Baxter-Sagart reconstructions and Occam's Razor

The internet abounds with information if we make the effort to search. One interesting find is a pdf of the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese roots in tabular format. Excellent! But being an analytical bad news bear, I also see some important issues that tie in with my stance on developing orthographies that properly conform to Occam's Razor. This is out of respect for logic, for necessary simplicity, for clarity and for general readers, some of whom may not be well-versed in linguistics but which nonetheless are interested in the beauty of a language and its history.

Contempt for Occam's Razor inhabits even mainstream linguistics and the field is far too often misconceived as an intuitive art than a logical science. I put my money on organized phonologies and uncluttered orthographies that express only what's necessary for the topic at hand. It's not necessary to show exact phonetics of a word each and every time when the discussion is not about the exact phonetics of a language. If we have a list of roots, it doesn't make sense to list it all out in excruciating phonetic detail any more than it makes sense to write English this way. As such, mixing IPA symbols into your orthography often spells more trouble than what it's worth. "IPA" doesn't stand for International Orthographic Alphabet. At some point a decent linguist must come up with a sensible, legible, optimal, uncluttered orthography to express their language of study beyond the microscale phonetic level. A means, in other words, to quickly and clearly cite words in a vocabulary, pruned for immediate and sufficient comprehension by an everyday reader. Abusing symbols to complicate the message is as corrupt a practice as abusing unnecessary specialist terms for little other reason than for show.

On the top of the list, the Baxter-Sagart team begins with roots like *ʔˤra. This shows us that they envision a phonemic pharyngealized glottal stop. Fine. However unless */ʔˤ/ is phonemically distinct from other phonemes in the language, say */ʕ/, why be so precise on the orthographic level? Why not use a single clear symbol for this instead of mixing up orthography with the phonetic level far below it? If the orthography, in its necessary simplicity, doesn't make the phonetics you intend very clear, one may simply write a quick primer on it and be done with it. If only this, then I can concede that perhaps there's some reason for it that I've overlooked.

Further down the list, we also have *qˤrep which is quite the tongue-twister. One may dismiss this as within the bounds of plausibility although I do admit that this apparent pharyngealized uvular stop is unusual for its Schrödingeresque ability to inhabit two places of articulation at once. Then again, there are many consonant rich languages like Klallam around, right? We also have to keep in mind though that these kinds of languages are also quite rare and there's nothing scientific and methodical about a theory that strives towards the exotic rather than the minimal. Strong proof should come before the addition of a new phoneme to a reconstruction.

But when we come across *qʷʰˤat-, what is Baxter and Sagart trying to express to us and how does it fit into a plausible phonological system? A labialized, aspirated, pharyngealized, uvular stop??? How on earth could this possibly be contrastive with another phoneme? Surely at this point we have to concede that Baxter and Sagart have not respected the differences and proper uses of phonetic versus orthographic transcription. It gives the impression of a poorly organized phonology and orthography, mixing exact and even unlikely phonetic symbols together to create a visual mess that ends up being more confusing to the reader than helpful. At this point, it's just not reflective of the facts, even when (and especially when) armed with knowledge of the IPA system!

Keep in mind that there are already expressed concerns by others about the use of "j" in Middle Chinese onsets in words like gji  (祇 qí) considering that the "phoneme" doesn't seem to exist when compared to some loanwords coming from outside Chinese (eg. MC *bjut [Baxter] < Sanskrit buddha 'enlightened one; Buddha'). There is indeed informational value behind "j" here but it's very unlikely a true semivowel or a palatalization of the preceding consonant. At some point then, we have to get back to reality, paying careful heed to creating a balanced, minimal orthography because overcomplexity quite simply hampers progress in all things.

Stress and tone in Mandarin

After googling for "stress" and "mandarin", I came across one forum where a member named Carlo notifies us of a dictionary of word stress for Mandarin. As he explains the situation in more detail with helpful examples, he adds: "So some say that putonghua has several lexical stress patterns: strong-neutral, strong-weak, and weak-strong."

Instinctively, I'm skeptical that our analysis of Mandarin stress must be so complicated (ie. strong-weak versus strong-neutral) and feel this may be an illusion caused by the interaction of stress with tone. I have my own language models in mind that would make things simpler than this, but I'll continue looking out for more info to test my thoughts.

