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Is Thai a stress- or syllable-timed language, and does it matter?
Re Thai words that might have unstressed syllables, there are plenty of candidates – my sample sentence might be misleading in that way. For instance polysyllabic borrowings from Pali/Sanskrit and ‘sesquisyllabic’ words with a CəCV(C) shape. The latter definitely have a unstressed-stressed pattern, but for the former I’m not so sure.
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Is Thai a stress- or syllable-timed language, and does it matter?
Thanks for the responses guys! I agree that we probably shouldn’t make inferences about timing based on the writing system alone.
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Difference between Genitive Personal Pronoun and Possessive Pronoun
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Are there any languages or cultures that have genderless given names?
I’ve read that many Vietnamese given names are derived from Chinese. If so, I wonder if the fact that they are written in quốc ngữ rather than with characters adds a degree of ambiguity gender-wise.
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Why do we use "someone" to signify one person?
Thai seems to work like Malay, except using word order rather than reduplication: neung khon ‘one person’, but khon neung ‘someone’ (neung = one, khon = people classifier.) ‘Some people’ would be bang khon. Thai ESL learners often make the mistake of giving ‘someone’ a plural referent, so clearly this feature of English is a bit strange to them too!
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How did a logographic orthography like Chinese organize its word-stock before any type of phonetic notation?
Pre-20th century Chinese dictionaries did have a system for indicating pronunciation – see the Wiki page on ‘fanqie’ about this. This was not how they were organized, although rime dictionaries like the Qieyun and Guangyun grouped entries by tone – books one and two were for level tone, etc. As far as linguistic diversity goes, the Qieyun is believed to present a compromise between northern and southern readings of the characters. This isn’t a surprise, since dictionaries are usually meant to set unitary standards rather than reflect diversity.
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How did a logographic orthography like Chinese organize its word-stock before any type of phonetic notation?
Dictionaries published in Taiwan, like the Far East Chinese-English Dictionary, still list the characters by radical/stroke order. (To look up a character, you first isolate the radical, then count strokes.) If you know the pronunciation, there are pinyin and Bopomofo indexes that can be used, but the actual entries go by radical. Radicals are basically semantic in nature, don’t you think?
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How is Sanskrit "va" supposed to be pronounced?
I can think of a couple of languages that have the consonant clusters [sv], [dv], [tv] and [hv] – Russian is one. You may have trouble with them as they don’t occur in your native language, but that doesn’t mean the original speakers of Sanskrit did.
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Do we know of any influences on Tibetan from Chinese (other than lexical borrowing)?
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Do we know of any influences on Tibetan from Chinese (other than lexical borrowing)?
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Tonal Language with more than 5 tones
In any case, I would bet these varieties of Lao are mutually intelligible, as speakers would be able to adjust for the slight discrepancy in the tones. I'll be in Hanoi next week - another exotic linguistic destination :)
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Tonal Language with more than 5 tones
That's interesting. Doesn't written Lao distinguish 6 tones, given how the system with consonant classes works? I thought Lao had 6 tones (high, mid, low, rising, high falling, low falling). Do you happen to know which of these is missing in the 5 tone version?
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Non-tonal "isolates" within families of tonal languages
The comment about a possible relationship between losing vowel length and losing tones is suggestive, but I don’t think it works that way. Mandarin (no phonemic vowel length) has fewer tones than Cantonese (which has long and short vowels). However, if you look at how Mandarin tones developed from Middle Chinese (see the wiki page on MC), it’s clear that there is really no relationship. The idea that Mandarin is somehow on the way to losing its tones is just not credible (not that you made that claim).
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Could certain adjectives or adverbs be analysed to function as a type of copula in Mandarin Chinese?
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Do the Thai and Lao negative particles, "ไม่" (mai) and "ບໍ່" (bo) have reflexes in the other language?
I think you're right. Here's another example, from the Matichon dictionary: เข่นฆ่ามหาอสุรแรง ฤทธิห้าว บ ห่อนเอ “[He] stabbed and killed the powerful asura, and his power was great [not a little]”. This is from the poem Samuttakhote, so maybe as early as the 1680s (King Narai).