Words for king: Greek, Tocharian, Sinitic
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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-seventh issue: “Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord,’ and Possible Wider Connections,” by Douglas Q. Adams. (pdf)
ABSTRACT
Examined here is the possible cognancy of Homeric Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’ and their respective feminine derivatives (w)ánassa ‘queen’ and nāśi ‘lady.’ ‘King/lord’ may reflect a PIE *wen-h2ǵ-t ‘warlord’ or the like. Further afield is the possibility that a Proto-Tocharian *wnātkä might have been borrowed into Ancient Chinese and been the ancestor of Modern Chinese wáng ‘king.’
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Selected readings
J.W. Brewer said,
September 26, 2024 @ 9:18 am
My Tocharian is not what you could even call weak or minimal since it is non-existent, but I enjoyed this because I have long known the Greek lexeme. Indeed I can pinpoint when I learned it: the spring semester of 1986, when I was required as an undergraduate taking Greek 301b to commit the first seven lines of the Iliad to memory. It's the third word in the seventh line:
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς
Prof. Adams' piece helpfully explains why I haven't come across it all that much in other Greek contexts, because once the literate age of Greek was underway it was generally not used to refer to actual current human rulers, only gods and certain venerable figures from former ages, such as (in the line quoted above) Agamemnon. It was much more common as Adams notes to use βασιλεὺς for king. However, in poking around I did find one interesting use of ἄναξ for a contemporary ruler. In the 5th line of _The Persians_, Aeschylus has the chorus refer to their monarch with both of those titles as ἄναξ Ξέρξης βασιλεὺς – and this in a play written and premiered when Xerxes was still very much alive and in power. Presumably that multiplicity of titles is akin to that seen in English uses such as the title of John Skelton's poem "A Laud and Praise Made for Our Sovereign Lord the King," written in 1509 on the occasion of the coronation of Henry VIII.
Victor Mair said,
September 26, 2024 @ 9:32 am
@J.W. Brewer
Your substantial contribution is greatly appreciated.
Martin Schwartz said,
September 26, 2024 @ 6:07 pm
Adams' aricle is learned and ingenious, but (esp. since I think his cmpd. reconstruction is a tad iifily concocted) I prefer to see the
Greco-Phrygian *wanakt- as substratic, and the Toch.words as
(with Gerd Carling, "Sanskrit and Tocharian") merely a lonword
from Middle Indic nāthaka- 'leader' (also in Skt. compounds, and cf. Skt. nātha- 'id'.) Btw for Agamemnōn, I think it was the late Raimo Anttila
who took the name as 'Steadfast in the chariot race', with aga- not 'much' but with *aga- compound form (zero-grade *n > Gr a)
of ágõn, 'chariot race'.
Martin Schwartz
Lucas Christopoulos said,
September 26, 2024 @ 6:40 pm
The Jie tribe are said in the Jin annals to be qiang qu (羌渠), or one of the nineteen tribes of the Southern Xiongnu Federation tribal area. Shi Le (Chinese: 石勒 274–17-333), the Jie slave who became Emperor Ming of the Later Zhao (後趙明帝), was also very skillful in boxing and probably trained somehow in combat sports since his youth (Jin annals Chap. 105).
Chris Button said,
September 26, 2024 @ 7:54 pm
Regarding Old Chinese, the glides w- and j- are problematic onsets.
Pulleyblank's 1995 article on glottals showed j- to have been treated as a vowel and given a glottalic onset–hence it does not occur in Old Chinese.
Pulleyblank struggled to make the same argument with w- because both ʔw- and w- coexist later. However, treating ʁ- as the source of w- in onset position, as Pulleyblank assumes in coda position in his 1977-78 reconstruction of OC rhymes, allows a similar glottalic argument to be made for w- as for j- (although I think some overlap between ʔw- and w- could still be a problem in that regard).
In any case, any comparisons with OC words supposedly beginning with w- or j- need to be handled carefully.
In the case of 王, I reconstruct ʁaŋ. Unfortunately, that reconstruction only pulls it even further from the proposed Tocharian source. Without any compelling evidence for it to have been a loan, I think the comparison should in the end be rejected.
Having said that, I too enjoyed the article and appreciated the proposal. I will let the PIE experts comment on the main argument of the article that does not hinge on the OC comparison in any case.
Chris Button said,
September 26, 2024 @ 8:04 pm
*although I think some overlap between ʔw- (from pre-OC w-) and w- (from OC ʁ- could still be a problem in that regard).