Etymological research in Sino-Tibetan Languages

Etymological research in Sino-Tibetan Languages Nathan W. Hill The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of around 500 languages, ranging geographically from from Balti Tibetan in Pakistan to Hokkien Chinese in Indonesia, with the foothills of the Himalayas and the South East Asian highlands as its center of gravity. Van Driem (2001) and Thurgood (2017) provide helpful introductions to the family overall. Hill (2021) discusses the history of scholarship on those Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in South East Asia.1 Although Anton Schiefner (1852) and Bernard Houghton (1892, 1898) put forward cognate sets and sound correspondences that remain valid, it is August Conrady (1896) who is generally regarded as the founder of Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics. Conrady himself called for a strict neogrammarian approach to historical phonology (1896: viii), but subsequent scholars have seldom heeded this call (see Fellner and Hill 2019). Important contributions early in the 20th century include Berthold Laufer's work on Tibetan loanwords (1916), Walter Simon's on lexical comparisons between Chinese and Tibetan (1929). In addition, Li Fang-Kuei, although primarily an expert in other language families, especially Kra-Dai, made lasting contributions to Tibetan verb morphology (1933) and Old Chinese reconstruction (1974-5). The two giants of 20th century Sino-Tibetan comparative research were Tatsuo Nishida (see Yabu 2014) and Gong Hwang-Cherng (2002). Both focussed their eforts on the Tangut language. Nishida also did feldwork on a number of Loloish languages and research of lasting value on Tibetan and Burmese. He was particularly interested in the Sino-Tibetan languages recorded in the Sino-Barbarian vocabularies (華夷譯語 Huáyí yìyǔ) of the Ming and Qing period. For his part, Gong made great strides in working out the correspondence patterns among Tibetan, Burmese, Chinese, and Tangut and he assembled a solid set of cognates among these languages. Both because linguists working on SinoTibetan languages have rightly focused their eforts on the documentation of the family's many endangered languages even at the expense of comparative and etymological research and because the linguistics departments of anglophone universities seldom encourage students to appreciate Japanese and Chinese language scholarship, the work of 1 Other useful reference works include the 言語学大辞典 Gengogaku Daijiten (1988-2001), which includes over forty entries on Trans-Hiamlayan languages, and 云南特殊语言研究 Yúnnán tèshū yǔyán yánjiū (2004), which focuses on languages spoken in Yunnan. 1 these masters remains remarkably unappreciated; it will probably be decades before their insights are fully incorporated into the opinio communis. The histoire de mots approach to etymology is naturally only possible for languages that enjoy a premodern literary attestation. Unfortunately, only a handful of Sino-Tibetan languages are so lucky; these include Chinese (from 1250 BCE), Pyu (c. 5th - 13th cent. CE), Tibetan (from 650 CE), Tangut (1038-1502 CE), Burmese (from 1113 CE), and Newar (from 1114 CE). For Tibetan the Wörterbuch der tibetischen Schriftsprache (2005-), of which 43 fascicles have so far appeared, together covering a bit over a third of the alphabet, at its completion will be the frst dictionary of historic attestation. Sadly the only Burmese dictionary of historic attestation A Burmese-English dictionary (1940-81), died a pitiful death after plodding along for four decades. When abandoned, this work covered only one letter of the Burmese alphabet. For Newar, A dictionary of classical Newari (2000) in some ways provides a lexicographical resource that surpasses the current state of Newar philology. For one thing, many of the dictionary's sources remain unpublished and otherwise unstudied. Of all Sino-Tibetan languages Chinese by far has received the most study; in addition to many specialized works, there are two general Chinese dictionaries of historical attestation, namely the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten 大漢和辞典 (1955-) and the Hanyu Da Cidian 漢 語大詞典 (1986-). Unfortunately, in the study of Chinese 'etymology' is frequently confused with questions of paleography. In particular, there is a tendency to phrase philological and etymological problems in terms of what the 'original character' (本字 běn zì) for a lexical item and what 'orthographic substitutions' (假借 jiǎjiè) are permissible in texts. These approaches take little account of phonology or morphology and are pervasively anachronistic and circular in their methodology. Boltz (2017) provides a useful survey of traditional and modern scholar on Chinese textual exegesis and etymology. The increasing availability of electronic corpora, by reducing the labor required for philological research, has the potential to increase the pace and quality of etymological research on the relevant languages. Such corpora are available for Pyu, 2 Old Tibetan,3 and Old Burmese.4 The corpora and other electronic resources available for Chinese are so copious that they would a long article to survey. When we turn to the other sense of etymology, the tracing of attested forms in one or 2 3 4 Corpus of Pyu Inscriptions hisoma.huma-num.fr/exist/apps/pyu (accessed 22 December 2021). Old Tibetan Documents Online https://otdo.aa-ken.jp/ (accessed 22 December 2021). A Structured Corpus of Old Burmese Stone Inscriptions https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4321314 (accessed 22 December 2021). 