No, I’m not claiming that it refutes the Chinese theory! I know too little about the Chinese language to make such a claim—I thought I’d made that clear enough in several places.
So I’m just interested in how these peculiarities fit with that. Since I know you don’t speak Chinese either, I let this question sit for a long time until "chenxiang" showed up—who does speak Chinese—and I basically asked him whether this “peculiarity” fits with Chinese. That’s how this whole thing came about. He said no, but I think we’d really need a Chinese linguist here, to clear ist. That’s why I wanted to let the discussion rest, but I admit that with my last post here, I undermined that myself—sorry about that… ?
I really don’t see the point in splitting this “sh” phenomenon into two separate ones. To me, it’s ONE phenomenon: namely, that words containing “sh” at the beginning or in the middle are more likely to be followed by “qo” than by “ch,” “k,” or “t.” I’m not at all concerned with whether they attract or repel “qo” as individual words—in my opinion, that distinction leads nowhere.
It’s simply a matter of a glyph at the beginning or in the middle of a token having an effect on the following token, and that this effect varies in strength among different glyphs (sh, ch, k, t) while the token structure remains otherwise the same. That alone would be interesting. But the truly crazy thing about it is that “sh” is significantly higher in all these tokens, and the distribution of the other glyphs also follows a pattern (the two exceptions may be related to the low n-values).
Whether individual forms lie above or below the overall average is simply irrelevant to this analysis.
This is an important and interesting phenomenon. And I think it’s hard to reconcile with a language. That’s why I’m interested in whether this could be the case in Chinese. It’s not really compatible with European languages. I’m not aware of such a rigid pattern in any language.
Of course, I understand that you don’t want to see it that way, because it’s difficult to explain in a single language and therefore possibly doesn’t fit with your Chinese theory. And I also understand that you want to downplay it by referring to “individual cases,” but that doesn’t work. You can’t make the phenomenon go away that way.
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And if “qo” = “and,” how do you explain that “qo” is followed by a “k” 59% of the time and by a “t” 21% of the time—which together already add up to about 80 percent? That’s going to be quite difficult, too….isn't is?
So I’m just interested in how these peculiarities fit with that. Since I know you don’t speak Chinese either, I let this question sit for a long time until "chenxiang" showed up—who does speak Chinese—and I basically asked him whether this “peculiarity” fits with Chinese. That’s how this whole thing came about. He said no, but I think we’d really need a Chinese linguist here, to clear ist. That’s why I wanted to let the discussion rest, but I admit that with my last post here, I undermined that myself—sorry about that… ?
I really don’t see the point in splitting this “sh” phenomenon into two separate ones. To me, it’s ONE phenomenon: namely, that words containing “sh” at the beginning or in the middle are more likely to be followed by “qo” than by “ch,” “k,” or “t.” I’m not at all concerned with whether they attract or repel “qo” as individual words—in my opinion, that distinction leads nowhere.
It’s simply a matter of a glyph at the beginning or in the middle of a token having an effect on the following token, and that this effect varies in strength among different glyphs (sh, ch, k, t) while the token structure remains otherwise the same. That alone would be interesting. But the truly crazy thing about it is that “sh” is significantly higher in all these tokens, and the distribution of the other glyphs also follows a pattern (the two exceptions may be related to the low n-values).
Whether individual forms lie above or below the overall average is simply irrelevant to this analysis.
This is an important and interesting phenomenon. And I think it’s hard to reconcile with a language. That’s why I’m interested in whether this could be the case in Chinese. It’s not really compatible with European languages. I’m not aware of such a rigid pattern in any language.
Of course, I understand that you don’t want to see it that way, because it’s difficult to explain in a single language and therefore possibly doesn’t fit with your Chinese theory. And I also understand that you want to downplay it by referring to “individual cases,” but that doesn’t work. You can’t make the phenomenon go away that way.
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And if “qo” = “and,” how do you explain that “qo” is followed by a “k” 59% of the time and by a “t” 21% of the time—which together already add up to about 80 percent? That’s going to be quite difficult, too….isn't is?