New thought: A 2D matrix of eventive/non-eventive and subjective/objective

I've been remodeling the PIE verb system for my own personal kicks to try and unite a number of various ideas (ie. Jasanoff's theories, the durative-aorist-perfect model, active-stative, and subjective-objective) into a single coherent model that explains everything much clearer than what I'm finding in journals and books. Forgive me if I'm reinventing the wheel but as far as I know this wheel hasn't been invented yet.

My cursed snag to my subjective-objective theory remains that subjectives are expected to yield atelic verbs (ie. verbs without completed goal) or imperfectives (ie. continuous actions or states)^[1]. Even though the middle clearly should be placed under a subjective category in my hypothetical remodeling, and even though the subjective on which the middle is built acts in many respects like a former subjective (for example, its curious habit of accomodating verbs of state), subjective can't turn into a perfective in any direct way according to known structural linguistics! We oddly expect the total reverse: subjectives yielding imperfectives and objectives yielding perfectives. This is why I had a migraine a couple of days ago, frenetically diagramming to make this irritating paradox finally unfold into clarity. I think I've come to an interesting idea that takes a page from the Ancient Egyptian verbal system: eventive versus non-eventive.

An eventive verb, as the name implies, refers to a specific event in time while the non-eventive by contrast focuses more on the action or state in a more generalized context. It's the difference between "I ate the baby (last night)" (eventive) and "I eat babies (in general)" (non-eventive). By drawing a two-dimensional grid between eventive & non-eventive on the one hand and subjective & objective on the other, we end up with four main categories in which to place the earliest verbs of Common Proto-IE. This is perhaps not a good synchonic model for PIE but it seems to be explanatory as a seed for its eventual evolution in many of the Core IE dialects. Observe:

Objective non-eventive	*h₁és-m̥ 'I am' *déh₃-m̥ 'I share'[2] *bʰḗr-m̥ 'I carry (often)'
Objective eventive	*bʰḗr-mi 'I am carrying' *bʰḗr-s-m̥ 'I have carried (once)'
Subjective non-eventive	*wóid-h₂e 'I know' *ḱónk-e 'it is hung' *stestóh₂-e 'it is stood' *gʰónh₁-h₂e 'I am born'
Subjective eventive	*h₁és-h₂or 'I sit' *gʰu-h₂ór 'I spill'

Objective non-eventive

This category is the origin of root aorists and imperfective past in Core IE while becoming the mi-class preterite in Anatolian. This is because the pan-PIE choice to make the continuous aspect a present tense marker made non-continuous verbs automatically a past by contrast. This change also hints at why past tense came to be less marked than the present, curiously opposing normal language tendencies (ie. the shift occurred rapidly as PIE broke up). Telic verbs (ie. Narten presents with *ē-vocalism) were free to be marked in the continuous, suggesting an impending goal, or to remain unmarked to convey realized ones. The former leads to a durative-turned-present and the latter leads to a momentaneous-turned-past.

Objective eventive

This category was largely characterized by telic verbs marked in the continuous aspect (later Narten presents). However, the antecedent of sigmatic aorists (ie. those verbs marked in *-s- with lengthened root vowel) which originally expressed a past experience were by definition eventive as well. An experiential form, parallel to Mandarin guo (过), can easily yield explicit past tense "sigmatic aorists" in Core IE dialects, while forming special 3ps sigmatic past forms for an originally tenseless hi-class as evidenced by Anatolian and Tocharian.

Subjective non-eventive

This category denoted states where the subject was affected (passives), but also often verbs of emotion and of thought which are clearly subjective, as well as what would later be termed reduplicated perfects. The development of reduplicated perfects with built in punctual meaning directly out of a "stative" requires the brunt of explanation. My hunch here is that reduplication was restricted to verbs like 'stand' signifying states resulting from prior action. An expression like 'it is stood' qualifies as such while 'I have gone' is less focussed on state than on the completed action itself. This latter comparison explains how forms specialized in suggesting resultant states from actions (PIE *stestóh₂e 'it is stood up' → 'it has come to be stood up') can gradually expand to take on resultant actions as well (post-IE *bʰebʰórh₂e 'I have come to be carrying' → 'I have carried') and thus become a "perfect" with punctual aspect now emphasizing active result over mere resulted state. The connection then between subjective and perfect is indirect and subtle.

It should also be noted that only part of this single category yields perfects while the rest of the subjective umbrella is the mother of middles and inherently non-punctual states. So the subjective simply doesn't become perfective wholesale and there's no need for me to worry about the crosslinguistic tendency I mentioned above which refers more to developments as a whole, not in part. Phew!

