrow. Has a good Tibetan cognate as well, that also has a pre-initial. So I'm sort of building possibility for relationships still between pre-initials in sign of Tibetan, let's say, and pre-globalization in Burmese or in Proto-Burmish. And then I will just point to this word for bird. There are cognates in Chinese, I've put them on the slide, but it also looks a lot like words for bird in I think in Austro-Aziatic. I always get Austro-Aziatic and Austronesian confused, but that's something to keep an eye on. And let's just look at nose, because it's so lovely, although actually due to a computer glitch in some cases I've ended up presenting data twice, which you get here. But anyhow, you have na in Burmese, no in Lasi, and sna in Tibetan. So it's a lovely set of cognates. Okay, now just to say that what we don't get is a clear example of aspirated Y or if you like from Proto-Burmish perspective, pre-globalized Y, Anishin notes only two words and they don't have Proto-Burmish cognates or they don't have Burmish cognates. And then just sort of cleaning up some details when we're dealing with glottalization, Burmese zero, and I mean by that, I mean just orthographic zero, right? It seems to have a glottal stop initial because you have this same sort of pre-glottalization in Lasi. And as I've done in other cases, we see that here's a sound change. It goes from Proto-Burmish to Burmese. Does it affect Achang on Chandao? And in this case, we can say very clearly that it does. So this is really the sound change actually that allows you to distinguish this node. So the other things we're looking at, Matasoff's law, Maungun's law, Wolfen's law, those are just for Burmese. But Burling's law affects Burmese, Achang and Chandao quite unambiguously. So they branch together on the same branch. You can see this in Frighton, for example, where there's no pre-glottalized and nothing in Achang, but there is in Lasi. Okay, but there are some exceptions to Burling's law. So here are some exceptions where Lasi and Achang don't have pre-glottalized initials, but Burmese does have aspiration. Most such words have an MH in Burmese. You also get the reverse where Lasi has pre-glottalized stops, but Burmese doesn't have aspiration. So all of these need to be addressed. And now we have gotten basically back to, if we undo all of these changes, back to Proto-Burmese. So now I will just sort of tell it the story forward. In approximate chronological order, we get Burling's law, the loss of pre-glottalized consonants. Then we get Mahuun's law. So Ud goes to O before Vilares. We get Wolfen's law, which is Ik goes to Ach and In goes to Anya. And we get Matasov's law, which is let's say loss of palatal, distinct palatins. So now we're to Proto-Burmese and the rest of the presentation looks backwards from Proto-Burmese to Sino-Tibetan. Well, I'll give two explanations for that. One is just purely orthographic. It's the same as a Visarga. The Burmese said, let's write a Visarga. So I write a Visarga, right? That's the kind of, you know, let's say surface level explanation, but how do we actually interpret it? It's a high tone marker. The Burmese basically has exactly the same tonal system as Middle Chinese. Four tones, you know, a kind of a neutral, a Glowstop final, a rising tone, which is this one marked with Visarga, and a stop final tone. So it's just exactly the same as Middle Chinese. And I think that it's pretty clear that this kind of tonal system just became in style, you know, in around, I don't know, 500 throughout East Asia. You have things like it in Proto-Karen. It's a little bit different in each language, the conditioning environment is different, but you have things like it in Proto-Karen, in Vietnamese, Burmese, even in Lhasa, Tibetan, actually, or at least on the way to Lhasa, Tibetan, you get something very, very similar. Okay, so now from Proto-Burmese to Trans-Himalayan, which is the same thing as sign of Tibetan, there seems to have been a merger of in and in, right? So remember from Wolfendon's law, in becomes an, but it looks like in and in on their way to Proto-Burmese merge. We'll go into those details. Let's just look at the examples. So for in, we have things like neck, name and long, where Tibetan confirms the velar nasal and for in, we have things like ripe and love and liver and nail, where Tibetan points to a dental final, not a velar final. And just to point out, right, that the Burmese has the nyah, this kind of strange nyah thing, but the other Burmese language is have a velar nasal in these cases. So we do know it's a merger of velar nasal and dental nasal to velar nasal in Proto-Burmese. And then looking at Iq, you'll remember, we talked, I think a lot about this word for joint. So in when we're looking at Chinese, so here it is in Burmese and Tibetan. So we have Iq and I don't give any examples of it, I think, because there aren't really any very clear ones, although the number seven, I think could be one. So now Demsi's law, which is the merger of eh and ih before velars. So remember that according to Wolfenen's law, ach and anyh reconstruct to ik and ing. So now we're going to pull apart, let's say, ik and ing from ek and ing. Yeah, so