Reconsideration of distribution areas of the Kam-Tai ancestors based on etymology of a daily word

Abstract

The paper holds that the word *o (i.e. "屙") "to empty the bowels" in many southern Chinese dialects and the word *ok "out" in the Kam-Tai languages have developed from the same source and that since the word *o is found as far north as in the Yellow River area, the Kam-Tai ancestors must have been distributed in this area, too. The large-scale northward migrations towards the end of the glacier period brought to the north the word *ok, which lost the ending *-k along with the trend of the Chinese sound change in the subsequent millennia. Subsequently, the word *o covered the southern part of the East Asian continent in the wake of the following southward migrations which began a few thousand years ago. The northern equivalent *la (i.e. "拉") only remains today as a substratum in the southern dialects.