Also, forms like *wóidh₂e 'I know' which never ever show reduplication in the later perfect hint at their original meaning and usage: 'I know' (stative) → 'I have come to know' (inchoative) → 'I have known/seen' (perfective past). Since 'to know' is not an action and since reduplication expresses a resultant state from an *action* as outlined above, naturally there can be no reduplicated forms possible for these stative verbs.

Subjective eventive

This category is composed of middles and are marked as such with special endings in *-r. They are actions accomplished through a medium ("mediopassive"), through one's own effort ("sitting"), or involuntarily like "spilling" or "sneezing". This category appears to be the least molested by change in the various branches, so I think I'll stop typing now.

There, now we'll see if this post stands the test of time...


NOTES
^[1] Gülzow, The Acquisition of Intensifiers Emphatic Reflexives in English and German Child Language (2006), Studies on language acquisition, v.22, p.45, table 6 (see link).
^[2] Perhaps this verb is better placed in the category of subjective non-eventive instead. Note Hewson/Bubeník, From Case to Adposition: The Development of Configurational Syntax in Indo-European Languages (2006), p.100 (see link): "In this context we should remind ourselves of the archaic transactional meaning of *dō- (< *deh₃-) as shown by Hittite dahhi 'I take' (< *deh₃-h₂e) vs. general IE 'I give'." Jasanoff shows a slightly different interpretation in The role of o-grade in Hittite and Tocharian verb inflection (1992), published in Reconstructing Languages and Cultures, p.140 (see link): "Hittite has a 3 sg. dāi, which can be referred to an underlying *doh₃-e and taken as the continuant of a pre-Proto-Indo-European 'middle' with the meaning 'gives/gave to oneself'."

UPDATES
(12 Sep 2009)

Just realized that a better translation of what must have been a bidirectional sense underlying *deh₃- is not 'to trade' but 'to share'. Thus, a semantic shift from 'to share (my own property)' → 'to give' (as in Core IE dialects) and 'to share (another's property)' → 'to take' is clearer. It also works well with what grammatically hints at a non-eventive and atelic verb, non-eventive because it avoids the continuous marker and atelic because it shows no Narten-grade which would explicitly mark it as telic.

Also corrected the forms *h₁ḗs-h₂or and *gʰeu-h₂ór to *h₁és-h₂or and *gʰu-h₂ór respectively, as per the middle forms suggested in Sihler, New comparative grammar of Greek and Latin (1995), p.133 (see link) and in Indo-European perspectives - Studies in honour of Anna Morpurgo (2004), p.506 (see link).

(05 Sep 2009)

Added footnote #2 concerning the changing semantics of *deh₃-.

(09 Sep 2009)

Added footnote #1 concerning theories on the typical evolution of transitive verbs.

Fun with Old Chinese rhymes

Between data-mining all things Etruscan and pondering on the issues of Pre-Proto-Indo-European, I'm becoming increasingly enchanted by Old Chinese. Old Chinese is absolutely nothing like modern Mandarin or Cantonese. In fact, all of the tones that we now take for granted in Chinese come purely from sound changes in the language that occured since Augustus Caesar crowned himself divine emperor of the newly forged Roman Empire. (I've wrote about Chinese tonogenesis before.) Vis-à-vis the number of tones, Mandarin was the more economical of the Sinitic languages, settling with four tones; the so-called "fifth tone" (as in the interrogative particle, 吗 ma) being in reality a misnomer for what is the reduced variant of any of these four tones. In Cantonese, the number of distinct tones is six.

The reconstruction of Old Chinese depends on who does the reconstructing but there is no question that Old Chinese had interesting consonant clusters that would make Russian speakers feel right at home. You can see these same clusters in Classical Tibetan, a language which shares a common ancestry with Chinese within the past 6000 years. In 1992, William Hubbard Baxter authored A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology, clarifying all of the interesting changes that took place. We can tell in part what happened during the course of history of the language based on old rhymes. Words that originally rhymed now no longer do. In fact, in many cases, the changes are absolutely dramatic. Below, I will talk about some of these "used-to-but-no-longer" rhymes, showing pronunciation of the characters in Modern Mandarin.

