Mar. 8th, 2004 04:34 pm
Incredible Sunday
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muckefuckYesterday was damn near perfect.
I slept in. The sun woke me up. I had two epiphanies about Korean historical phonology. The first was a complete "duh!" moment. I'd always wondered why Modern Chinese aspirated stops sometimes correspond to Korean aspirated stops and other times to unaspirated ones. For example, Mandarin tang2 "sugar" and tang2 "hall" are homophones, but, in Korean, the first is thang and the second tang. Then I remembered that Early Middle Chinese had a three-way distinction: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced aspirated. (Some dialects, like Shanghainese, still have this.) I went through Karlgren's reconstruction of Ancient Chinese looking for evidence and came up with the following hypothesis: Although in Mandarin, the voiced aspirates lose their voicing and fall together with the voiceless unaspirated stops, in Korean, the lose both aspiration and voicing and fall together with the voiceless unaspirated series. The pattern is distorted by apparent exceptions and (later?) analogical changes, but I think the basic correspondence is sound. The second was the reasoning behind the mysterious alternation in some endings: /s/ after consonants, nothing after vowels. I finally realised that, historically, there musta been an */s/ in all cases, which was voiced to [z] between vowels. All [z]s were lost in Late Middle Korean and wham! the flanking vowels closed up. That's why you have /kapnita/ from the stem /ka-/ and /capsupnita/ from the stem /cap-/. Elementary! I got a ride to Meinl from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
welcomerain. There I met a lot of fun people, talked about food and languages, ate ham and cheese and gugelhupf, and drank two large mochas. mollpeartree gave me a fantastic scarf. She, princeofcairo, caitalainn, and I went shopping. I bought some silly pretty things. We went out to Tizi Melloul, met more good friends, ate steaming bacalao croquettes and drank red wine. The featured Middle Eastern pulled me onto the floor to dance with her and told me she was "impressed" with my moves. I got an enthusiastic round of applause from the room. caitalainn had us all pissing ourselves laughing. When I got home, I felt melancholy, had a satisfying wank, and sank into sleep, exhausted.
The only thing missing wasmonshu!
I slept in. The sun woke me up. I had two epiphanies about Korean historical phonology. The first was a complete "duh!" moment. I'd always wondered why Modern Chinese aspirated stops sometimes correspond to Korean aspirated stops and other times to unaspirated ones. For example, Mandarin tang2 "sugar" and tang2 "hall" are homophones, but, in Korean, the first is thang and the second tang. Then I remembered that Early Middle Chinese had a three-way distinction: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced aspirated. (Some dialects, like Shanghainese, still have this.) I went through Karlgren's reconstruction of Ancient Chinese looking for evidence and came up with the following hypothesis: Although in Mandarin, the voiced aspirates lose their voicing and fall together with the voiceless unaspirated stops, in Korean, the lose both aspiration and voicing and fall together with the voiceless unaspirated series. The pattern is distorted by apparent exceptions and (later?) analogical changes, but I think the basic correspondence is sound. The second was the reasoning behind the mysterious alternation in some endings: /s/ after consonants, nothing after vowels. I finally realised that, historically, there musta been an */s/ in all cases, which was voiced to [z] between vowels. All [z]s were lost in Late Middle Korean and wham! the flanking vowels closed up. That's why you have /kapnita/ from the stem /ka-/ and /capsupnita/ from the stem /cap-/. Elementary! I got a ride to Meinl from
welcomerain. There I met a lot of fun people, talked about food and languages, ate ham and cheese and gugelhupf, and drank two large mochas. mollpeartree gave me a fantastic scarf. She, princeofcairo, caitalainn, and I went shopping. I bought some silly pretty things. We went out to Tizi Melloul, met more good friends, ate steaming bacalao croquettes and drank red wine. The featured Middle Eastern pulled me onto the floor to dance with her and told me she was "impressed" with my moves. I got an enthusiastic round of applause from the room. caitalainn had us all pissing ourselves laughing. When I got home, I felt melancholy, had a satisfying wank, and sank into sleep, exhausted.The only thing missing was
monshu!![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
I don't remember yelling "pudding" out the window.