Chinese historical linguistics

The most common existential/possessive verbs in Chinese are nearly all forms that are directly cognate to Modern Standard Chinese yǒu 有. This etymon is also well attested in dialects descended from Early South Central Chinese, the putative ancient language spoken in south central China, presumably from the lapse of the Eastern Hàn Dynasty down through the Six Dynasties period. However, there was in this language another word, which was different from yǒu and for which we are unable to posit a Modern Standard reading, though reflexes of it do exist in a number of southern dialects. The purpose of the present paper is to introduce this lesser-known word and reconstruct an Early South Central Chinese phonological form for it.

Sin dall'epoca dell'incontro tra la Cina e l'Occidente nel XIII secolo e fino ai primi decenni del XVIII, l'Italia detenne il primato sugli studi sinologici europei. Il culmine fu raggiunto tra la fine del XVI e l'inizio del XVII secolo, quando una gran quantità di informazioni sulla Cina raggiunse l'Europa e l'Italia grazie al lavoro dei missionari, specialmente gesuiti, che possono a buon diritto essere considerati i primi veri sinologi. 2 Negli anni successivi l'Italia perdette il suo primato in favore di altri Paesi quali la Francia, l'Olanda e l'Inghilterra, la cui presenza in Cina era decisamente più forte per ragioni di varia natura. Tuttavia, la Cina e la sua lingua continuarono a interessare e affascinare gli studiosi italiani, anche se coloro che all'inizio del XIX secolo volevano intraprenderne lo studio erano costretti ad andare a Parigi al Collège de France, 3 dove sin dal 1814 erano stati avviati corsi di cinese. La prima cattedra di sinologia era stata affidata ad Abel Rémusat (1788-1832), che aveva studiato in primo luogo medicina e poi il cinese da autodidatta. Non si era mai recato in Cina e le sue lezioni concernevano perlopiù la grammatica e la traduzione dei Classici. Alla sua morte, il successore al Collège fu il suo allievo Stanislas Julien (1799-1873), che divenne un sinologo molto noto in Europa, nonostante, come il suo maestro d'altronde, non fosse mai stato in Cina come il suo maestro. Uno dei primi a ottenere una borsa di studio per apprendere il cinese oltralpe fu il marchigiano Antelmo Severini (1828-1909), il quale a Parigi ebbe l'opportunità di studiare sia il cinese sia il giapponese con i più eminenti orientalisti del tempo. Una volta in Italia, egli divenne il primo docente universitario italiano di entrambe le lingue. 4 Nonostante sia principalmente ricordato e apprezzato come iamatologo, Severini dedicò numerosi studi alla cultura e alla lingua cinese, prendendo parte ad alcuni tra i più accesi dibattiti del suo tempo nati in seguito alla classificazione tipologica delle lingue, agli albori degli studi di linguistica comparativa. Dopo una breve introduzione sulla vita e le opere di Severini, nonché sul contesto in cui si trovò a lavorare, questo articolo sottolineerà il contributo del sinologo italiano agli studi sulla lingua cinese, offrendo una panoramica delle sue riflessioni in testi editi e inediti, concentrati principalmente negli anni Sessanta dell'Ottocento.

This was a presentation given at SEALS 28 (Wenzao Ursuline University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, May 17-19, 2018). It presents Early Sino-Vietnamese data that suggests borrowing during a period in Sinitic had lost final fricatives in words that developed qusheng/Type C tones. In Vietnamese, for these Sinitic words, the earlier period have level ngang/huyền tones (e.g. pingsheng), whereas the later standard Vietnamese have the expected qusheng tones, or Vietnamese sắc/nặng tones. Following the ideas of Pulleyblank 1962, the most likely scenario is a period in which Vietic in that period did not yet have tones, but and so speakers borrowed the Sinitic words, which had lost final fricatives, and later, after tonogenesis in Viet-Muong, these words simply had level tones. The later later of Sino-Vietnamese was in the period in which Viet-Muong had tones. This ping-for-qu layer of Early Sino-Vietnamese was thus borrowed approximately in the 300s to 600s.