2 more language to their unattested ancestors, the landscape is even more grim. Peiros and Starostin (1996) provide the only efort at a Sino-Tibetan comparative lexicography to research publication. Although this work gathers together an invaluable collection of putative cognates across the fve languages Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Jinghpaw, and Mizo, its handling of data was not up to the state of the art at the time of publication and it has only become more outdated since. There are many monographs purporting to reconstruct this or that Sino-Tibetan subgroup,5 but these works generally do little more that work out a few sound correspondences among basic wordlists. Although it is right to constrain semantic latitude in the early days of research on a family, a trivial comparison such as among Phunoi khə̀, Bisu khɯ̀ , and Mpi khɯ², all 'dog' (Bradley 1979: 295), cannot meaningfully be called an etymological proposal. The only comparative dictionary at the level of a Sino-Tibetan subgroup is the draft Burmish dictionary compiled by Xun Gong (Gong and Hill 2020). This draft was compiled using an innovative computer-assisted technique that shows great promise to speed up etymological research in general (see Gong 2020). Turning to the etymological study of individual languages, in this vast family it is only Chinese and Tibetan that have attracted an etymological secondary literature and only Chinese has an etymological dictionary (Schuessler 2009). As is the case with all such pioneering works, this dictionary is of rather uneven quality. For examples, its data for many languages is third hand and dates from the 1940s. The morphological theories of William Baxter and Laurent Sagart (2014) allow these two scholars to propose many compelling etymologies, for example that 窗 tsrhaewng < *s-l ̥ˤroŋ ‘window’, with the original meaning ‘where light penetrates’ derives from 通 thuwng < *l ̥ˤoŋ via application of a circumstantial noun prefx *s- (2014: 56). Sagart regularly proposes further etymologies on his blog, for example, recently suggesting that 瘈 tsyejH <*kə-tet-s and 瘈 kjiejH <*k-tet-s both ‘mad (dog)’ derive via a nominalizing *kəprefx from the same root seen in the verb 噬 dzyejH <*m-tet-s ‘bite (v.)’ (Sagart 2021). The linguistic naïveté of European Sinologists and the conservative nationalism of many in China have conspired to ofer these stimulating proposals a rather chilly reception. Chinese ablaut is an area of research with great future potential. Doublets such as 談 dam < *lˤom and 譚 dom < *lˤəm 'speak' or 涼 ljang < *C.raŋ and 冷 lengX < *rˤeŋʔ 'cold' are well known but have never been comprehensively catalogued or adequately explained (Schuessler 2009: 103, also see Behr 1998). My own hunch is that Chinese 5 Thurgood (2019: 155) gives a useful list. 3 fragmentarily preserves the same ablaut grades that are more transparently preserved in Tibetan. For example, 讀 duwk < *C.lˤok 'read' compares directly to the present stem of the Tibetan verb klog (pres.), blags (past), klag (fut.), lhogs (imp.) 'read' (Hill 2019: 43). Tibetan has received increasing etymological attention in the last years. In particular, Joanna Bialek's (2018) two volume study of Old Tibetan compounds is a watershed. It is only after her publication that we now have an ongoing conversation on questions of Tibetan etymology, with scholars explicitly disagreeing about small problems. For example, where I see ǰo-bo 'lord', occasionally spelled rǰo-bo, as related to rǰe 'lord' (2019: 29), Bialek sees ǰo-bo as built analogically to ǰo-mo 'lady', which in turn she traces to the same root as ḫǰo 'milk (v.)' (2021: xvii). In another case, where Brandon Dotson sees źal-če 'judgement' as deriving from the verb ḫǰal 'weigh' (2007: 35 n. 39), Bialek sees it as a compound of źal 'face' and lče 'tongue' (2018: 434-440). At the dawn of scientifc comparative philology it was the clarity of Sanskrit morphology that provided Franz Bopp with a framework into which he ft Greek, Latin and other languages. So far no language has provided the Sino-Tibetan family with like service. Thus, although there is some agreement on the existence of a few derivational afxes (Hill 2014, LaPolla 2017), we as yet lack an overall theory of Sino-Tibetan root structure and there is no consensus on the proto-language's overall typological profle. In particular, whereas many researchers see convincing evidence