and Chinese is really important here because Tibetan also underwent something like Demsi's law. So here we look at the word for kernel, but it's, I only use kernel because there are some complications using the word heart, but it's pretty clear the root, the morphine is heart, which we think is cognate with the Chinese word for body. And there you have the eh vowel, right? The same thing for year and harvest. Same thing for joint and wood, firewood. So these are all good. That's why I'm sort of just drawing your attention to the by saying the meanings. They're all very good, sign of Tibetan cognates. And then here are examples with the eh vowel. So one, we have tech in Chinese. Neck, we have ring in Chinese. Name, we have mung in Chinese. And then conflict, we have something like sarang in Chinese. And I'm not giving the Tibetan cognates here because they're not helpful. They all had it, yeah. Okay, and now loss of final r and final l. So comparison with Tibetan shows that Burmese dropped final r in front of l. So here's final r. We have something like new in Tibetan and the evidence for this r and this, and to some extent the l can, you can turn to Chinese but it's really kind of through a glass directly. It's very complicated, very hard to distinguish in Chinese. So that's why I'm just, I'm just turning to Tibetan for these things because in Tibetan they just write r or they write l. So new and flat and burn or blaze, these are cases where there's no obstacle to reconstructing r. And here are examples where there's no obstacle to reconstructing l. Oil compared to grease is a nice core vocabulary item where we can reconstruct l. Rl also is lost, yeah. So you lose r, you lose l, you lose rl, no big surprise there. A good example to just draw your attention to kind of for the sake of remembering it is the last one here. Na which means to rest or stop in Burmese and na which means to sleep in Tibetan and Sagar argues in an article that the West, which is where the sun sleeps is cognate with this. Okay, now a little caveat about Burmese is, okay, it loses r and l. Well, there's an exception. After the vowel u, l changes to y in Burmese. So that's quite nice in terms of relative chronology, right? Because you have to have this u to ui change precede the general loss of l. And in a few words, Chinese r corresponds to Burmese ui and this suggests that before the change of u to ui, there was a change of rl to l. Burmese and Tibetan don't distinguish from a before dentals, but Chinese does. So we can reconstruct the Chinese form here. The word for eight is the clearest example of this. I think where you have pret in Chinese and you have, you know, I don't know, quite how to say it, riat in old Burmese. But also we can go with this word for new where you have ser in Tibetan and you have sa in Burmese. And I'm leaving out the Tibetan because Tibetan underwent a very similar change. Remember that new was gsar in Tibetan. And this change must precede the loss of r in order for r to have conditioned the change. And then in some ways, you know, one of the most famous changes in so-called Tibetan Burmese is the merger of a and shua because, you know, Chinese has six vowels with this shua. So here are examples that we can reconstruct a. It's very, very straightforward. Let's look at fish. So you have gsar in Burmese and you have gsar in Chinese. So you can reconstruct gsar, no problem. And then here are examples that can be reconstructed with a shua. So let's look at ear. So you have gsar in Burmese and nsar in Chinese with a shua vowel. So it's quite easy to just say that Burmese merged shua and a. But there is some evidence in Burmese for shua. And I think it's very important because it touches on the kind of controversy about whether Tibetan Burmese is a valid clade. And just to put my cards on the table, I don't think there's any evidence for that idea. And I will just point out that there's a lot of Tibetan Burmese languages. So proving that all of them share an innovation would be a lot of work. So I think it's strange that for sort of 60 years or something the field just kind of took for granted that there was such a thing as Tibetan Burmese when everyone could have known that to prove that would be an immense amount of work and that amount of work had not happened yet. If you ask those people who do believe it, why they believe it, they will, well, I mean, actually the only one who's really put his cards on table is Zev Handel who in 2008 said, oh, it's the merger of shua and a because you get it in Tibetan and you get it in Burmese and you get it in other languages as far as we can tell in Benedict's reconstruction of proto-Tibeto-Burman there's no shua. So it looks like an innovation across all the Tibetan Burmese languages but here's proof that it's not because Burmese does point to shua in some cases. So shua-j and a-j develop differently. And this means that in terms of relative chronology this change shua-j to I has to have preceded the overall merger of shua with a. In his review of my book, Zev Handel brings this question up and he thinks he can kind of save it by treating these as unitary items, right? There's no reason to expect in a sense that