The relation between Chinese cultural identity and the use of Chinese characters is frequently discussed by historians of China. The study of Dungan cultural identity is crucial to this issue, especially since the Dungan language (Dōnggānyǔ) comprises a number of Northern Chinese "Mandarin" dialects spoken by a mixed population with a strong unified sense of a local Chinese cultural identity all of its own. The primacy of speech versus writing is a central theme in general linguistics. Here again, the case of Dungan cyrillic pinyin versus Chinese character literacy provides absolutely crucial evidence of a unique case in which the spoken language of a highly literate Chinese population is profoundly affected by a radical change of writing system. In separating themselves from the traditional Chinese writing system and the traditional literature transmitted in that medium, the Dungan people provide unique evidence that the generally accepted thesis on the primacy of spoken versus written language is profoundly flawed: Dungan independence from the traditional Chinese writing system had profound and pervasive effects on the use of so-called shūmiànyǔ vocabulary, of traditional colloquial proverbs on the one hand, and very importantly on the use of chéngyǔ and yànyǔ which is so widespread within those Chinese communities in which the use of Chinese characters continues to prevail. Yuen Ren Chao is said to have complained that speakers of Mandarin Chinese were trying to speak shūmiànyǔ. It seems to me to be profoundly significant that no such complaint could ever be made of the Dungans speaking their language. The status of the written language is not the same as that in the case of Standard Mandarin Chinese. The abandonment of Chinese characters to supplement the Korean hangul alphabet has had closely similar profound gradual effects on the usability and comprehensibility of a wide range of Chinese loan words and classical Chinese proverbial idioms of all kinds in modern Korean. The foreign language of reference is no longer classical Chinese. It is English. Again, when it comes to the comparative study of the cultural and even political implications of writing systems, the case of the Dungans can be very usefully compared with that of a

Tóm Tắt: Bài này cung cấp những bằng chứng cho thấy cũng và cùng là hai từ vay mượn có nguồn gốc từ từ 共 <gòng> cộng trong tiếng Hán. Tuy nhiên, khác với từ Hán-Việt 2 cộng chính thức được công nhận là cách đọc của 共 <gòng>, hai từ cũng và cùng được vay mượn sớm hơn, trong đầu thiên niên kỷ thứ nhất SCN, theo cứ liệu so sánh ngữ âm học lịch sử và tài liệu thành văn tiếng Hán và tiếng Việt (văn bản Nôm). Ba thanh điệu khác biệt ở ba từ này trong tiếng Việt hé lộ cho thấy những giai đoạn vay mượn từ gốc Hán khác nhau trong quá trình hình thành thanh điệu tiếng Hán. Hai từ cùng và cũng vay mượn sớm hơn, trong thời kỳ tiền Hán Việt, có thể vay mượn qua các cộng đồng song ngữ Hán-Việt lớn, đều có chung một số đặc điểm cú pháp ngữ nghĩa với từ Hán 共 <gòng> vào mấy thời điểm trong lịch sử. Nhưng chúng cũng thay đổi từ khi cộng đồng tiếng Hán cộng cư với cộng đồng tiếng Việt sau thời Bắc thuộc (tức là "language shift" của Sinitic với Vietic 3). Do đó, từ gốc Hán này là từ được vay mượn ba lần ("triplet") và là một ví dụ 1 Xin cảm ơn TS. Nguyễn Tuấn Cường (Viện trưởng Viện nghiên cứu Hán Nôm) đã giúp tôi xác định vị trí của một số chữ Nôm và trao đổi một số vấn đề về dữ liệu trong bài này, và TS. Edith Aldridge (University of Washington) và TS. Marc Miyake (the British Museum) đã đọc bài này và cung cấp ý tưởng. Nguyễn Đức Nghiệu (Đại Học Quốc Gia, Hà Nội) cũng đưa ra rất nhiều gợi ý làm cho bài này tự nhiên hơn theo kiểu tiếng Việt. 2 Trong bài này, từ viết tắt bao gồm: HV = Hán Việt, THV = tiền Hán Việt (như Nguyễn N. S. 2003), HC = Hán cổ, HTĐ = Hán trung đại. Phục nguyên Hán cổ và phiên mã Hán trung đại là của Baxter và Sagart [4, 5]. Tôi cho rằng tù Hàn-Việt là cách đọc của Hán trung đại, và tiền Hán-Việt là từ được vay mượn trước đó.Tôi không sử dụng "cổ Hán-Việt" theo Vương Lực vì "cổ" thường xuyên biểu thị phục nguyên (theo ý kiến của Phan, mà sử dụng "Early Sino-Vietnamese" song song với THV). Về "Hán-Việt Việt-hóa" của Vương Lực, nghiên cứu đã chỉ ra rằng những từ được coi là nhiều từ Hán-Việt Việt-hóa thực sự là tiền Hán Việt, như từ cung trong bài này. 3 Mặc dù từ "Hán" thường được sử dụng để chỉ ngôn ngữ Trung Quốc quá khứ cổ đại, từ "Sinitic" tiếng Anh rất hữu ích vì nó phân biệt rõ ngôn ngữ và văn hóa. Hơn nửa, từ Sinitic chính sách: nó là tổ tiên của tất cả biến thể Trung Quốc hiện nay. Từ Vietic cũng vậy: nó chỉ một cộng động ngôn ngữ là tổ tiên của cả tiếng Việt, mường, Chứt..., không phải là tiếng Việt cổ.