for argument indexing in the verbal system (e.g. DeLancey 2015), a few, particularly Randy LaPolla (2003), insist that the verb originally showed no infectional at all. It appears that the feld is on the cusp of radical progress, because [t]he richness and high productivity of morphology in Japhug and other Gyalrong languages, comparable with that of Sanskrit in Indo-European or Meskwaki in Algonquian, ofer a framework to explore the fossil morphology [...] potentially for the family as a whole. (Jacques 2021: 46). Nonetheless, the tiny resources globally put into the study of Asian languages, when compared to what is lavished on those of Europe, condemns Sino-Tibetan etymology to languish behind both in methods and results. Despite the bleakness of the current horizon, there are two grounds for hope. First, it is possible that a revolution in the productivity of researchers brought on by developments in computer-assisted language comparison will help Asianists to catch up (Wu et al. 2020). Unfortunately, as yet most researchers in computational historical linguistics, mesmerized by Bayesian phylogenetics, have done 4 nothing concretely helpful to historical linguistic praxis, thinking that we, like they, amuse ourselves only with sketching trees. Second, the rising economic importance of China may change the balance of resources put into European and Asian languages, but perhaps more likely is that this same economic rise, coupled with a chauvinistic neglect for China's minority nationalities, will kill of the great majority of Sino-Tibetan languages before they have been adequately studied (Roche 2021). References Behr, Wolfgang. (1998). Preliminary notes on the forms of Old Chinese qualitative ablaut. 3ème Colloque International Sur La Grammaire Du Chinois Ancien. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1404594 Bialek, Joanna (2018). Compounds and Compounding in Old Tibetan: A Corpus Based Approach. 2 Vols. Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag. Bialek, Joanna (2021). “Comments on Jacques’ 'The directionality of the voicing alternation in Tibetan'” Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 14.1: i-xiv. Boltz, William G. 2017. “Etymology”, in: Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, Rint Sybesma, et al. eds. Leiden: Brill, 194-205. Conrady, August (1896). Eine indochinesische Causativ-Denominativ-Bildung und ihr Zusammenhang mit den Tonaccenten. Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz DeLancey, Scott. 2015. The historical dynamics of morphological complexity in TransHimalayan. Linguistic Discovery 13.2: 60–79. Dotson, Brandon, 2007. “Divination and law in the Tibetan Empire: the role of dice in the legislation of loans, interest, marital law and troop conscription.” In Contributions to the cultural history of early Tibet, edited by Matthew T. Kapstein and Brandon Dotson, 3–77. Leiden: Brill. van Driem, George. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas. Leiden: Brill. Fellner, Hannes and Nathan W. Hill (2019) 'Word families, allofams, and the comparative method'. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 48.2: 91-124. Gong Hwang-cherng (2002). Collected papers on Sino-Tibetan linguistics. Taipei: 中央硏究院 語言學硏究所籌備處 Zhongyang yanjiuyuan yuyanxue yanjiusuo choubeichu. Gong Xun (2020). Making computers actually useful to historical linguists. SOAS Linguistics Webinar, 16 December 2020. https://youtu.be/mz0n9iw1J48 Gong Xun and Nathan Hill. (2020). Materials for an Etymological Dictionary of Burmish. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4311182 de Jong, Jan Willem (1989). The story of Rāma in Tibet. Stuttgart: F. Steiner. 5 Hill, Nathan W. (2010a) “An overview of Old Tibetan synchronic phonology.” Transactions of the Philological Society, 108 (2). pp. 110-125. Hill, Nathan W. (2010b). A Lexicon of Tibetan Verb Stems as Reported by the Grammatical Tradition. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hill, Nathan W. (2014) 'Sino-Tibetan: Part 2 Tibetan.' 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"Tibetisch-chinesische Wortgleichungen. Ein Versuch." Mitteilungen des Seminars fur Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich Wilhelms Universität zu Berlin 32.1: 157-228. Thurgood, Graham 2017. Sino-Tibetan: Genetic and areal subgroups. In Thurgood, 6 Graham and Randy LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 3–39. Thurgood, Graham (2019). A review of Fellner and Hill’s “Word families, allofams, and the comparative method”. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 48.2: 154–158. Wu, M.-S., Schweikhard, N.E., Bodt, T.A., Hill, N.W. and List, J.-M. (2020). “ComputerAssisted Language Comparison: State of the Art.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 6.1:, DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/johd.12 Yabu, Shirō 藪 司郎 (2014). “Professor Nishida, Tatsuo and the study of Tibto-Burman languages.” Memoirs of the research department of the Toyo Bunko 72: 179-206. 7