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In the comments to "The Altaic Hypothesis revisited" (12/10/20), Peter Golden, a Turkologist, mentioned that, as a non-Sinologist, he uses the reconstructions of the following scholars — Karlgren, Pulleyblank, Schuessler, Baxter/Sagart, Kroll and Coblin — "to get some sense" of the Old Sinitic, Late Han, Middle Sinitic (Early Middle Sinitic and Late Middle Sinitic) sounds that are "masked" by the Sinographic renderings of foreign names.  Alexander Vovin raised the problem of the inadequacies of the reconstructions of Christopher Beckwith, saying that it "is not a reconstruction at all, at least not in the sense of Karlgren, Pulleyblank, Baxter/Sagart, Zhengzhang Shangfang, Li Fang-Kuei, Coblin, etc."  Vovin continues:

I think that Beckwith is a very interesting historian (as far as I can judge, not being one myself — some of his books are very interesting reading, imho), but when he starts to talk about historical linguistics, whether it is Chinese, Japanese, Turkic, Mongolic, etc., it is methodologically simply not acceptable and it is further aggravated by the corruption of data.

The question of Beckwith's reconstructions being ad hoc in nature was also raised.

This prompted Chris Button to remark:

Of the names above, the only one I'm aware of who could make a completely valid claim to being both a historian and a linguist is Edwin Pulleyblank.

The reason Pulleyblank never published an Old Chinese lexicon like his one for Early Middle Chinese and later stages is because he never felt there was enough evidence. That's admirable, but it's also a shame for people trying to come to grips with his approaches today. I think he did want to publish at least some kind of final statement on Old Chinese, but that unfortunately was not to be.

For me, the only certain thing about Old Chinese reconstruction is that one day –- when the whole mess has been largely figured out –- someone is going to look back and realize Pulleyblank had, in one form or another, already figured a substantial portion of it out. His approach just won't seem so boundary-pushing whenever that time in the future may be.

I personally think that — because of the non-phonetic nature of the script — there will never be a day when Sinitic can be reconstructed on an internal basis.  Only through extensive comparison with non-Sinitic language materials will it be possible for major breakthroughs in the reconstruction of Old Sinitic.  This has been my principle for the past thirty years and more, and I have been slowly chip, chip, chipping away, one word at a time. (Crosby, Stills, and Nash; lyrics; no comment)  That is why we have so many Language Log posts on the model of "Of XXX and Old Sinitic reconstructions".

Chris Button himself often follows a similar model.  In fact, Chris has long been involved in a systematic comparison of PIE and OS vocabulary and, I trust, will one day publish a substantial dictionary of Sinitic vocabulary with corresponding IE words and roots.

The generation after Chris may be represented by John Carlyle, a graduate student at the University of Washington, who is superbly trained in traditional historical linguistics, but is willing to consider the possibility of Sinitic and PIE parallels.

"Historical dialectology and the Poetry Classic" (7/9/20) — guest post by John

"Middle Eastern harps and 'harp' in Eastern Central Asia" (12/10/20) — "Appendix:  Reconstruction of the Old Sinitic sounds of kōnghóu 空侯", which is noteworthy for proposing a powerful new method for finding possible IE-Sinitic comparanda

Cited in this comment by Shuheng Zhang.

But what happened to Pulleyblank's quest to reconstruct Old Sinitic?  Chris says that "he never felt there was enough evidence". What does that mean?  Not enough evidence for what?  The materials are all out there.  What matters is what you do with them.  Either you develop a methodology that can crack the code for internal reconstruction, or it remains forever moot / mute.  I submit that Pulleyblank never cracked the code, and so — though trying hard to do so — ended in frustration.

This is in contrast to Jerry Norman and South Coblin, close associates and both superb historical linguists.  They tried too, Jerry through precise, detailed dialectology and especially South (trained under Li Fang-Kuei [1902-1987]) utilizing the discipline of Sino-Tibetan studies:

W. South Coblin, A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983) — this is an exquisite, extremely useful and reliable volume that relies heavily on a combination of traditional Sinitic phonological analysis and Sino-xenic transcriptional data.

_______, A Sinologist's Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Correspondences, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 18 (Nettetal: Steyler, 1986) — South was disappointed that he could only find about two hundred common roots for Sinitic and Tibetan.