the language treated the shua in shua-j in the same way that it did the shua in shua-k, for example. I wasn't able to completely follow his argument. You can look if you want, but anyhow, he seems to think that this is not the kind of the silver bullet to disproving the Tibetan Burman hypothesis that I think it is. But in case let's show you the evidence. a-j turns into a, so you have like ad kre in Chinese and kre, here are examples where the shua-j turns into I. So the word for fire, sorry, the Chinese character is kind of a slightly too fancy a character from my software to have been happy with. So it doesn't display correctly. But you have a shua-j in Chinese, in burn, in draw near and in tail, and you see that in all three cases, you get an I in Burmese. So I think there's really good evidence of a sound change. And it seems like Tibetan has an e vowel in these cases. So Tibetan also didn't merge shua-j and a-j, but we only have two of the three, do we have Tibetan cognizance for? Okay, now moving on, still sort of further back in time if you like, we're interested in this mysterious vowel U-I-W, which I think I just treat as U-I-W throughout my book because there's a controversy about how to analyze it in old Burmese and I sort of want to avoid that because from a structural perspective you can work its correspondences out with Tibetan and Chinese without knowing how it was pronounced in old Burmese, right? So generally it corresponds to a U in Tibetan. Chinese offers both U and O correspondences. So look, if you have a U-U correspondence, you should reconstruct it U, right? And I think these cognates are pretty rock solid person in Burmese body in Tibetan and he in Burmese, it can also mean who in Burmese, but it's a pronoun in Burmese where it's only an interrogative pronoun in Tibetan. Those are clear cognates, but there are very few examples of this U-U correspondence and that bothers me. Okay, and then similarly, which we discussed when we were talking about Chinese, O corresponding to O, Tibetan also has O in some of these cases. So O-O-O you would reconstruct as O, right? But again, there's kind of fewer examples than you would want. So how do we reconstruct this, right? U-U we use U for that, O-O we use O for that, so we can't use U, we can't use O and I have no idea. I use schwa W for something else. So I just index it as U-W and that's a purely mechanical solution but we get it in nine, for instance, where Tibetan and Chinese point to U. Burmese, you would like to reconstruct U. It really looks like you should reconstruct U but then we can't use U for the U-U correspondence. So this U-I-W is a bit of a problem for me. Now, as I also mentioned in the discussion of Chinese, the correspondence U-I-W in Burmese to O in Chinese, I reconstructed a schwa W and I went through the advantages and disadvantages of that yesterday. But here are some examples. So we have breast, steel, horn, I'm just looking at breast, you know, we, however it was pronounced in Old Burmese and then no for milk or nipple in Chinese. So I think the whole question needs to be reexamined with a more thorough reconstruction of proto-Burmese or Burmoconic, particularly in light of the fact that as I mentioned on the first day, Burmoconic languages tend to have a velarized, non-velarized distinction on their vowels, which is lost in the Burmese languages. So one way of understanding what's going on here is the reconstruction of stop final syllables is pretty straightforward for proto-Burmese, let's say, or even for Sino-Tibetan from the proto-Burmese perspective. But the reconstruction of open syllables, you have more correspondences than you want. You have these things like, you know, u-u and u-i-w-u. And why do you have so many correspondences in open syllables? It's probably because the velarized, non-velarized vowel distinction lasted longer in open syllables. I'm not a phonetician, but I've told it there's reason to think that that would happen. So probably this would all become clearer and my reconstructions would get better if we took the perspective of Burmoconic and added a lot more gyaurong data and looked at, like, oh, maybe the difference between these different u's and different o's has to do with one's velarized, one's not velarized. And now moving on again to what I call Piero's and Starrosen's law, which is the loss of u-vulers in Burmese. And I'll just say that I think Tabetto-Burman correspondences provide a very good argument for the reconstruction of u-vulers in Chinese. So to formulate it the other way around, you saw that we have Sheshang series evidence for reconstructing u-vulers in Chinese, but then the cognates of those behave differently in Tabetto-Burman. So here we go. A u-vular in Chinese corresponds to a zero initial, which we know is a glottal initial, in Burmese. With House I think is being a really nice example. Tabetto has a velar in these cases. So one way to put it is you can reconstruct to Sino-Tabetten. You can reconstruct u-vulers by just saying zero initial in Burmese, velar in Tabetten. We reconstruct that as a u-vular. And then it just happens to be the case that those cognates that exist in Chinese tend to be u-vular. For