ABSTRACT
Thurgood (1994) claimed that within Tai-Kadai, the AN-related vocabulary obeys different correspondences from the rest.3 He concluded that the AN-related vocabulary is borrowed from an early pre-AN source. However the vocabulary shared by Tai-Kadai and AN is very basic: it includes the 1sg, 2sg and 2pl personal pronouns; all the numerals above ‘one’; bodypart terms like ‘eye’, ‘tongue’, ‘hand’; terms for natural objects like ‘moon’, ‘water’; verbs like ‘die’, etc. Borrowing such a set of vocabulary is probably not impossible, given sufficient pressure, but if so, one should also expect to find many, many loanwords in the cultural vocabulary. This is precisely where the difficulty arises: items of cultural vocabulary shared by Tai-Kadai and AN are quite scarce (terms for rice cultivation, for instance, are all but missing; see Blench, Chapter 2, this volume). It appears, then, that neither chance nor borrowing are likely explanations for the lexical comparisons between Tai-Kadai and AN. The only remaining explanation is genetic, as Benedict argued. For a realistic list of likely cognates between AN and Tai-Kadai, see Ostapirat, Chapter 7, this volume.
