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[This is a guest post by Mok Ling.]

I recently paid a visit to the oldest Chinese temple in the city of Tangerang in Indonesia, Boen Tek Bio (文德廟 ["literary virtue"], note the Dutch-influenced spelling) which was renovated some time in September this year. I was very pleased to see they did a pretty good job restoring all the inscriptions and pieces of calligraphy.

I noticed some (very old) custodians of the temple were handing out talismans (fú 符), and very helpfully, a hand-drawn diagram explaining each part of the talisman (see the attached diagram) — notice the ad-hoc Mandarin romanizations and Indonesian translations of each element).

The part that caught my attention was the bottom-most line: 釋䘥煞, transcribed "si yak sha" and translated as "Yang tidak bagus, segala bala, dimusnahkan" ("All that is not of benefit, all misfortune, be destroyed!"). The connection between "yaksha"* and "misfortune" is pretty obvious, but I have never seen "yaksha" spelt 䘥煞 in any Sinitic language.

My guess is that whoever made the talisman spoke some older form of Mandarin that has rù shēng 入聲 ("entering tone")** and did not palatalize /k-/. 釋 is, of course, a 入聲 word ending in /-k/, and 䘥 would have had an initial /ki-/ historically. Perhaps it was meant to be pronounced like /sik.kiap.sat/, with the initial /k/ of 䘥 being perceived as part of the final /k/ of the previous syllable.

—

*yaksha

The Yakshas (Sanskrit: यक्ष, IAST: Yakṣa, Pali: Yakkha) are a broad class of nature spirits, usually benevolent, but sometimes mischievous or capricious, connected with water, fertility, trees, the forest, treasure and wilderness. They appear in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist texts, as well as ancient and medieval era temples of South Asia and Southeast Asia as guardian deities. The feminine form of the word is IAST: Yakṣī or Yakshini (Sanskrit: यक्षिणी, IAST: Yakṣiṇī; Pali: Yakkhini).

In Hindu, Jain and Buddhist texts, the yakṣas have a dual personality. On the one hand, a yakṣa may be an inoffensive nature-fairy, associated with woods and mountains; but there is also a darker version of the yakṣa, which is a kind of (bhuta) that haunts the wilderness and waylays and devours travellers, similar to the rakṣasas.

(Wikipedia)

VHM:  In the popular imagination, the more demonic aspect of the yakshas is stressed.

**entering tone, also called "checked tone"

A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a type of syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop. Separating the checked tone allows -p, -t, and -k to be treated as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng, respectively, since they are in complementary distribution. Stops appear only in the checked tone, and nasals appear only in the other tones. Because of the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables. Chinese phonetics have traditionally counted them separately.

Final voiceless stops and therefore the checked "tones" have disappeared from most Mandarin dialects, spoken in northern and southwestern China, but have been preserved in southeastern Chinese branches like Yue, Min, and Hakka.

Tones are an indispensable part of Chinese literature, as characters in poetry and prose were chosen according to tones and rhymes for their euphony. This use of language helps reconstructing Old Chinese and Middle Chinese pronunciations since Chinese writing system is logographic, rather than phonetic.

(Wikipedia)

Selected readings

• "Tones, Then and Now" (8/22/24)
• "A Chinese character that is harder to write than 'biang'" (7/30/20)

December 17, 2024 @ 11:04 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Romanization, Tones

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