The Aramaic source of the East Asian word for ‘Buddhist monastery’: on the spread of Central Asian monasticism in the Kushan Period (2014)
- ️https://indiana.academia.edu/ChristopherBeckwith
Related papers
Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 2018
The morphophonology of Old Chinese has usually been reconstructed as an earlier version of the traditional reconstruction of Middle Chinese, with exclusively monosyllabic morphemes. For Old Chinese some scholars have posited syllabic morphemes with long or short vowels, or even polysyllabic morphemes, and other theories have been proposed, but it is still assumed that by Late Old Chinese any longer morphemes that once existed were already monosyllabic. However, Central Asian loans in Chinese suggest some disyllabic morphemes still existed in Late Old Chinese. They seem to be confirmed by a new study of little-noted Old Japanese transcriptions known as nigōgana. Thus the hitherto problematic Old Chinese and Old Japanese transcriptions of foreign words such as Saka and Buddha, and the monosyllabic theory of Old Chinese morphology, must be reconsidered. This paper's new reconstructions conform to the data and have great implications for the reconstruction of Old Chinese as well as for the reconstruction of the early Chinese loans into Japanese.
The Syllable yi in Old Japanese
This paper further explores whether or not we have reliable evidence for the existence of the syllable yi in Old Japanese. It examines the man’yōgana used for both i and yu, looking at both their frequency across the corpus as well as their reconstructed forms in Early Middle Chinese. It also examines the verb yuk-/ik- (“to go”), again looking at the raw frequencies of yuk- versus ik-, as well as some distributional peculiarities. Finally, it looks at the various words which vary between yu and i in the Nihonshoki Kayō, because there is reason to believe that it would provide the most persuasive Old Japanese-internal evidence.
2012
A voicing alternation in the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the initial consonant of Chinese verbs has long been recognized as the reflection of a morphological process dating to the Old Chinese period or earlier. As illustrated by the pair of words zhāng 張 (MC trjang) ‘to stretch (trans.)’ : cháng 長 (MC drjang) ‘to be long (intr.)’, this morphological process is associated with transitive/intransitive word pairs. There is disagreement among historical phonologists about whether this alternation should be attributed to a detransitivizing nasal voicing prefix *N- or to a causativizing sibilant devoicing prefix *s-. In this paper I summarize the internal and comparative evidence and review the recent arguments put forth by specialists in support of both views, and conclude that both explanations are not entirely satisfactory. I propose that further research must consider the possibility that several processes were at work, and that productive and frozen morphological processes may have co-existed with analogical leveling at various points before and during the Old Chinese period. 中古漢語動詞聲母清濁別義的現象，例如:“張”和“長～短”，被認為是上古音或者更早構詞現象的反映。這種清濁別義的現象，有的學者認為其上古音的來源是起濁化作用的去及物性前綴*N-，也有的學者認為是起清化作用的使動化前綴*s-。本文總結介紹來自漢語內部的證據和來自比較語言學的證據，以及學者就這兩種假設提出的最新的意見。由於這兩方面假設都不能令人完全滿意，本文作者根據以上材料進一步提出新的看法, 認為上古漢語時期可能有不同的構詞過程並存，但各種詞綴不一定都同時具備構詞能力，有的到了上古時期可能已經失去了構詞能力。
Evidence of a Consonant Shift in 7th Century Japanese
Journal of Japanese Linguistics, 1972
This paper attempts to certify that certain changes in voicing and aspiration, namely the shift from Kan'on to Go'on, occurred during the proto-Japanese period. Based on Middle Chinese data, proto-Korean-Japanese systems, Tibetan transcriptions of Chinese texts, and internal Japanese evidence, the authors date the transition roughly in the 7th century. A bibliography of referneces is included. (DD)
Chinese loans in Old Vietnamese with a sesquisyllabic phonology
Journal of Language Relationship, 2019
While consonant clusters, taken broadly to include presyllables, are commonly hypothesized for Old Chinese, little direct evidence is available for establishing the early forms of specific words. A number of Vietnamese words borrowed from Chinese have initial consonant lenition in Vietnamese, which corresponds to presyllables in conservative Vietic languages, e.g.: Chinese 劍 kiæmH “sword” is borrowed as Vietnamese 劍 gươm [ɣ-] and Rục təkɨəm. Baxter and Sagart (2014) understand such words as reflecting Old Chinese preinitials, relying on conservative Vietic languages for the identity of the preinitial. This essay examines a hitherto overlooked source: Old Vietnamese, a language attested in the single document 佛說大報父母恩重經 Phật thuyết Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh (Nguyễn Ngọc San 1982, Shimizu 1996, Hoàng Thị Ngọ 1999), which writes certain words, monosyllabic in modern Vietnamese, in an orthography suggesting sesquisyllabic phonology, e.g. rắn ‘snake’ is written 破散 (phá tản < phaH sanX), cf. Rục pəsiɲ³. For a number of words, Old Vietnamese provides the only testimony of the form of the Vietic borrowing. The small list of currently known sesquisyllabic words of Chinese origin attested in this document includes examples of both words with a secure initial Chinese cluster and words with plausible Vietic prefixation. On the one hand, we find the word *s–kương ‘mirror’ borrowed from Chinese 鏡 kiæŋH. Here, the Vietnamese *s- is corroborated by its morphological derivation, which is an instance of the Sino-Tibetan instrumental deverbal *sV-. On the other hand, for the word 阿唱 *ʔ–ɕướng ‘to chant’, likely borrowed from Middle Chinese 唱 tɕhaŋH, the Old Vietnamese form could reflect a dummy prefix *ʔ- (Section 4) that exists in other Vietic languages.
