A NOTE ON THE PHONETIC EVOLUTION OF YOD-PA-RED IN CENTRAL TIBET

Despite the current inconsistent spellings such as yod-red (Tournadre 1996: 229-231 et passim, 2003), yog-red (Denwood 1999: 158 et passim), and yoḥo-red (Hu et al. 1989: 64 et passim) of the existential copula and auxiliary verb which is pronounced as yɔɔ ̀ ree ̀ (Chang and Shefts 1964: 15) or yo:re ' (Tournadre 1996: 229-231) there is widespread agreement that yod-pa-red is the etymological origin of this morpheme (Chang and Chang 1968: 106ff, Tournadre 1996: 229). It is regularly spelled yod-pa-red in the newspaper articles collected from the Mi dmaṅs brñan par (人民畫 報 Peoples Pictorial) by Kamil Sedláček (1972, e.g. p. 27, bsam-gyi yod-pa-red ‘he was thinking’). The pronunciation of this auxiliary is not what one would predict from the spelling. In all likelihood it is the frequency and unstressed syntactic position of the word which led to this deviant phonetic development. The existence of studies and handbooks for the language of Lhasa over more than a century permits us to trance the phonetic development of yod-pa-red with surprising precision