However, by the mid-nineties, Jerry and South realized that they had hit a brick wall.  There was no sense attempting to create an Old Sinitic reconstruction when — with existing tools and data — there was no hope for creating a successful, convincing product.  Whereupon they issued their famous, succinct manifesto: 

"A New Approach to Chinese Historical Linguistics", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 115.4 (1995), 576–84.

I still remember when it came out that their "New Approach" struck me with the force of a thunderbolt.

These words from the Wikipedia article on South speak powerfully to the overall trajectory and meaning of his career:

Early in his career he made many important contributions to Tibetan and Sino-Tibetan linguistics, but since the mid-1990s has worked primarily on alphabetic representations of Chinese. Starting around that time along with Jerry Norman he promoted a new direction in Chinese historical phonology making less use of the Qieyun and other rhyme books, and more use of the traditional comparative method.

Note particularly the last clause of the first sentence, which has profound meaning for me in light of my own career during the past half-century and more.

Jerry's students, e.g., David Prager Branner and Richard VanNess Simmons, continue his methods of emphasis on the diachronic and synchronic description and analysis of topolects, the former on Min and the latter on Wu.

Another outstanding figure in this circle of closely knit friends and colleagues is Axel Schuessler, who is the author of these three important dictionaries:

ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2006) — the first and only genuine etymological dictionary of Sinitic

Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa (ABC Chinese Dictionary Series) (2009) — a revision of the foundational work of Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978)

A dictionary of early Zhou Chinese (1987) — a pathbreaking work that makes available to the non-specialist a vast amount of data from early inscriptional and literary materials

(all from the University of Hawai'i Press)

Unlike Jerry and South, Axel was willing to present a full-fledged reconstruction of Old Sinitic (OS) and Later Han Sinitic, but what sets his work apart from other OS reconstructions is that, while adhering to the most exacting standards of phonological research, Axel pays careful attention to the user friendliness and heuristic purpose of his publications.  Also, in line with the overall thrust of the methodology advocated by this post, Axel makes extensive use of comparisons with early and contemporary Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, and other areal languages.  Yet  he is under no illusion that his reconstructions are the ipsissima verba of what people actually spoke in the East Asian Heartland (EAH) two or three thousand years ago.  Rather, they are more on the order of mathematical formulas for the representation of phonological relationships among the elements of basic morphemes of the language.

So where are we now?  I don't know about others, but I for one will keep chip, chip, chipping away.  Sooner or later, the wall will come tum-, tum-, tumbling down.

 

Selected reading

• "'Clear' and 'turbid' in Chinese phonology, part 4" (12/13/20) — guest post by South Coblin
• "'Clear' and 'turbid' in Chinese phonology, part 3" (12/4/20) — guest post by San Duanmu
• "'Clear' and 'turbid' in Chinese phonology, part 2" (12/4/20) — guest post by Sara de Rose
• "'Clear' and 'turbid' in Chinese phonology" (11/29/20)
• "Middle Eastern harps and 'harp' in Eastern Central Asia" (12/10/20)
• "'Skin' and 'hide' ('pelt') in Old Sinitic and Proto-Indo-European" (11/7/20)
• "Reconstruction of Middle Sinitic" (8/23/20)
• "Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in Buddhist translations of the 2nd c. AD" (4/20/20)
• "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
• "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 3" (6/3/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20) — with a list of more than a dozen previous posts related to archeology and language
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
• "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with a bibliography of numerous relevant previous posts
• "Sword out of the stone" (8/9/08) — see especially this comment
• "Trefoils across Eurasia: the importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 4" (10/11/20)
• "Headless men with face on chest" (9/28/20)
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
• "'Horse Master in IE and in Sinitic" (11/9/19)
• "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic Reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/8/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (3/12/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3" (3/16/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4" (3/24/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
• "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17)
• "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)
• "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)
• "GA" (8/6/17)
• "Of dogs and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/17/18)
• "Of ganders, geese, and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (10/29/18)
• "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16)
• "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions" (11/12/18)
• "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)
• "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
• "Galactic glimmers: of milk and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/18/19)
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/18)
• "Thai 'khwan' ('soul') and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/28/19)
• "Sinitic for "iron" in Balto-Slavic" (2/15/19)
• "Language vs. script" (11/21/16)
• "Mare, mǎ ('horse'), etc." (11/17/19)
• "The Names of Metals in the Turkic, Indo-European, and Finno-Ugric Languages"
• "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)

December 14, 2020 @ 11:16 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Historical linguistics, Language and history, Phonetics and phonology, Reconstructions

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