A germanic-Tai Linguistic Puzzle

by Arne Østmoe

  1. THE HYPOTHESIS
  2. GERMANIC/INDO-EUROPEAN
  3. TAI/TAI-KADAI
  4. INFLUENCES/SOUND CHANGES GM-TAI
    1. Initial consonants
    2. Table of initial consonants
    3. Vowels
    4. Final consonant
    5. Tones
    6. Tone character system
  5. BIBLIOGRAPHY
  6. ABBREVIATIONS
  7. THE MATERIAL

I. THE HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis is that the old core of Tai language has been influenced from Indo-European, most strongly from Germanic (GM).

As will be seen from other chapters this influence must also have been on Tai-Kadai, the language family to which Tai belongs.

The borrowings from Indic mostly did not occur early enough to have influenced Tai-Kadai, or even Proto-Tai.

Early and important influences on Tai-Kadai are from languages in the region, first of all Han-Chinese. Prapin Manomaivibool presented in 1975 a study containing 621 Thai words as related to Chinese. This Sino-Thai common vocabulary bristles with Indo-European stems. Tsung-tung Chang believes that Proto-Indo-European vocabulary became dominant in Old-Chinese, caused by contact with IE peoples in the third millennium B.C. It is suggested that IE-people had the leadership in the Old Chinese main language center. He presents 200 words, but claims to have registered 1500.

A possible influence from IE on Chinese has later transferred IE word stems to Tai along with the influence Chinese had on Tai.

The reason for believing in a direct influence from GM on Tai is that Grimm's Law seems to have acted before the transfer.

Partly, however Grimm's Law also seems to have acted through the IE to Chinese transfer (as by sound changes k- to h-). This could be coincidental or from a transformation state of IE. However, this study only examines the word transfer of GM to Tai, since systems to explain the sound changes are more easy to develop for GM to Tai than for IE to Tai, or for other IE languages to Tai for that matter. The case might have been as follows:

People of Austronesian and/or Austro-Asian origin merged with Germanic people who came to their area.

This resulted in a common language which contained a Germanic word stock, transformed to the usual simplified forms of the area, with tones and without Germanic grammar.

This common language was an important part of ProtoTai-Kadai.

The area was most probably within what today is Southern China, or perhaps farther to the north.

North of this area lived the Han-Chinese, from whose language words were adopted both before and after the common language was developed. Words adapted in those oldest periods are not normally regarded as borrowings.