*hu

This excellent root, with a relatively rare laryngeal proto-initial, appears in the NE Indian Areal Group, Lolo-Burmese, and Qiangic, with a range of meanings including ‘be pregnant’; ‘give birth’; ‘bring up, rear (a child)’; ‘nourish, feed’, covering the whole range of parental responsibility from conception to childhood. It is reconstructed in Matisoff 1985, ‘God and the Sino-Tibetan copula’ (note 69, p. 38) and in Matisoff 1988, The Dictionary of Lahu (p. 1071), and discussed in the context of TB laryngeal-initial etyma in general in Matisoff 1997 “Primary and secondary laryngeal initials in TB” (section 5.3).

好 OC *χôg, GSR #1044a ‘good’ ⪤ ‘love, like’¹; Li 1971: *həgwx/*həgwh; Baxter 1992: *xuʔ/ *xu(ʔ)s (737); Mand. hǎo ‘good’ ⪤ hào ‘love, like’.

The word for ‘love, like’ is a putative form derived from ‘good’ through *-s suffixation. This presents some semantic difficulty for the OC-PTB comparison, since the basic meaning of the PTB root is closer to that of the derived Chinese transitive verb.

Corroborated as it is by other etyma (e.g. #1168 PTB *pʷu EGG / BIRD / ROUND OBJECT, #1733 PTB *r/m-bu ⪤ *pru NEST / WOMB / PLACENTA), the correspondence TB *-u with OC *-əgw (Li)/*-u (Baxter) is well attested. The initial correspondence is difficult to evaluate because there are so few proposed cognates involving words with OC *h- (Li)/*x- (Baxter) or PTB *h-. Of these several (such as Gong 1995 #142 comparing OC 鼾 *xan ‘snore’ (Mand. hān) to PTB *hal ‘snore’) are clearly onomatopoetic. In other cases Gong has derived OC *x- from earlier *skh-, facilitating comparison with Written Tibetan forms having initial velars (see Gong 2000). Nevertheless, there is no specific reason to doubt the validity of the initial correspondence.
[ZJH]

畜 OC *χi̯ôk, GSR #1018a ‘raise (animals); bring up; cultivate’; Schuessler 2007:194 *huks; B & S 2011: *qʰuk-s; Mand. xù.
畜 OC *t̂’i̯ôk, GSR #1018a ‘livestock; (domesticated animal’; Schuessler 2007:194 *rhuk; B & S 2011: *qʰ‹r›uk; Mand. chù.