As we learned from the previous post, Kunlun is known from historical and fictional sources dating to the last two millennia and more to refer to mythological and geographically locatable mountains in Central Asia and in the far west as well as to vague places in Southeast Asia and blacks associated with them.
Simply because of the wide range of referents, one cannot help but be intrigued how it transpired that the same unusual name, which mostly refers to mountains, can be so broadly dispersed.
I just read Don Wyatt’s Blacks of Premodern China (which I believe you published?), and I found that someone who had previously borrowed the book from the library had left a sticky note in it… and evidently whoever it was forgot how to write 崑崙, so wrote it out in pinyin with the mountain radical!
When I watched the embedded video in that article, it sounded to me as though the archeologists were speaking Urdu or something close to it (e.g., I heard them repeatedly use the word matlab مَطْلَب ["meaning; purpose; motive"; Hindi spelling मतलब]) and caught many other words that I recognized from my knowledge of Hindi-Urdu and Nepali, but I was astonished at how much English vocabulary was mixed into the language the archeologists were speaking. Not only did they use a lot of English vocabulary, it was mostly not heavily accented with their local language.
Here are some of the English words and phrases that I heard in the interviews: "important site development", "800 century year ago", "complex", "rainy season", "dwelling monks", "meetings", "religious", "philosophy", "schooling areas", "institute", "architecture", "Buddhism", "Buddhist site", "religious tourism… peace… harmony". I cannot guarantee that this is a complete list of all the English words and phrases in the interviews (total length 3:38), nor that I have transcribed each and every item exactly the way they said it. Still, this list should give a fairly good idea of the nature of the mixed language they are speaking.
[This is a guest post by Nicholas Morrow Williams]
I recently came across this article on the first occurrence of hanzi 漢字 ("Chinese character; Han character; Sinogram; Japanese: kanji; Korean: hanja; Vietnamese: hán tự/chữ hán／漢字/漢"):
Wang Yong 王勇. "'Kanji' tanjō no isseki: 'bonzi' kara 'kanji' e" 「漢字」誕生の一齣――「梵字」から「漢字」へ.
Bukkyō shigaku kenkyū (The Journal of the History of Buddhism), 56.1 (2013): 1-11.
It's obvious when you think about it, but of course there was originally no need to write the word hanzi when Chinese characters were the only game in town, writing-wise. Wang first refers to some earlier identifications of the earliest use of hanzi dating to the Song (960-1279) or Yuan (1271-1368), and then points out that the Japanese monk-scholars Kūkai 空海 (774-835) and Saichō 最澄 767-822) seem to have used it in their works, though the details are a bit complex. The clearest single usage seems to be in a text completed by Saichō in 818, entitled the Jugokoku kaishō 守護国界章. But then Wang further points out the Fànyǔ qiānzì wén 梵語千字文 by Yijing 義浄 (635-713), which explains in its introduction that it uses hanzi in correspondence to each Sanskrit letter. The overall point is clear: the term hanzi first came into common usage among Tang-era (618-907) monks as it was required to distinguish Chinese writing from Sanskrit. This insight does not seem to have been incorporated into all the standard reference works yet (my Hanyu da cidian identifies the earliest usage in the Song).
In our ongoing quest to link up linguistics with archeology, we have had numerous posts involving Iranian-speaking peoples spreading from west to east and bringing culture and language with them. When I say "culture", I mean technological as well as spiritual, artistic, architectural, and other aspects, plus social customs and political organization. Because the Iranian-speaking peoples were so active in spreading diverse manifestations of culture, I often refer to them as Kulturvermittlers par excellence.
Among the more prominent features of culture that Iranian-speaking peoples transmitted across Eurasia was metallurgy. That includes all four of the main metals: bronze, iron, gold, and silver. The first two were mainly for weapons and implements, and where they went, they transformed military affairs, agriculture, and daily life. The changes that bronze and iron brought about amounted to revolutions of civilization. Gold and silver were primarily for ornament and embellishment, and the Iranian-speaking people created breathtakingly beautiful works of art out of these precious metals
Though best-known for its titanic consonantal inventory, Ubykh also has an etymologically fascinating vocabulary, heavy with loans from a diverse array of sources. Many of these are drawn from the indigenous lexicons of its Circassian and Abkhaz sisters, but Circassian and Abkhaz both also acted as proxies by which Ubykh became a linguistic placer deposit of sorts, receiving substantial loan strata from millennia of the ebb and flow of Kartvelian, Turkic, Mongolic, Semitic, and Indo-European cultural tides. More recently the Ubykh nation’s exodus from their homeland and subsequent exile in Anatolia, following extensive genocides at the end of the Great Caucasian War (Ubykh: Adəɣaʁʷərda ‘the Rape of Circassia’), added yet another layer of complexity and invested the language with loans from whole new branches of Indo-European, Turkic, and Semitic. This makes compiling an Ubykh etymological dictionary a complex and challenging project, and while engaged in it I’ve often found myself having to track etymologies along paths that lead deep into other language stocks entirely. This post began as a question to Victor Mair while I was playing bloodhound along one such trail, and it was on his suggestion that I reworked it into a post for LL. Thank you for having me!
The other day, when we were discussing where Napa cabbage came from, Diana Shuheng Zhang mentioned to me that the Chinese word for "spinach", bōcài 菠菜, indicates that it came from Persia. She's usually right about such things, and she was in this case too:
From earlier 波斯菜 (bōsīcài), from 波斯 (Bōsī, “Persia”) + 菜 (cài, “greens, vegetable”).
where bōsī 波斯 is obviously a transcription of "Persia":
This is something I wanted to write about back in mid-July, but it fell victim to my backlog of thousands of e-mails. Now, slowly, slowly, slowly, I'm catching up, and I find that it's still a worthy topic to post on.
I've long been deeply intrigued by the word "macaque". It's an odd-looking term with a murky history, but somehow it just seems to fit the creature that it designates.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed.:
French,fromPortuguesemacaco, of Bantuorigin; akin to Kongomakako, monkeys : ma-, pl. n. pref. + -kako, monkey.
East Indian monkey, 1757, from French macaque, from Portuguese macaco "monkey," a Bantu word brought from Africa to Brazil (where it was applied 17c. to a type of monkey there).
I have a couple of questions about Sino-Japanese historical linguistics, which I have not been able to find an answer to elsewhere. If you have the time, I would greatly appreciate a response.
Modern Mandarin forms with the rhyme -ing regularly correspond to Sino-Japanese -you (formerly -yau) and -ei, the first being Go-on and the second Kan-on. Sometimes there is a Tou-on with -in. In the case of 京, the development of Middle Chinese seems to have been something like /kiaŋ/ > /kiŋ/. With Middle Chinese coda -ŋ regularly corresponding to -u/-i in Sino-Japanese, the Go-on lines up well with the earlier Middle Chinese form, and the Kan-on with the later form.
It matters, so let's familiarize ourselves with the meaning of the term right off the bat. In Chinese Studies, we call this "zhèngmíng 正名" ("rectification of names").
Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality. The phrase has now become known as a doctrine of feudal Confucian designations and relationships, behaving accordingly to ensure social harmony. Without such accordance society would essentially crumble and "undertakings would not be completed." Mencius extended the doctrine to include questions of political legitimacy.
