A refutation of Song’s (2014) explanation of the ‘stop coda problem’ in Old Chinese

Abstract

Song (2014) draws renewed attention to the problem of groups of Chinese words in which the character used to write one of the words has a stop final reading in Middle Chinese but the character used to write another of the words has an open syllable reading in Middle Chinese, although the two seem to have a shared a rime in Old Chinese. She offers a new solution employing the reconstruction of voiced and voiceless stop finals in the shared ancestor of Chinese and Tibetan. Every step in Song’s reasoning is faulty and nearly every claim she makes about Tibetan is false. Haudricourt long ago solved the ‘stop coda problem’ (1954).