Talk:เส้น

@Octahedron80 IMO a final *-l in Proto-Tai is fairly unlikely to be of Chinese origin. If it were borrowed from Middle Chinese, it would have an *-n final. However, The reconstruction in Pittayaporn may be debatable; there are very few descendants listed for that etymon. Wyang (talk) 11:36, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

I think the el has nothing special or is read as el. (You know actual Tai words never end in el). He might want to use alternative symbol to avoid existing protowords.--Octahedron80 (talk) 11:48, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

@Octahedron80 Proto-Tai *-l is posited as different from *-n, although they have merged into the latter in most Tai descendants, including Thai (spoken and written). Saek has preserved the distinction, and the Proto-Tai word here has the Saek descendant with a final -l, which is the reason Pittayaporn reconstructed it with an *-l coda. Please see pp. 208 in his thesis. There is a chance that the Saek and Thai words are coincidentally similar, though Pittayaporn holds the opinion that they are cognate. Wyang (talk) 11:54, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

My new Saek dictionary does not mention to final el at all. For example, "to become", in Thai as pen (เป็น), in Saek as phal (พั๊น, not พั๊ล) since Saek people want to write like that. The written forms are capable to be different from pronunciation. (And the final el will extinct soon). Nevertheless, these are not relevant to whether the word come from Chinese; the final el could be only dialectual. --Octahedron80 (talk) 12:31, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

P.S. I found Saek sɛl (แซ̂น) that reflects this entry. --Octahedron80 (talk) 12:54, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

@Octahedron80 Saek -l is in the process of a gradual merger into -n (pp. 4). William J. Gedney's Concise Saek-English, English-Saek Lexicon records (pp. 90) that:

sɛl³ classifier for long thin objects (older generation 1964–1976, = younger generation 2010 sɛn³),

so it's not surprising (although unfortunate) that this Saek word is now written as แซ̂น in the orthography document in 2013. However, the ancestral state for this word in Saek is with a -l final, and Pittayaporn has taken this to be evidence for the reconstructed *-l final of the Proto-Tai etymon, which I agree is the most parsimonious solution for explaining the reflexes. For this entry, I think it would be safest for us to follow Pittayaporn and only list the Chinese word as a comparandum, rather than an ancestor (cf. his note for etymon #747), before he or another Tai-Kadai linguist formally proposes the derivation of either the Thai or Proto-Tai word from 線, while also attempting to explain the Saek word (as an aberrant reflex, a coincidental noncognate, etc.). Wyang (talk) 13:29, 26 August 2017 (UTC)