For example, we know that 人 rén "person" and 年 nián "year" used to rhyme but they don't now. Even in Cantonese, the two words have deviated a fair amount: /jɐn/ "person" & /nin/ "year". So some propose that the two words in Old Chinese were pronounced *znen and *ʕznen (yes, with pharyngeal onset!), respectively. This is what is represented on Wikipedia... but I would recommend that people take Wikipedia with a large pinch of salt. Baxter shows instead *njin "person" (where j is for IPA /j/ as in the y- of "yeller") and *nin "harvest, year" (see p.424).

Likewise, we are told that *b-rjɨŋ and *prjɨŋ both mean "ice" in Old Chinese (on p.273) and that they are undoubtedly related. However in Modern Mandarin, these two words are quite different: 凌 líng and 冰 bīng. In the first word, the prefix *b- has been omitted in Middle Chinese while *p- in the second word is not a prefix and therefore remains intact. Prefix deletion is a common change in Middle Chinese which is half the reason why modern Chinese seems so completely removed from its original pronunciation. Note that the voicing or voicelessness of the initial and final consonants of these words played a part in determining the eventual tone of the word and also keep in mind that different Chinese languages reflect different tones. What is usually high flat tone in Mandarin (which sounds like "singing" to English ears and which is identical in sound with the French tonal accent) will often be high falling tone in Cantonese (sounding like an exclamation in English).

UPDATES
(Mar 25 2008) Based on the input from Movenon, I realize now that my initial statement in the first paragraph of this entry ("Mandarin was the more conservative of the Sinitic languages, settling with four tones,[...] ") is too vague and may cause confusion. I was thinking of changing it to "Mandarin was the more conservative (in the number of tones)" but I guess the word "conservative" is the crux of the problem since I'm using it to mean "reserved, limited" while it can also be interpreted as meaning "traditional". Arrgh. Damn the English language. So I guess we'll have to try this: "Vis-à-vis the number of tones, Mandarin was the more economical of the Sinitic languages, settling with four tones,[...]".

Nifty Online Linguistic Keyboard Tools

Here are some nifty websites offering an online keyboard program free to use without downloads. Simply go to the site and start typing in the field and things will be converted to whatever you need. Perhaps it will be useful to you unicode geeks out there as it has been for me:

http://www.ntgreekkeyboard.com/
This website is handy for writing Classical Greek with a standard keyboard ('q' is used to write theta and 'x' is used to write chi, for example). Be forewarned that the website is bedecked with advertisements by biblethumping literalists like 'Bible Gateway', but I trust that educated people can appreciate the website while shunning this christocentric minefield of religious extremist drivel. Besides, agnostics will inherit the earth anyway (assuming our species lives long enough after the polar ice caps melt thanks to Republicans who are coincidentally also religious extremists).

http://www.pinyin.info/tools/converter/chars2uninumbers.html
This is another handy site which converts chinese characters into html code. Considering the thousands of Chinese characters out there and two sets of them to boot (the traditional set and also the simplified versions used in mainland China and Hong Kong), it's nice to not have to waste your time with mindnumbing conversions or memory-hogging downloads. Keep in mind that in order to first type the Chinese on a standard keyboard as I can, you do need to download a special program. Mine allows me to switch easily from English to Chinese and back again with the press of CTRL-SPACE... like this: 太好啦!

http://linguiste.org/phonetics/ipa/chart/keyboard/
I love this one most of all. It allows you to assemble standard IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) together with just a point-and-click. Want a bilabial fricative? No problem! Say, I currently feel the urge to make phonetic transcriptions of Nama sentences!!!

Jews in Beijing and Old French songstresses

Stay tuned, folks. I'm busy assembling my stray notes on the Etruscan god Suri into something coherent for my inevitable article "Suri, the saga part 2" to go with my previous article. Suri is just full of poppycock goodness and it's hard to explain it all in one installment considering all the garbage peddled in books about Etruscans in the past hundred years.

In the meantime, while I collect my notes on that, I found a bunch of fun links online that probably have nothing in common with each other except for the fact that it shows us how we live in one big, beautiful melting pot called earth.

Just yesterday, I was having lunch with a friend of mine and I just couldn't convince the stubborn Newfie that there was a Chinese version of HBO's Sex in the City coming right out of Beijing. Not made by HBO at all, but a damn close imitation to the original. It's called 好想好想談戀愛 (Haoxiang Haoxiang Tan Lian Ai). He said that it surely must be from somewhere non-communist like... say... Taiwan. Nope. Yes, that's right. Sex in the City communist style.

