The Strata of Bai

Yeon-Ju Lee , Laurent Sagart (1)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

This paper recognizes four strata of Chinese loanwords in the Bai lexicon: two (called A1 and A2) for the old layer, and two (B1 and B2) are recent. The sound correspondences with Chinese are presented for each layer. The indigenous layer is not Chinese and shows connections with proto-Loloish as reconstructed by Bradley. each item on a Swadesh-100 word list is discussed. It is argued that the Bai numerals from '1' to '10' are early loans from Chinese, to the exception of colloqiuial forms for '1' and '2', which relate to Tibeto-Burman.

Keywords: Chinese; Tibeto-Burman; loanwords; stratification; historical linguistics; contact; Bai

Domains: Linguistics

Yeon-Ju Lee, Laurent Sagart. The Strata of Bai. 31st International conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Sep 1998, Lund, Sweden. ⟨halshs-00250200⟩