labio-u-vulers, we have initial wa in Burmese, which is kind of what you'd expect, right? You can basically always get to answer what happens to u-vulers in Burmese by just dropping the u-vular. And then if there's a vowel, you just have a vowel initial. If there's a w, you have a w initial. And if there's an r, you have an r initial. Now there are some exceptions, like here you get velars basically where you would expect nothing because Chinese has a u-vular. And I don't know, maybe the problem is in Chinese. Maybe, yeah, maybe these Chinese examples should be revisited. Burr comes up. And that might be, I don't have this in the book, but in the meantime I've noticed that you have it in other language families. So maybe it's just not a cognate. Maybe it's a vondervoord and that explains the irregular correspondence. And then you can also have cases where the correspondence makes you want a Chinese u-vular, but you don't get one. So maybe in these cases we should reconstruct a u-vular, right? That's the problem with Chinese. It's Chinese, it's not like you just get it. Oh, it's written u-vular, it's written velar. It takes a lot of work to figure out. Okay, and now this one's quite interesting, I think, where you get a w in Burmese where you have a p in Tibetan with pig probably being the clearest examples. You have wak in Burmese and you have pak in Tibetan. And for a long time, people have thought that this is kind of some kind of a lenition that's triggered by a lost prefix. I see no problem with that explanation sort of mechanically. We can just index the correspondence with a capital C at the beginning, but it feels a little bit like a trick. But I'm happy to say that Laiyunfan actually is working on this from, again, from the Yaurang perspective and we'll have exciting things to say soon about lenition inside of Tibetan. We can also use the same kind of machinery since we've posted for this reconstruction, which is a t in Tibetan corresponding to an r in Burmese, where I think the parada by Spill is weave. So it seems like the sign of Tibetans knew how to weave. You have a very nice correspondence between the word in Tibetan and the word in Chinese. And then you think like, well, look, the Burmese or rak is not a coincidence. It must be a cognate. But why does it have this r initial instead of a t initial? Well, let's stick a capital C in front of it and pretend that we've solved the problem. Now, since we're doing that, I would say why not use it in the verb to C? Because, you know, C is kind of a basic idea. If Tibetan Burmese are related, you would expect them to have cognates. And then you can bring together these things. They look quite different, metong and mrang, if you reconstruct metong. And, you know, maybe the m is, in fact, the pre-initial that's triggering the munition here. But we don't know that. So I leave the capital C anyhow. And I'll just mention that this proposal of mine, I think other people see as a little bit too speculative, in part because of the vowel correspondence. But that's because I see there is being some kind of real oblawed inside of Tibetan, whereas other people don't. Okay. And then another very interesting correspondence that in my book I treat as just an outright irregularity of mystery. But I think now I'm tempted to see as part of this overall phenomenon of Linnition is a S correspondence or a S in Burmese, where you have a S in Tibetan. So let's look at the word for son. That's like son, like child. So you have S in Burmese. You have S in Atsi, which is to say it's a quite specific to Burmese change. You have Tsabo for nephew or grandson in Tibetan. Do you know Chinese? Well, immediately you know Ts in Chinese. And then I just throw in Tang Mi for a very specific reason. So the C in Tang Mi is pronounced as Ts. So it's a son, Tang Mi. And then you have a daughter, Tsami. Books, like it must be a cognate. Tsami in Tang Mi is not a coincidence with Tsami in Burmese, which I think means we have to see these as old words. And, you know, you may say, okay, Nathan, yeah, the words for son and daughter are old, you know, a big deal. Well, Mark Miyake has come up with a very interesting proposal that these are in Burmese, and Burmese is Pew substrate words. And why does he propose that? Because in Pew, the change of Ts to Ts is regular. So you can explain this aberrant correspondence from substrate influence. But I say, why don't we reconstruct a pre-initial capital C here, which we see as having this lenition effect? And you could even imagine that it's something like there was a little vowel there. And so you had something like, let's just say the pre-initial was a T, I don't know, for fun. So you had something like T Ts, and then maybe it voiced to T Ts, and then maybe it united to T Ts, then maybe you lost the initial, and you just ended up with Z. And then remember that, you know, a Z would have changed to an S on the way to Burmese. So I think something like that is a nice story. I was inspired to make this change because of this forthcoming work of Layun Fan. So Kroschap, which is a kind of Yaranaka language, has this word Piglet, Paxi, or Paisi, Paisi, and it has the word son, Z. So his solution