A New Approach to Linguistic Reconstruction and the Study of Genetic Relationships: A Review of Proto-Naish and the Genetic Position of Naish Languages
This review by Liu Wen and Hou Nianhan examines Li Zihe's 2021 monograph Proto-Naish and the Genetic Position of Naish Languages, which reconstructs Proto-Naish using six dialects (including three surveyed for the first time) under a strict phonetic-correspondence standard adapted from Wang Feng's "distillation method." The reviewers highlight the book's new "differential homophony method" for genetic subgrouping, which corroborates results from the shared-innovations and lexicostatistical methods, and its use of crop-vocabulary word clusters to date the Naish dialects' divergence to between the Tang and Ming dynasties. Comparing Proto-Naish with Proto-Yi and Proto-rGyalrong, the monograph concludes Naish is genetically closer to Yi, addressing a long-debated classification question. The review closes with critiques: the "core-consistency correspondence" criterion is underused in practice, the differential homophony method may introduce subgrouping error, and the crop-based dating evidence is less certain than claimed.
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