Talk:бийр

final r

@Wyang could this be from an erhua form (筆兒)? Or could it be some sort of Tibetan epenthetic element? I read a blogpost mentioning that this word entered through Tibetan, although Сүхбаатар's etymological dictionary only has the Tibetan form in parenthesis. Crom daba (talk) 02:30, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

@Crom daba This is more likely to be from 筆 (MC pit) alone. Middle Chinese -t (especially -et, -ɪt) was realised as -r in the Northwestern dialects of Tang Dynasty Middle Chinese, and this may be the source of the Tibetan and Mongolian words. cf. Sino-Korean pil (MC -t ~ Korean -l is regular) from 筆, and Mongolian бурхан from 佛 (MC bjut). This article (On the peculiar Chinese loanwords "biir", "bici-" in Mongolian) discussed this word in detail, concluding that it had entered Mongolian prior to 1269, and is from Chinese directly. It didn't discuss the Tibetan word though; it could be that the borrowing was via Tibetan. Wyang (talk) 06:17, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Should I put it as derived from Middle Chinese with the corresponding transcription then? Another problematic thing about this word is that it seems to be limited to Mongolian proper and Buryat with no Middle Mongolian attestations (that I can find), so the theory of borrowing from Tibetan seems attractive. Is MC *-t commonly reflected as Tibetan *-r? Crom daba (talk) 09:32, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Middle Chinese would be more correct. In Luo Changpei “The Northwestern Dialects of Tarng and Five Dynasties", five Chinese-Tibetan sources from the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, which "were originally meant for the use of Tibetans in learning Chinese", were investigated, and Middle Chinese -t was written as Tibetan -d or -r in the early document, and just as -r in another three. The conclusion from Luo was that they represent a northwestern variety of Chinese that had *-d (= *-t) in the eighth century and *-r in the ninth and tenth centuries. If there is no Middle Mongolian attestation, then a Tibetan etymology would seem more plausible, as the checked tone coda -t (or some variant) is likely to have vanished by the 14th century in northern dialects of Chinese. Wyang (talk) 09:54, 1 November 2016 (UTC)