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Three Mon-Khmer word families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

H. L. Shorto
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If one examines the vocabulary of almost any Mon-Khmer language, and turns to words with an initial labial semivowel—or those derived from roots with such an initial—one is immediately struck by the number of words with meanings of the order of ‘round, circular’, ‘to go round’, ‘to put round, coil, wrap round’, ‘enclosure’, ‘to turn round, return’, and the like. Thus, consulting three relatively modest lexica, we can cite from (modern) Mon in the Western branch of the family wèn, wèn wòk ‘ to be crooked, deformed’; ω⋯αη ‘compound, enclosure’; ω⋯αη ‘to shun, avoid’; ω⋯η ‘loop, bend; to be bent round, to go round’; wòt ‘to wring out’; wòa ‘whirlpool’; with tsh ‘all around’. The Eastern Mon-Khmer language Sre, spoken around Jiring (Di-linh) 100 miles north-east of Sàigòn, has wac ‘eddy’; wal bong ‘halo round sun or moon’; wang (waang) ‘pound for animals’; war ‘to coil round, wrap round’; waar ‘to bend back’; weet ‘to turn round’; wil ‘circle’; wöl ‘again; to turn’; wör ‘to stir’. In Northern Mon-Khmer, Palaung has υαη ‘compound’; υƏr ‘to stir’; υεh ‘to avoid, shun’; νeη to come back, go back’; υi? ‘to bend’; υir ‘again, to recur’; (υrƏr) ‘to avoid, shun’; υiƏt ‘to give back, return’. (The Palaung voiced fricative υ corresponds functionally in syllable-initial position to the semivowel in the other languages.)

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 1973 , pp. 374 - 381
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1973

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References

1 Shorto, H. L., A dictionary of modern spoken Mon, London, 1962Google Scholar.

2 Dournes, Jacques, Dictionnaire sré (kōho)-français, [Sàigòn, 1950]Google Scholar. The transcriptionwaang ‘pound’ is preferred in the orthographically more reliable Lexique polyglolte: kōho-françaisviêtnamien-rōglai of Bochet, and Dournes, , Sàigòn, 1952Google Scholar.

3 MrsMilne, Leslie, A'dictionary of Englishr-Pcdaung and Paluung-English, Rangoon, 1931Google Scholar. For typographical and linguistic reasons I transcribe Palaung here according to the system outlined in my ‘Word and syllable patterns in Palaung’, BSOAS, xxiii, 3, 1960, 544–57Google Scholar. Words I have not personally checked are enclosed in parentheses.

4 A dictionary of the Mon inscriptions from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, London, 1971Google Scholar.

5 cf. also κƏωᾰl ‘large and bent’, κƏωɛl ‘small and bent’, cited below. A similar exploitation of vocalic variants is found in Khasi.

6 See now Benedict, Paul K., Sino-Tibetan: a conspectus, Cambridge, 1972, 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, no. 217, where forms are quoted from Lushei, Kachin, Nung, and Kiranti as well as Burmese to support a Tibeto-Burman *hωαη and p. 132, where Karen forms are added.Only in the Kiranti languages of Nepal need borrowing from MK be early.

7 Final r, lost in spoken Khmer, is retained in the orthography (though some established spellings are historically suspect).