Most non-Chinese people in North America have the impression that Beijing is a very scary place where only Chinese live, where outsiders are avoided, where people are prudish, traditional and overall closed-minded. That just doesn't appear to be the case from what I see online and from what my Chinese friends tell me when they go to Beijing every year. Here's a few links that will brutalize any lingering belief you may still have that China is somehow a backwards, unfriendly country:

Haoxiang Haoxiang Tan Lian Ai
My friend introduced me to this one day. I was delightfully amazed. It's a TV series just as polished as you would find on a North American or European station except for the slight technicality that it's from Beijing and everyone speaks Mandarin.


Sexy Beijing: A Jew Brew
I found this link looking for Haoxiang Haoxiang Tan Lian Ai. I'm glad I did. This girl is funny, Jewish and gabs with locals in Mandarin while bridging the communication gap for all of us Chinese-challenged anglophone folk. In this episode, we are educated about the Jewish community in Beijing. Who knew?

Then there is the beautiful voice of chanteuse Emma Kirkby. Listen closely. This isn't modern French. She's actually singing in Old French as it was spoken around the year 1300. The name of the song is Foy Porter, originally composed by Guillaume de Machaut during the Middle Ages. Even if you hate all foreign languages with a vengeance, I'm sure you'll agree that her sound is refreshing and warm.

UPDATES
(May 9 2008) I corrected a typo. I typed de Michaut but the French composer's name is in fact Guillaume de Machaut. Thanks Graham for pointing that out! Much appreciated.

Love is locative

Okay, this is probably less about historical linguistics and more to do with how a language with a long history might be evolving into something totally out-of-hand. I couldn't help but laugh at this news item from Beijing:

• Chinese couple apply to name their baby 'at-sign'

Makes you want to impose laws to prevent some people from having babies, doesn't it? Thank my friend, Amy Hui, for this news tip.

The origins of Greco-Chinese apeirophobia

Let's say you have a swift runner and a lazy-going tortoise placed on a track with the intent of racing each other for the curious enjoyment of a classical audience. Do not ask why. This absurd scenario is purely theoretical for the sake of a point about dead philosophers. Now, the tortoise, being slow, is given a head start by the gracious Achilles. In order that Achilles even pass his reptilian competitor, he must first travel the distance from himself to the tortoise. Yet before, he gets to the tortoise, he must have travelled half of that distance. And before half that distance, he must have journeyed a quarter the distance, and before that, an eighth, and before that, a 16th, et cetera ad vomitum. As we can see then, he has to accomplish an infinite number of tasks to even get to that sluggish turtle. So we can conclude that Achilles will never win the race at all, no matter how fast he runs.

No, wait. Nevermind. Bad example. Let's just skip the Greek calculus exam and sum it all up by saying that, um... the dimensionless cannot be accumulated, yet its size is a thousand miles. Sound good? Excellent.

What am I carrying on about? Infinity, of course. And both the Ancient Chinese and the Classical Greeks are to blame for its discovery as well as the countless mathematicians on both sides of Eurasia tormented by its abstract purgatory of existential paradoxes during the following two millenia thereafter. Personally, I like to think that both Zeno of Elea and Hui Shi were fraternal twins seperated at birth on the open Indian sea by a freak storm. Strangely, they both covered similar topics involving the notions of infinity, motion and spacetime approximately 2500 years ago without the use of a telephone. Another coincidence is that little happens to be known of both of these people's lives.

Zeno of Elea, a Greek, was born in the town of Elea (hence the name) and was probably born around 490 BCE. Zeno was said to be a handsome man, at least according to Plato, and in his youth he had probably been the eromenos to an older philosopher named Parmenides (read Plato, Parmenides, 127b). He seems to especially have been devoted to the notion of paradoxes involving the divisibility of dimensions, the nature of motion and the illusion of plurality. He appears to have made a name for himself through his genius explorations taking advantage of logical proof by contradiction to undermine the very things we most take for granted in our daily lives. He is famous for the self-named Zeno's Paradox involving that mindnumbing turtle example above.