This paper aims to discuss the linguistic features of Three Han's toponyms (country names Mainly in Mahan 馬韓 and Byeonjin 弁辰) which are based upon the historical records in San Guo zhi 三國志․Wei zhi 魏志·Dong Yi zhuan 東夷傳 by Chen shou 陳壽 in 280. To decipher the morphological and phonological features of toponyms, firstly the textual research of Dong Yi zhuan is thoroughly carried out by comparing the different versions of different periods in China. Secondly, the phonographs of the toponyms which were written in Chinese characters are selected by analyzing the morphological components which can be divided into Hunpyoso(훈표소, 訓表素, semantographic morpheme) and Eumpyoso (음표소, 音表素, phonographic morpheme). Thirdly, the distributions and percentages of consonants(initials) of the selected phonographs are quantitatively analyzed separately, meanwhile, the reconstructions of Old and Later Han Chinese, Middle Chinese are based upon Schuessler(2009). According to the result of quantitative approach, the diachronic development of Korean phonological system and Middle Sino-Korean system, Chinese historical phonological system, Ko-on, Go-on and Kan-on of Sino-Japanese,  the consonant system of Three Han's toponyms which includes ‘**p-, **t-, **k-, **ts-, **-s-, **h-, **m-, **n-, **-ŋ, **-l-’ are deciphered. Alongside the result, the limitation of this study and the future research outlook on vowel and suprasegmental systems are put forward reasonably.

Vietnamese has numerous early-era Chinese loanwords with ngang and huyền tones, which in Middle Chinese loanwords correspond to the pingsheng level tone category, for words that should have sắc or nặng tones, corresponding to the Middle Chinese non-level qusheng departing tone category.1 It is proposed that this layer of Early Sino-Vietnamese represents borrowing of Chinese words in the period after which Old Chinese had lost final *-s and prior to tonogenesis in Viet-Muong, thus leading to words with the level-tone category when tones emerged in Viet-Muong. This paper provides 60 items of Early Sino-Vietnamese that exemplify this phenomenon of ngang/huyền tones in qusheng words, but also 120 items exemplifying the previously noted reversal of sắc/nặng and hỏi/ngã tones between Early Sino-Vietnamese and later Sino-Vietnamese (the formalized readings of Chinese characters). Altogether, this allows for an overall relative chronology of the development of tones in both Sinitic and Vietic.

Bailang est une langue transhimalayenne conservée seulement dans les trois « Chants de Bailang » (Bailang ge 白狼歌) reproduits dans l'Histoire des Han postérieurs, le Hòu Hàn shū 漢書漢書 (entre 58 et 75 ec). Profitant pleinement des récents progrès de la phonologie historique du chinois, cet article tente de mieux comprendre la langue Bailang et l'état de la langue chinoise de la dynastie des Han, telle qu'elle devait être parlée par le scribe qui a retranscrit les poèmes.

Mots-clés : phonologie historique du chinois ; langue Bailang ; linguistique transhimalayenne.

Abstract Bailang is a Trans-Himalayan language preserved only in the three 'Songs of Bailang' (Bailang ge 白狼歌) in a Chinese historical text, the Hòu Hàn shū 後漢書 (58–75 ce). Taking full advantage of recent progress in Chinese historical phonology, this paper attempts to gain a better understanding of the Bailang language and the version of Han Chinese that must have been spoken by the scribe who committed the poems to writing.

