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Dear typologists,
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<div>I have noticed two interesting parallel phenomena:</div>
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<div><span class="x_css-1qaijid x_r-bcqeeo x_r-qvutc0 x_r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">1. Latin <i>dingua</i> 'tongue' replaced by <i>lingua</i>, for unknown reason; </span></div>
<div><span class="x_css-1qaijid x_r-bcqeeo x_r-qvutc0 x_r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">2. Middle Chinese <i>zyet</i> 舌 'tongue' replaced by <i>lei</i> 脷 in Cantonese (and other southern Sinitic lects), which is apparently for euphemistic reason - Cantonese <i>sit3</i> 舌
sounds similar to <i>sik6</i> 蝕 ’to corrode’ - but still unclear why it had to be <i>lei</i> among all other sounds.</span></div>
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<div><span class="x_css-1qaijid x_r-bcqeeo x_r-qvutc0 x_r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">There seems to be diachronic pressure to map /l/ into ’tongue’. This is in line with the fact several typological studies confirming that /l/ is abnormally common
in words for ’tongue’ in world’s languages (Blast et al. 2016, Joo 2020, Erben </span>Johansson et al. 2020).</div>
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<div><span class="x_css-1qaijid x_r-bcqeeo x_r-qvutc0 x_r-poiln3" style="text-overflow: unset;">I would thus like to ask (historical) typologists whether you are aware of similar phenomena where the common term for ’tongue’ has unexpectedly acquired /l/, either
via irregular sound change (like Latin) or lexical replacement (like Cantonese).</span></div>
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<div>From Otaru,</div>
<div>Ian</div>
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<div><b>References</b></div>
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<div class="citation-text">Blasi, Damián E et al. “Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.” <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America</i> vol. 113,39 (2016): 10818-23. doi:10.1073/pnas.1605782113</div>
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<div>Joo, Ian. "Phonosemantic biases found in Leipzig-Jakarta lists of 66 languages" Linguistic Typology, vol. 24, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-12. doi:10.1515/lingty-2019-0030</div>
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Erben Johansson et al. "The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features" Linguistic Typology, vol. 24, no. 2, 2020, pp. 253-310. doi:10.1515/lingty-2020-2034</div>
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朱 易安 <br>
JOO, IAN <br>
准教授 <br>
Associate Professor <br>
小樽商科大学 <br>
Otaru University of Commerce</div>
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🌐 ianjoo.github.io<br>
📞 +81 (0)134-27-5422<br>
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