However, miles away, a contemporaneous fellow by the name of Hui Shi (惠施) wrote about surprisingly similar things concerning plurality and our notions of infinity. He was part of the "School of Names", a nebulous label we use for a group of recognized philosophers of the same time period as Zeno and his followers, who likewise delighted in paradoxes, mind twisters and an overall profound contemplation of logic in a way that wasn't done before (as far as we know). And of course, it can be attributed to Hui Shi who stated in Classical Chinese:

• 无厚不可积也，其大千里。
  Wú-hòu bù kě jī yě, qí dà qiān lǐ. (Modern Mandarin pronunciation)
  Literally: Non-thickness not can accumulate also its size thousand miles.
  The dimensionless cannot be accumulated, yet its size is a thousand miles.

UPDATES
(Mar 27 2008) Updated thanks to a tipoff from an anonymous person. The Chinese character 也 is to be read yě, not tā whose character is quite similar: 他. Sorry, this is due to my carelessness.

Matriarchy and women rulers

I was idly thinking about matriarchy the other day while walking in a park. I do stuff like that regularly to unwind from stress. It's all part of my bohemian daily regimen, really. Then my mind wandered to how Marija Gimbutas and others have earned a bad rap for their insistence on skewing historical perspective with their matriarchal/matrifocal ideals of an 'Old Europe', i.e. Europe and its inhabitants before the domination of Indo-European languages. (Some interesting insight into the politics behind this ideology can be gained from False Goddess by Lawrence Osborne at Salon.)

After that, I started to think that despite the silliness of feminism^[1] and its equal opposite, chauvinism, and despite the fact that matriarchy in its true definition either doesn't exist in any culture or is astonishingly rare, there are still some notable women of history that rose to full power regardless of cultural limitations.



In Egypt, there was Hatshepsut (aka Maat-Ka-Re), the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty who lived between 1473 and 1458 BCE. She was the daughter of Thuthmose I and Ahmes. Her father died and so Hatshepsut's younger half-brother, Thuthmose II, ascended the throne. However, Thuthmose II died soon after, and so she was made regent for the young Thuthmose III. Rather than relinquish her title to him when Thuthmose reached maturity as expected, Hatshepsut proclaimed herself Pharaoh. While women enjoyed a number of rights, from owning land and property to having rights in the court of law, a female Pharaoh was a bit outside the norm. Nonetheless, she was approved by the temples as the 'daughter of Amon' and she maintained rule for about twenty years.^[2]




It seems however, thanks to a tip from a good friend of mine who knows her Chinese history, there was another similar character called Wu Zetian (武则天, pronounced [u tsɤ tʰiɛn]). Born in 625 CE into a merchant-class family in Shanxi, she started out with the role of fifth-grade concubine, a cairen (才人, pronounced [tsʰai ɻən]), to Emperor Taizong. When the emperor passed away, it was customary for all concubines of the deceased emperor to be taken to the nunnery to live out the rest of their lives. However, the next emperor named Emperor Gaozong evidently showed special favour towards her when he had her reinstated into his own harem. Her status was raised to a zhaoyi concubine (昭儀, pronounced [ʈʂau i]). Wu Zetian gave birth to a daughter which then died mysteriously. Empress Wang was quickly accused of having killed the baby out of jealousy and was disgraced. In the process, Wu Zetian rose to become the new empress. The Emperor's health was poor, deteriorating gradually, and Wu Zetian's responsibilities increased little by little until by 650, he suffered a stroke. At this point, he was Emperor in name only as Wu Zetian was practically ruling the country already. In fact, in 690 she finally proclaimed herself Emperor and promoted Buddhism as the state religion. All of these facts were a shock to Confucianists who could not accept a woman in power because to them it violated their perceptions about the natural order of things. Wu Zetian even had a male harem and was especially fond of a set of identical twins. She was both reknowned for her ruthlessness in stamping out opposition as she was for promoting arts, fighting against nepotism and elevating the status of women that was kept down by Confucius philosophy in previous eras. She ruled until she was 81. In 705, when a coup slaughtered her harem, her rule ended and she died nine months later.

Now, isn't historical accuracy far more fascinating than inventing sterilized feminist myths about imaginary peace-loving matriarchies or talking ad nauseum about the same ol' dry, men-only history that we still see in school textbooks? In my mind, there is no such thing as an "egalitarian society" or a "patriarchal society" in the end. These are imaginary oppositions invented in the modern day. In reality, human society is far more complex. A culture, regardless of how you look at it, is always a special blend of both egalitarianism and patriarchy. Sometimes a culture is more open to women having power, sometimes not. Time changes a culture too. The battle between balance and extremism is a neverending one.