(Conference paper) On the Partonymy of Female Genitals in Chinese Manuscripts on Sexual Body Techniques.
28p. Addendum to 2016’ (Shanghai 上海) Chutu Yixue Wenxian Yanjiu Guoji Yantaohui Lunwenji 出土醫學文獻研究國際研討會論文集 (Collected Papers of 2016 (Shanghai) International Conference for Medical Manuscripts Unearthed in China). Shanghai: Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. (254+28+1+8p.)

Abstract:
Research on body-part terminology is common in historical linguistics. The special terms for the parts of the female genitals form a special subset that is often less well documented. Chinese manuscripts on sexual body techniques, called ‘arts of the bedchamber’ (fáng zhōng shù 房中術), thus provide a unique perspective on the matter.
This paper compares mainly the partonymic sets found in the Early Han Mawangdui M3 manuscript Discussion of the Utmost Way Under the Sky (Tian xia zhi dao tan天下至道談), and on the labelled diagram of the vulva in Recipes for Nurturing Life (*Yang sheng fang 養生方) with the quotations of early medieval Chinese source texts included in Tamba no Yasuyori’s 丹波康賴 Core Prescriptions of Medicine, roll 28 ‘Inside the Chamber’ (Ishinpō 醫心方, bōnai 房內) of 984 CE.
The word meaning of the partonyms and the identification of the body part is often controversial, and will be re-analysed in detail. The new reconstruction of Old Chinese by Baxter and Sagart (2014) is used to discuss possible regional and substrate language influences seen in the partonymic sets. This diachronic study allows to detect cognitive metaphors, and patterns, and to focus on divergences between the partonymic sets.
Keywords: partonymy of female genitals; partonymic sets; ancient and medieval manuscripts; Mawangdui medical manuscripts; Ishinpō.
doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3381.5926

Medieval Chinese Syntax " Medieval Chinese Syntax " aims to provide a rough sketch of the development of function words and syntactic structures during the Chinese Medieval period, including Early Medieval Chinese (c. 0-700 CE) and Late Medieval Chinese (c. 700-1100).

Richard VanNess Simmons and Newell Ann Van Auken, eds. 2014 Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text 漢語與漢藏語研究：方言、音韻與文獻, Language and Linguistics Monograph Series 53 《語言暨語言學》專刊系列之五十三. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica 中央研究院語言學研究所.
Full text download at http://tinyurl.com/SiCSTL-intro

Chinese loanwords have played a significant role in the Vietnamese system of pronouns and terms of address and reference. Semantic and pragmatic features of Chinese kinship terms and names have been transferred into the overall Vietnamese referential system. However, many of the Chinese loanwords in this semantic domain have undergone grammaticalization quite distinct from those in any variety of Chinese, thereby mitigating the notion of Chinese as being a primary source of the structure of in that system. This paper also considers how kinship terms, titles, and names came to have 1st and 2nd person reference potentially via language contact with Chinese, areal linguistic influence in Southeast Asia, or both. Many related questions will require future studies.

This is the seventh addendum to my manifesto "Rapid Progress in the Genetic Classification of the World’s Languages ". It contains a list of almost 200 useful books I've collected about the world's Language families. It is obviously not exhaustive, and it includes books only (not papers or online resources).

In this article we attempt to demonstrate that most of the new kinship terms in Middle Chinese denoting elder members of the family that first appeared in the Tang period replacing the Old Chinese terms (and some of them still being the main colloquial terms in Mandarin) come from Old Turkic, or in one case ultimately from para-Mongolic, but via Turkic. We perceive this discovery as a major blow to the Chinese linguistic nationalism that denies the existence of foreign loanwords in Chinese. It also demonstrates that the Northern Steppe 'barbarians' were not always on the receiving side in their interaction with the Chinese, and, as a matter of fact, managed to influence Chinese language and society to the great extent. Eski Orta Çincedeki Eski Türkçe Akrabalık Terimleri Özet: Bu makalede Tang Hanedanlığı zamanında Eski Çince biçimlerinin yerini alan (ve bugün hâlâ Mandarin Çincesinde kullanımda olan) ailedeki yaşlı bireyler için kullanılan Orta Çince birçok akrabalık kavramının Eski Türkçeden ya da çok sıra dışı bir şekilde para-Moğolcadan en nihayetinde Türkçe bir kökenden geldiğini göstermeye çalışmaktayız. Bu bulguyu Çincedeki her türlü ödünçlemeyi reddeden ırkçı Çin dil bilimi anlayışına ağr bir darbe olarak nitelendiriyoruz. Üstelik bu bulgu, kuzey step " barbarlarının " Çinlilerle kurdukları etkileşimlerde her zaman alıcı taraf olmadığını ve aslında Çin dilini ve toplumunu büyük ölçüde etkilediklerini de