is to reconstruct Kutse, as the source for Z, in core Yaranaka languages, body parts, kinship terms, and other relevant nouns, I think I mentioned this in another class, have this inalienable prefix, T. So you get it with father and mother and son. You get it for son, yeah? So remember we think Yaranaka is related to Burmese pretty closely. They're both Burmachangak. So if this inalienable prefix existed at the Burmachangak level and induced Latination, then this correspondence is solved. Final K goes back to both final K and Q, which are distinguished based on Chinese evidence. So here everybody has K, no surprise, but we have this example of K in Burmese and global stop in Chinese, which I reconstruct as Q. And then zero in Burmese corresponds to K in Chinese, which I reconstruct as this K shua, where maybe son, let's look at son like son in the sky son, as a third example is maybe the clear is. And now I can just talk you through summary of these changes. So in something like the order from Sino-Tibetan to Burmese, you have the loss of Q, the change of final, the U-vehler and the final vehler, the ignition of stops, Piero-Sintrosin's law, which is the loss of U-vehlers. Then you have these vowel changes, which I won't go through because it would just be boring to hear me read them out, that have to have happened before the merger of I and shua. Then you have E turns to A for dentals, R-L changes to L, which has to have happened before U-L changes to U-Y. Then the loss of R and L. Then Dempsey's law, the merger of N before vehlers. Then the merger of ing and in. And now you've gotten back to Piero-Burmese. So these are the changes that go from Sino-Tibetan to Piero-Burmese. And one thing I'm very happy about in this case, is we are able to figure out a lot of the relative chronology, which we were not able to do in the case of Chinese, because in the case of Chinese, they were all mergers that didn't interact. When we're looking for cognates, I don't think we should preemptively remove things that could be explained using onomatopoeia, because then we're preventing ourselves from seeing cognates where they might exist. Because the proto language may well have had autopoetic stuff in it that was inherited. So the question is, does it follow the rules or not? So if something doesn't follow the rules, then you can say we can dismiss it because it's an onomatopoeia. But if it does follow the rules, why not reconstruct it? That's my feeling. Making arguments for long distance relationships based on these kind of cognates, before you have worked out the sound changes would be a bad idea. And I agree with that. There's a section in the last chapter of my book where I sort of look into this. I'm not sure I actually look enough at the origins of medial why in Burmese. But certainly in terms of R and L, you have cases where, let's just make up an example, Burmese has something like clung and Chinese just has lung and Tibetan has brang or something like that. If you wanted to propose that all laterals in sign of Tibetan occurred in the initial position and lateral clusters arose only because of pre-initial predestination, I think that there's good reason to think that, but that a lot of work would need to go into figuring out the morphological meaning of these affixes. That's really right at the cutting edge of sign of Tibetan etymology. And all I could do in my book was really just gather together the evidence. When he discovered Werner's law, he just read an article that assembled exceptions to Grim's law. Nowadays, if I tried to publish an article, which was just a collection of exceptions to a sound change, I think it would have a lot of trouble being published. People would say, well, there's nothing new here and you don't have a theory, but actually that's extremely valuable work to do. And maybe since I wrote a book and not an article, I was able to get away with that sort of thing. And my hope is that readers will just read it and be like, whoa, it's so obvious. Why didn't he notice that the origin of medial yah in Burmese is this other thing in the way that we saw with Werner's law? But that's really, you'll say, it's the right question. I don't have an answer. And I hope that when you just look at the examples in my book, some answers will pop out at you. The why, definitely not. And the R and L, I would say generally speaking. If you want to talk about the Tabeto-Berman hypothesis, the best evidence is the change of e to a before dentals in both Tibetan and Burmese, and the merger of both ng and ng to, well, let's say ng in both Tibetan and Burmese. But that would only prove the Tabeto-Berman hypothesis in a kind of narrow sense that Tibetan and Burmese are more closely related than either one is to Chinese. And fine, I think actually I probably believe that, but that leaves aside the question of where Karen goes or where Kiranti goes or whatnot. Right. I think that's that that is the version of the Tabeto-Berman hypothesis that everything goes together except for Chinese. Everything, even languages we know nothing about because no one has ever worked on them, must be related more closely to each other than Chinese. That seems crazy to me.