A NOTE ON VOICING ALTERNATION IN THE TIBETAN VERBAL SYSTEM

A recent paper on the prehistory of the Tibetan verbal system by Guillaume Jacques (2012), in keeping with many previous authorities, presents Tibetan verbs as occurring in pairs, with a voiced intransitive and a voice-alternating transitive member. However, as noticed by Uray, Tibetan verbs occur in triplets with no relationship between voicing and transitivity. Many authors have observed that verbs exhibiting voicing alternation, such as ḥbo, pos, dbo, pos ‘pour’,1 frequently have a corresponding intransitive verb with voiced initial, in this case ḥbo, bo ‘overflow’, with both verbs appearing to derive from the same root.2 Conrady (1896: 27) associates the voiced members of the transitive paradigmwith the voiced intransitive paradigm. This idea has proven tenacious.3 Thus, LaPolla (2003: 23) writes that ‘for the verb “put off, pull of, take off”, we have present ḥbud-pa and future dbud, which derive from an intransitive stem *bud, and perfect and imperative pud, which derives from a transitive stem *pud ’. The claim that the voiced members of the alternating paradigm are somehow intransitive is easily dismissed; the verb ḥbud, pud, dbud, pud ‘take off ’ is transitive; the suggestion that certain of it