UPDATES
^[1] (June 26/07) Egad! In hindsight, I had better elaborate on what I mean in this context by the word "feminism" to avoid unnecessary ire from those who should mistake my words for what they are not. Here, by opposing this word with "chauvinism", I am of course talking about "radical feminism". Naturally, the goal of "feminism" itself (if used only to refer to promoting equality regardless of gender) is a logical and constructive goal. I think readers should be able to understand my intent by the nature of the topic anyways, but it's better to communicate clearly than not at all.
^[2] (June 26/07) More interesting perspectives on Hatshepsut are available online from Hatshepsut: Wicked Stepmother or Joan of Arc? by Peter F. Dorman, an associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago.

Mommy, where do tones come from?

I've been ranting too much about European linguistics. I've been shamelessly unfair to the other continents who have patiently been reading my rants and feeling unrepresented. This is a big world so let's get cracking on... [Glen swiftly spins a globe and then stops it suddenly with his finger]... ah, yes, Sino-Tibetan.

Don't know what Sino-Tibetan is? Then check out this explanation from Berkeley University in California. Learn it because this is where the most popular language in the world comes from. No, no, not English, silly. Mandarin!

When I was a wee lad, there was this nagging question in the back of my quirky mind: Why does Chinese have tones? No matter how educated one happens to be, most people honestly haven't the foggiest clue about how to answer that question. Afterall they don't teach language origins in high school for some crazy reason. I guess if they started that programme, people would feel more united and have one less reason to start wars with other countries. Surely global comradery would cause a collapse of civilization. (Okay, that was a terribly bitter thing to say, but I just finished watching George Orwell's 1984 on YouTube and it just makes ya think, y'know?)

Anyways, it was only in my twenties when I finally discovered the juicy answer. The keyword here is called tonogenesis. Tonogenesis is the development of tonal contrasts in a language that previously didn't have any. Apparently, this happens all the time. It probably happened in languages before the Ice Age. It's certainly happened into the modern day, and if we live long enough and haven't evolved into waddling fish-people, there will be new languages with tones, perhaps derived from English, in the future.

Asian languages aren't the only tongues with tones. Did you know that Swedish has two tones? See The Tone-bearing Unit in Swedish and Norwegian [pdf]. And have you ever heard of a Nilo-Saharan language called Nobiin? Where have you been? Read this article entitled A sketch of Nobiin tone [pdf] from the University of Leiden. And we can't forget our Native American brothers and sisters, some of whom speak Navajo.

Tonogenesis in Sino-Tibetan is pretty interesting. Surprisingly linguists have reconstructed Proto-Sino-Tibetan with tongue-twisting consonant clusters and no tones. Frankly, it sounds more like Russian than anything we'd recognize in China today. All the tonal contrasts that Chinese languages now use (four tones in Mandarin; six or more in Cantonese) came after Proto-Sino-Tibetan. I have to chuckle every time I think about that crazy thought. It's a mind-bender. The word "eight", for example, is pronounced ba with high tone in Mandarin and as baat in Cantonese with middle tone. The two words, including their tone are related, of course. Sometimes you can even guess what the tone will be in Cantonese if you know the Mandarin word but, trust me, be careful with that because I personally have miscalculated a few times and had egg on my face. Both Mandarin ba and Cantonese baat go back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *bʀyat but this word is without any reconstructable tone. Yep, just like Russian. So where did these tones come from then? Thin air? How does that work?

It turns out that voiceless and voiced sounds that we make unconsciously when we speak a language have an inherent acoustic frequency or "tone". In the word *bʀyat the initial consonant cluster is voiced and therefore gives off a low frequency but the letter at the end, *t, is voiceless and has high frequency. In other words, the surrounding sounds of the vowel were the seeds for later tone and they eventually determined the tonal shape of the word, whether the tone was low or high, whether it rose to a high pitch or fell sharply, etc. I suppose we could say that the vowel assimilated the unconscious frequencies of consonants and this evolved into more conscious tones, now intrinsic to the meaning of that word. Different Chinese languages have different kinds and numbers of "tonemes", just as all spoken languages have different kinds and numbers of phonemes.

Similar tonogenesis happened in Navajo, a language which derives from Proto-Athabaskan. Proto-Athabaskan also doesn't appear to have had tonal contrasts. This article Vietnamese and Tonogenesis: revising the model is also interesting for those who want to really get their hands dirty.