This paper provides evidence that Vietnamese cũng 'also' and cùng 'with' are both loanwords of the same Chinese word 共 gòng. 1 However, unlike the standard Sino-Vietnamese reading cộng, formally recognized as a reading of 共 gòng, cũng and cùng were borrowed earlier in the first millennium CE, as shown by comparative data in both Chinese and Vietnamese historical phonology and textual evidence in ancient Chinese and Vietnamese writings. The three distinct tones in each Vietnamese word represent different eras of borrowing in the process of tonogenesis in Chinese. These two grammatical Early Sino-Vietnamese loanwords, likely borrowed via large Sino-Vietnamese bilingual communities, share some semantico-syntactic properties with the Chinese etymon at points in its history. But they have also innovated in various ways since the absorption of earlier Chinese communities into the Vietic speech community after the period of Chinese administration. Thus, this Chinese etymon has status as a triplet loanword in Vietnamese and is an example of the long history of Sino-Vietnamese language contact. These Vietnamese words are also an example of the tendency of grammaticalized morphemes to continue to develop grammatical functions.

This paper considers the history of words for domesticated poultry, including ‘chicken’, ‘goose’, and ‘duck’, in China and mainland Southeast Asia to try to relate associated domestication events with specific language groups. Linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence supports Sinitic as one linguistic source, but in other cases, Tai and Austroasiatic form additional centers of lexical forms which were borrowed by neighboring phyla. It is hypothesized that these geographic regions of etyma for domesticated birds may represent instances of bird domestication, or possibly advances in bird husbandry, by speech communities in the region in the Neolithic Era, followed by spread of both words and cultural practices.

This paper is a brief overview of the typological features of negation in the Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages (with two branches, Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages), utilizing the data of many previous descriptive works and data I gathered by myself. This paper discusses the features of phonology, word order, tense/aspect, morphology, syntax/semantics, and illocutionary acts. Phonologically, Sinitic languages usually have plosive and nasal onsets for negative morphemes, while Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages mostly have negative forms derived from Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) *ma-. Most Sinitic and TB languages are of the preverbal negation type, whereas postverbal negation type can be found in Northeast India and Bangladesh, the double type (cooccurring preverbal and postverbal negatives) can be found in Nepal and in Karenic languages. Some Sinitic and TB languages employ different forms for tense/aspect distinctions that show suppletion or vowel alternation, whereas Burmese "tense" distinctions are neutralized in negation. Many TB negative morphemes are morphologically clitics or affixes. The negative markers in some ST languages are fused with the copula, auxiliary verbs, or aspectual markers. As for semantic features, some languages with negative-polarity items, such as Mandarin and Duhumbi, have a structural "double negative," which is construed as single negation. Many ST languages mostly have prohibitive forms derived from PTB *ta ⪤ *da, while some languages, such as Burmese, utilize concordance with a sentence-final marker to represent the prohibitive.

I analyze the toponyms for places in China which derive directly or indirectly from Chinese originals, via one or more non-Chinese originals. By analyzing certain features, I conclude that they are not consistent, but the majority of them seem to be derived from Yuan-era Chinese via Mongolian. I conclude with an appendix that gives solutions to several hitherto not adequately solved toponyms, such as Caiciu and the related stories, *Cuncian (or Cuncon), and Vuguen.

This paper was delivered at a conference in September, 2015, in Yangzhou. A Chinese translation will be published in the conference volume.

There are six first personal prououns in ancient Chinese, while only wo suvives up to Modern. Some scholars assume the period of the changes, but give no convincing proof. Comparing the traditional Chinese literature and Chinese translation of Indian Buddhist sutras, this paper argues that the change in spoken Chinese have been accomplished before the East Han period, which is supported by the data of Chinese sutra translation.