Edwin G. Pulleyblank

Chinese and Indo-Europeans

The question of the origins of Chinese civilization has fascinated scholars for a long time, but, in spite of the great advances that have come from recent archaeological discoveries, we still find extreme divergences of opinion on basic issues. The reasons for this are not far to seek. There are still enormous gaps in the evidence, and to fill in the picture at all one must extrapolate beyond what can be definitely proved. In such circumstances subjective considerations are bound to affect the judgment and what seems no more than an obvious inference to one person will seem wildly speculative to someone else. So it is with the question of indigenous development versus outside influence. To some Chinese scholars brought up within the self-sufficient tradition of their own culture it seems natural to assume that unless there is absolutely overwhelming evidence to the contrary, everything essential in Chinese civilization, including the basic inventions of agriculture, metallurgy, etc., developed from its own creative energies without outside influence. Hypotheses of contacts across Central Asia which cannot yet be documented in the absence of archaeological exploration in the intervening regions are stigmatized as far-fetched, whereas theories, as little based on evidence, about as yet unattested earlier stages of culture within China itself are advanced as matters of logical necessity.

Qieyun and Yunjing: The Essential Foundation for Chinese Historical Linguistics

In response to Norman and Coblin (1995), it is argued that there is no inherent contradiction between the study of living dialects, the study of traditional rhyme dictionaries and rhyme tables, and the study of all kinds of additional philological evidence. Every kind of evidence must be used and still will not be enough to solve all the interesting questions that one can ask about the history of the Chinese language.

CLOSE/OPEN ABLAUT IN SINO-TIBETAN

In a recent article’) I was able to show that the vowel system of Old Chinese could be anaiysed as a two-term close/open contrast, s/a. This IF very different from Karlgren’s ‘Archaic Chinese’ but IS remarkably slmllar In esscntlal features to the analyses of Modern Pekingese by Hartmann,?) Hockett3j and Rygaloff.4j (See also the further study by Mart&) and the more recent prosodic anaiysis by I-ialhday.“jj Hartmann adopted the theory of three basic vowels (high, mid, Iowj developed, but not published, by Trager and Kennedy. He wrote these vowels as 1. e, u, recogmzmg as well three semlvowels J, r, w Hackett found It unnecessary to retain a separate sign for the high nuclear vowel, which he regarded Instead as zero vocahsm. By writing I and u Instead of 1 and \t he gave his transcrlptlon the appearance of recogmzmg more ‘vowels’ than Hartmann’s but this IS a mere: matter of orthography because he still called I and II semlvowels, and only e and CI vowels. (More recently’) he ellmmates a separate class of semlvowels and dlstlngutshes four high vowels I, u (previously IU), r, U, apart from the mtd and low vowels a and a This seems to me to be a retrograde step ) Rygaloff also reduced the number of nuclear vowels to two but m a ‘) E G.Pulleyblank, ‘An mterpretatlon of the vowel systems of Old Chmese and of

Ji 姬 and Jiang 姜: The Role of Exogamic Clans in the Organization of the Zhou Polity

In discussing the legendary origins of the Zhou 周 dynasty in the Cambridge History of Ancient China Edward Shaughnessy cites the poem “Sheng min” 生民 from the Shijing 詩經 (Mao 245) which tells how a woman called Jiang Yuan 姜嫄 became pregnant by stepping on the footprint of Di 帝 and gave birth to Hou Ji 后稷, Lord Millet, the ancestor of the Zhou kings.1 Shaughnessy translates the name Jiang Yuan as “The Jiang (People’s) Progenitress.” This is surprising, since according to the strictly patrilineal rules of clan exogamy no woman with the surname (xing 姓) Jiang could legitimately have persons with that surname as descendants in the direct line. The whole point of the story in a Zhou text concerned with the ancestry of the royal house is that she was the ancestress, not of her own Jiang clan, but of the royal Zhou clan, Ji 姬. On reading further it becomes clear that Shaughnessy’s translation reflects a theory that has recently become popular among Chinese archae ologists that the predynastic Zhou were an amalgam of two peoples, the Ji and the Jiang, who can be identified with distinct ceramic cultures, the Ji originally centered on the Fen 汾 River valley in Shanxi and the Jiang on the upper reaches of the Wei 渭 River in Shaanxi.2 This is correlated with an hypothesis that originated with Qian Mu 錢 穆 that, contrary to the traditional view that the ancestors of the Zhou kings originally came from a place called Bin 豳 (or 邠) in Western