Language and Linguistics, 2018
This article aims to reconstruct the word “west” in Old Chinese phonology. In previous studies, since there was no sufficient evidence besides Chinese dialects, phonetic compounds, and phonetic loans, most scholars reconstructed its onset as *s-. One of the oldest dictionaries, Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字, includes two other written forms of 西 xī “west,” 卥 (Gǔwén 古文) and 卤 (Zhòuwén 籀文). This paper re-examines the reconstruction of the word 西 xī “west” and investigates the word 訊 xùn “to interrogate” seen in excavated documents. According to the Shuōwén, 訊 xùn also had another written form ( ), which has the old form of 西 xī (卥). In other words, 西 xī and 訊 xùn must have had Xiéshēng connections (諧聲關係) at the time. Based on the resources from excavated documents such as oracle bone inscriptions and bronze scripts, 訊 xùn credibly has the character 人 rén as the phonetic element. This implies that 訊 xùn should have had the onset *sn- at the time; hence, it is concluded that the word “west” also had the onset *snˤ- in Old Chinese as well. Keywords: Old Chinese phonology, excavated documents, phonetic loan, preinitial *s-
A Hypothesis on the Origin of Old Chinese Pharyngealization (上古漢語咽化聲母來源的一個假設)
Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 2016
It is proposed that oc pharyngealized onset consonants—that is, ‘type-A’ onset consonants—arose out of Proto-Sino-Tibetan plain consonants followed by geminate vowels separated by a pharyngeal fricative. When the first copy of the geminate vowel fell, the initial consonants formed clusters with the pharyngeal fricative, evolving into the oc pharyngealized consonants we reconstruct. In the Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman, the pharyngeal fricative fell, and long vowels resulted. This proposal supposes a statistical correlation between Kuki-Chin long vowels and oc type-A words on the one hand, and between Kuki-Chin short vowels and oc type-B words on the other, as originally proposed by S. Starostin. A significant statistic bearing on forty-three probable Chinese-Kuki-Chin cognates supports this correlation. Thus reconstructed, a precursor language of Proto-Sino-Tibetan was aligned with Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Austroasiatic in exhibiting a surface constraint against monomoraic f...
Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 2017
This article is a linguistics paper but with an interdisciplinary approach. Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese from the first half of the 1st millennium CE are grouped by semantic domains (along with ethnohistorical and archaeological support), thereby offering a way to explore the sociocultural circumstances of Sino-Vietnamese contact in that early period. ------------------------------------------------- In this study, over 60 Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese are claimed to have been borrowed during the East Han or West Jin Dynasties. These Early Sino-Vietnamese (ESV) words are identified via a combination of linguistic, historical, archaeological, and ethnological data sources and frameworks. Such an interdisciplinary method helps to confirm or refute these words’ status as loanwords and as belonging to this specific historical period. The combined linguistic and extralinguistic data also leads to hypotheses about possible phonological changes in Chinese from the Old Chinese (OC) to Middle Chinese (MC) periods. In particular, while Sino-Vietnamese words from the mc period have expected qusheng tones for Chinese qusheng loanwords, OC-era ESV words have either shangsheng or, unexpectedly, pingsheng tones. It is hypothesized that esv words with shangsheng tones for OC qusheng words were borrowed earliest, while ESV items with pingsheng represent a later stage in OC in which final *-s was in the process of being lost in the first few centuries CE.
Trames, 2021
The present paper reports the intensive controversy on Chinese historical phonology that broke out in 2002. After sorting through over 150 Chinese papers on the intensive controversy by the Sino-linguists' side and the descriptivists' side, the present study suggests that we should investigate a history of the new hypotheses, and discuss them in a logical order. The hypothesis of the liquid medial for division-2 in OC of the descriptivists' side is refuted with philological arguments and a negative control of comparative evidence. The hypothesis of the vocalic medial for division-2 in OC of the Sino-linguists' side is supported with Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Uralic comparative evidence. Using etymological methods, the present study has identified nine (9) Sinitic and Uralic shared etymologies. Four (4) Shennong (Sino-Uralic) etymologies belong to a rhyme correspondence. Five (5) Shennong (Sino-Uralic) etymologies belong to another rhyme correspondence. These two (2) regular sound correspondences validate the etymological connections between Sinitic and Uralic.