Grammatical tidbits, cont.: Hmong

[muckefuck]

I couldn't hold myself back from playing with my new Hmong dictionary the night I bought, even if the format is super-annoying. For reasons I can't pretend to understand, the entries themselves are bound in landscape orientation, whereas the prefatory material and appendices are bound portrait. This isn't much of a problem as long as you're only browsing within each section, but I was trying to look up entries for the kinship terms given in a chart in the back of the book and it was a royal pain. So far, I've learned three new things about Hmong Daw:

1. Hmong Daw has a lateral fricative. You know that crazy Welsh ll that I'm always trying to teach people? I know of few other languages which have it, and they're mostly concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. The only other East Asian language I can think of with [ɬ] is Hoisanese (i.e. 台山話, a Yuè dialect spoken in the "Sze Yap" or "Four Districts" region of the Pearl River Delta), so I'm more than a little surprised to find it turning up here. (AFAIK, there aren't any Hmong in the area outside of a small, recent colony in Dongguan district, so a borrowing relationship is inconceivable.)
2. Hmong Daw has complex onsets. I knew it had initial affricates like [ʦ]. I even knew it had pre-nasalisation. But I did not expect to find words like nplhiab (IPA [mbɬíə]). That initial is described as "bilabial with lateral release" and there's a whole freakin' series of them including hml (which could be written in Welsh orthography as mhll--not that even Welshmen could necessarily say it!).
3. Hmong Daw has classifiers. This, on the other hand, I could see coming. I still haven't figured out who in East Asia died and made them cool--Classical Chinese doesn't have them, but all modern varieties do--but I've learned to expect them from any language that has been in contact with Chinese more than fleetingly. Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai--so, of course, Hmong.