In "On the Origin of the Mainstream Hakka Word [oi1] 'Mother' ", W. South Coblin proposes that oi-type words for 'mother' in Hakka varieties originate from the compression of two syllables (amoi) into one (oi). Although amoi > oi at first looks like am-loss (i.e., the disappearance of the first half of the word), if the kinship prefix a- is analyzed as a zero consonant Ø- plus a rhyme -a, then oi is really Øoi with the initial of the kinship prefix Øa- and the rhyme of the root moi 'mother':

- oi

That is an example of one of three types of compression in Chinese and other languages of the region:

1. disyllabic word > loss of first syllable without any trace in the second syllable

刀 Early Old Chinese *CVtaw > Late Old Chinese *taw 'knife' (If not for Vietnamese [zaːw] with lenition of *-t- conditioned by *CV-, no first syllable would be reconstructible)

2. disyllabic word > fusion of initial consonants of both syllables + rhyme of second syllable

抱 Early Old Chinese *mʌpuʔ > Late Old Chinese *bowʔ 'to carry in the arms'

*b is a fusion of *m- and *-p-.

My formulation needs to be tweaked because the vowel of the surviving syllable has changed under the influence of the lost vowel of the previous syllable: *u has lowered to *ow.

3. disyllabic word > initial of first syllable + rhyme of second syllable ... no, I'd better reformulate that.

Coblin gives a standard Mandarin example: 不用 yòng lit. 'not use' > 甭 béng 'no need to' (note the neat stacked composite character). My initial formulation doesn't work; it would predict a fusion ˟bòng or ˟bèng (the latter takes into account the impossibility of -ong after labials in standard Mandarin). But the actual form has the tone of the first syllable and a rhyme that is unlike either syllable. So how about

3'. disyllabic word > initial of first syllable + fusion of rhymes of both syllables

to account for 甭 béng?

And 3' can be reworded to account for 抱 *bowʔ:

2'. disyllabic word > fusion of initial consonants of both syllables + fusion of rhymes of both syllables

No, wait, *-ʌ- in *mʌpuʔ isn't a rhyme - it's a vowel in the middle of a word. And I can't think of a word to describe *CʌCu > *CʌCow > *Cow. 'Umlaut' isn't right. Vowel harmony is involved, but there's also diphthongization. I've used the term 'bending' and Schuessler uses the term 'warping', but neither term acknowledges the first vowel that triggers the process. 'Harmonic bending' or 'harmonic warping'?

In any case, I've been thinking that reduction is irregular. Fusion is a type of reduction. So I expect some difficulty in trying to ... reduce reduction to a set of simple categories. I'd still like to say something other than 'anything can happen', though. There are constraints on complexity.

Let's zoom out from a single etymology toward the bigger picture of Hakka as described by Coblin. Let me try to translate his words into a tabular tree:

Early South Central Chinese
Early Southern Highlands Chinese
a subset of Tuhua/Pinghua
Common Hakka-She

土話 Tuhua 'local speech' and 平話 Pinghua 'ordinary speech' are generic terms for a set of unclassified Chinese languages. Coblin proposes that some of them may be related to his Southern Highlands Chinese group of languages which I could call 'Greater Hakka'. He reconstructs 'mother' in Early South Central Chinese as *mVi3/4, leaving aside the problem of daughter forms with tones 1 and 2 (e.g., the "[oi1]" in his title) for the time being.

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