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Looking at a list of synonyms in several different East Asian language families, I found that many languages have a similar-sounding word for "this":

  • English: This
  • Khmer: នេះ (nih)
  • Korean: 이 (i)
  • Burmese: ဤ (i)
  • Indonesian: Ini
  • Thai: นี้ (Nī̂)

Is this similarity due to word-borrowing, or does it indicate a possible genetic relationship between the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Korean, and Tai-Kadai language families?

Anderson Green
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1 Answers1

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The vowel /i/ is maybe explained by sound symbolism (see also Bouba-Kiki Effect; compare also French ce ... ci "this" ce ... là "that"), also words for that often come with the vowel /a/ or a variant of it. The common consonant /n/ may indicate some linguistic connection either via inheritance or borrowing.

Sir Cornflakes
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  • Some of these apparent cognates might be explained by the Austric language hypothesis, which is still somewhat controversial. The answer depends on whether it is possible to reconstruct the demonstrative pronoun "this" in the proto-languages for each family. – Anderson Green Mar 07 '18 at 01:36