The Ganzhi as Phonograms and their Application to the Calendar

As many readers of Early China will be aware, I have for some time held the view that the twenty-two signs known as the ten Heavenly Stems and the twelve Earthly Branches originated as phonograms; that is, as names of the consonants of the Chinese language at the time of the invention of the script.1 I have used it as a working hypothesis, trying out various possible solutions to the underlying phonetic values that will, on the one hand, make sense as the phonological system of a natural language and, on the other hand, account in a natural way for the other kinds of evidence that are available for the reconstruction of

The Final Consonants of Old Chinese

For the internal reconstruction of Middle Chinese we have the firm guidelines provided by the rhyme tables and the rhyme dictionaries. For earlier periods such analyses by contemporary Chinese phonologists are lacking and we must depend on what can be inferred indirectly from evidence of various kinds, the most important of which are poetic rhyming and the phonetic elements in the structure of characters.

HOW DO WE RECONSTRUCT OLD CHINESE

THE DOMINANT FIGURE in everything to do with the history of the Chinese language throughout the twentieth century has been Bernhard Karlgren, whose reconstruction of the language of the Qieyun rhyme dictionary of A.D. 601 (1915-26) for the first time put the study of Chinese historical phonology on a rigorous scientific basis. This, together with his further reconstruction of the language of the Shijing rhymes, was published in dictionary form in Grammata Serica (1940), revised as Grammata Serica Recensa (1957), and has been widely used by specialists and nonspecialists alike ever since. Though his Qieyun reconstruction has been criticized by many scholars in points of detail, there have been few attempts to reexamine its basic premises, and even for specialists it has retained much of the authority it had over half a century ago. On the other hand his Old Chinesel reconstruction was always treated with considerable reserve by specialists and there are by now several alternative systems in the field. Without attempting anything like a complete survey, one can mention the names of Lu Zhiwei, Dong Tonghe, Wang Li, Chou Fa-kao, and Li Fang-kuei among Chinese scholars, Rai Tsutomu and TMd6 Akiyasu in Japan, Yakhontov and Starostin in the Soviet Union, and such scholars as Bodman, Baxter, and Schuessler in North America. I have myself published several articles on the subject over the past thirty years and am at present engaged in putting my ideas together in a monograph, though I would maintain that a complete reconstruction of Old Chinese such as is confidently presented in Grammata Serica Recensa is still beyond our grasp. A question that is bound to occur to outsiders looking at the field of Chinese historical phonology is why there is so little agreement among the quite small number of specialists working in this area. It is not a situation to inspire the confidence of nonspecialists and it is also discouraging to specialists themselves who would like to think they are contributing to the advancement of knowledge in ways that will ultimately demand wider recognition both from a historical and from a linguistic point of view. What I propose to do in this paper is to set out some of the desiderata, as I see them, for giving our work a more solid foundation and making it subject to commonly accepted critical standards. I shall discuss these desiderata under the following headings: (1) the need to use the best linguistic theory available, (2) the need to get ones reconstruction of Middle Chinese right as the essential foundation for reconstructing Old Chinese, (3) the role of typology in guiding ones reconstruction, (4) the need to use all available evidence and not to give a privileged position to any one class of evidence.

Han China in Central Asia

A.F.P. Hulsewe. China in Central Asia, the Early Stage: 125 B.C.-A.D. 23. An annotated translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty, with an Introduction by M.A.N. Loewe. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979, Pp. viii, 273, map. (70 guilders)

The Analysis of Vowel Systems.

Abstract The method of analysing vowel systems that will be presented in this article has been developed in connection with studies of Chinese historical phonology and related investigations of other East Asian languages. In part it derives from an interpretation of traditional Chinese “rhyme table” phonology and is a way of translating this into alphabetic notation. Beyond this, however, it has proved very useful in analysing linguistic change and it suggests a kind of feature analysis of vowels that may have a much wider application.

Prosody or pharyngealization in old Chinese ? The origin of the distinction between Type A and Type B syllables

Some comments are offered on a recent paper in these pages by Jerry Norman, in which be proposed an alternative to the A.s theory of the origin of the distinction between Type A and Type B syllables in Old and Middle Chinese, that is, the distinction marked by the absence or presence of medial yod in Karlgrens reconstructions