ABSTRACT
A Striking fact about our discussion of Acquire in Lao, Khmer, Kmhmu Cwang, Hmong, and Vietnamese is that these closely parallel patterns of polyfunctionality are associated with historically unrelated words. Exponents of Acquire in the five languages are not plausibly (at least, not straightforwardly) related in phonological form. The purpose of this chapter is to show in more detail the extent to which the Acquire morpheme is realised by different etymons across the area. While no mysteries of etymology are truly solved, it is nonetheless worth examining the question from the point of view of distinguishing ‘areal’from ‘genetic’ relatedness among the patterns.
