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Lucas Klein and Nick Williams asked me about this interesting word:  落魄.

It can mean either “free-spirited” or “downtrodden”, which appear to directly contradict each other, and it has at least three variant pronunciations (luòpò, luòbó, luòtuò).  Source

Negative meanings:  "down and out; in dire straits; abject".

Positive meanings:  "unrestrained; unconventional; untrammeled by convention; casual".

• Cantonese (Jyutping): lok⁶ tok³
• Hakka (Sixian, PFS): lo̍k-pak

Seems to be a literary term.

Source

Goes all the way back to Shǐjì 史記 (Records of the [Grand] Scribe / Historian; completed ca. 94 BC), scroll 97, "Lì Shēng zhuàn 酈生傳" ("Biography of Li Sheng").

Can also be written 落拓 (cf. 落魄 above and note that both the semantophores and the phonophores of the second characters of the two variants are starkly different).

I wonder if it might be related to 邋遢, a possible connection that I have not seen mentioned by commentators and lexicographers before.   邋遢, which is written completely differently from 落魄 / 落拓, means "slovenly; dirty; dowdy; sloppy; slobby; unkempt; ill-groomed", Cantonese "dirty".  Source

(Guangzhou, Jyutping): laat⁶ taat³ (Taishan, Wiktionary): lat⁵ tat¹

Perhaps 邋遢 is not related to 落魄, because the final consonants (of the entering tones) in Cantonese are different from those for the latter — "t" vs. "k".  Also, this word has no positive meanings.

I do have one other observation about 落魄.  Namely, as is often the case with disyllabic words, the meanings of whose individual characters / morphemes / syllables do not add up to the meaning of the disyllabic term, I suspect that 落魄 might be a dimidiated binom.  When I used this term on Language Log in the past, many commenters professed never to have heard of it and not to know what it signified, but it was used by people like the Belgian missionary and University of Washington professor, Father Paul Serruys (teacher of South Coblin and younger brother of the Mongolist, Henry Serruys), and the Berkeley professor Peter Alexis Boodberg (references available upon request).

In any event, I asked Diana Shuheng Zhang, whether she thought that 落魄 might be a dimidiated binome and, if so, what would the original phonological shape of the undimidiated word might have looked like?

She began her reply:

I do know what a dimidiated binome is, and to be honest, I'm not sure whether 落魄 is one. This is because, although this rhyming binome does bear the shape that resembles a dimidiated binome, 落 already has a *kl- initial cluster by itself. I doubt if a tri-consonant cluster could be possible in the structure of the OC (Old Chinese / Sinitic).

To this, I responded:  Yes, a *kkl- initial cluster would be odd, but it still needs to be looked into.

After a week or two, Diana sent me this detailed, lengthy discussion, which constitutes the remainder of this post and is primarily for specialists:

=============================================

I now have a better idea on the correlation between 落魄(泊)/落拓.

拓: MC tʰak

In the Chang'an dialect of early Medieval China, 泊 and 魄 are not homophonous.

泊: MC pʰak

魄: MC pʰæk

So, between these two words, only 落泊 was a real rhyming binome in the Tang-time Chang'an reading: lak-pʰɑk, while 落魄 was read lak-pʰæk. This explains why, in the eighth stanza of the 梵語千字文 (yes!!), it writes: "四生頻落泊，六趣幾徘徊" ("All sentient beings [caturyōni] frequently fall into dire straits; the six-destinies [ṣaḍgatīḥ] from time to time hover around"). This is an evident example indicating the vernacular Tang-Chang'an topolectal nature of the Chinese part of the 梵語千字文, which helps authenticate the text's authorship by Yijing (635-713). 落魄, because it was not then a binome, was not as frequently used. We see sentences such as “落魄江南載酒行，楚腰腸斷掌中輕” (by 杜牧) in the transmitted version of Tang poems, however, since Tang poetry anthologies were mostly compiled by Song people — by whose time 泊 and 魄 had already merged in their language — who knows in which form Du Mu wrote those lines in the first place?

The correlation between Medieval Sinitic pʰ- (魄/泊) and tʰ- (拓) initials can be better explained now as follows:

1. The Old Chinese form of this word, as "unrestrained" or "in dire straits", was probably *rák-pʰrák and *rák-hrák in various OC topolects (the acute accent marks type A syllables a.k.a. faucalized/glottalized syllables).

2. The sound change goes: *hr > *hl > *tʰ. Two other xiéshēng examples demonstrating this change are:

tǐ 體 (MC tʰ- > Mand. t-) VS lǐ 禮 (MC l- > Mand. l-) &

tǎ 獺 (MC *tʰ- > Mand. t-) VS lài 賴 (MC l- > Mand. l-).

泊 and 拓 is a likely member of this sound change category. The lak-tʰak pronunciation just dropped the pʰ- part and replaced it with h.

================

The next question is: in which area was 落拓 first used? I suspect that the answer is in the "Eastern Area", namely, the Qīng-Xú 青徐 region in modern Shāndōng. The most prominent feature of the Early Medieval Eastern Dialect is represented by the first entry of 劉熙 (d.216)'s lexical dictionary 釋名 Explaining Names:

"天，豫司兗冀以舌腹言之。天，顯也，在上高顯也。青徐以舌頭言之。"

[As for "Heaven", the Yù-Yǎn-Jì (modern Hénán & Héběi) prefectures speak it with the dorsal part of the tongue. The Heaven (EHC tʰen) means manifestation (EHC xen). It is lofty and manifest upon high. The Qīng-Xú areas speak it with the apical part of the tongue."] (my own translation)

釋名 informs us that 天 was pronounced as tʰen, apically, in the Eastern dialects, while it was pronounced dorsally, homophonous to 顯 xen in the Middle dialects. This linguistic deduction perfectly matches what the literary example provides to us:  落拓, written as 樂託 (pronounced the same), first appeared in the written record as in 世說新語 — the author of which, 劉義慶, was ancestrally native to 彭城 (the modern 江蘇徐州)!! 一個東部人！[VHM:  an easterner]

lak-pʰak, on the other hand, could be in the topolects of most places. This explains why 落魄/泊 is attested in written records with much higher frequency and much longer history than 落拓 prior to the Medieval time. With the Eastern people's thriving as literati, lak-tʰak and lak-pʰak coexisted and became  interchangeable shortly before the Tang. Thus, the same Tang author could use both 泊 and 拓 in his writings because both pronunciations survived in the form of a synonym pair, or polyphonic word. It is like the co-existence of xuè, xiě, xǔe for 血 and ké, qiào 殼 nowadays.

At last, if lak-tʰak 落拓 was an Eastern thing, then what about its 100% Western counterpart? Phonologically, the western counterpart of 落拓 should be a word that is pronounced lak-xak. We do have one: it is written 落瓠 (Mand. luòhuò), derived from 則瓠落無所容 in Zhuangzi 莊子. Metathetically, we acquire the form huòluò, which writes 濩落, attested in 杜甫's famous long poem "自京赴奉先縣詠懷五百字": “居然成濩落，白首甘挈闊”. Our renowned Du Fu resided in Chang'an for his official post and also established his home, along with his wife and children, in a place named 奉先 (still in modern 陝西 as 奉先縣 now). He was on his way returning to his home in 奉先, during the exact journey of which this long 500-character poem was composed. I believe that we do not need too much elaboration on how and why 落瓠 stands for "free-spiritedness", or 濩落 for "down-in-dire" for Mr. Du!

October 15, 2019 @ 5:23 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Historical linguistics, Morphology, Phonetics and phonology, Topolects

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