Ad hoc sinographic romanization in Indonesia
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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.
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.
Selected readings
- "Tones, Then and Now" (8/22/24)
- "A Chinese character that is harder to write than 'biang'" (7/30/20)
Ben Zimmer said,
December 17, 2024 @ 11:06 am
Here are translations of the other Indonesian glosses for anyone who's interested.
top left:
terang bercahaya 'bright and shining'
top right:
menjaga rumah/melindungi 'guard the house/protect'
middle, below the arrows:
melindungi rumah supaya jadi terang bercahaya 'protect the house so that it may be bright and shining'
bottom left:
memberikan rejeki dan hoki 'bestow fortune and good luck'
bottom right:
menerima segala keberkahan kesejeteraan dan langit 'receive all the blessings of prosperity and heaven'
[kesejeteraan is an alternate spelling of kesejahteraan 'prosperity']
Ben Zimmer said,
December 17, 2024 @ 1:10 pm
As for the use of "si yak sha" in the romanization, I gather Mok Ling considers that unusual because the /k/ has been lost in modern Chinese reflexes of the Sanskrit loanword यक्ष yakṣa. However, the Sanskritism has also been borrowed into Indonesian (via Javanese) as yaksa, so the transliteration could reflect some influence from that.
Chris Button said,
December 17, 2024 @ 5:17 pm
It's interesting because 䘥 would originally have had a -p coda.
However, at least in Eastern Min varieties (such as Fuzhou Min), that -p coda would have regularly merged with -k (and then more recently become -ʔ).
Jonathan Smith said,
December 17, 2024 @ 6:42 pm
"䘥" isn't a word so no such thing as it "originally had a p- coda." Instead, as the post says, "䘥" (like all characters) is used to *write*/*spell*. E.g., it is used to write words like Tw. kah-á 䘥仔 'sleeveless garment / singlet' and (according to Wiktionary) related Eastern Min (= Hokchiu?) gák 'sleeveless coat'. Whereas above, if the annotations are correct, it is used to write the first syllable of yaksha as loaned into some Sinitic language. IDK if these two facts are related. Chinese transcriptions at bottom are all Mandarin-like with this one exception, whereas hud at top resembles Hokkien etc. hu̍t 'Buddha' and im resembles lots of southern Chinese 'sound' (but note this item is also written in at very top.)
Chris Button said,
December 17, 2024 @ 6:49 pm
䘥 is in the Jiyun where it rhymes with 狎 with its -p coda.
Chris Button said,
December 17, 2024 @ 7:14 pm
*by "rhymes", I mean glossed with phonetic speller (fanqie)
Weh said,
December 17, 2024 @ 8:53 pm
Are we sure that it is "yak sha"? This handwriting seems to use very similar forms for "k" and "h", so I believe it is "yah sha", which is apparently a Mandarinization of Hokkien 押煞 ah-suah "to restrain; to stop forcefully; to discipline rigorously".
The concept of 押煞 ah-suah is used in Hokkien folk religion. If you google 押煞, you can find many similar talismans (where the first character is written as 押). This version, however, has the 䘥 character, with the radical 衤, but I presume it was intended to be (⿰示甲), with the radical 示 (as in 神).
Curiously, 押煞 is a Hokkien translation of Achshaph, a Canaanean city mentioned in the Bible, whose name literally means "sorcery".
Some relevant videos:
The ritual of 押煞 conducted https://www.facebook.com/gongxue2temple/videos/最終-押煞送火神儀式/1201080853901375/
The same talisman in a Tiktok video https://www.tiktok.com/@elsa.novias/video/7422999918664518917
Note that in the comments to this video, the words 釋押煞 [sic] are interpreted as "Shi Ya Sha yang berarti Melepas, Menundukkan, dan Menghentikan" ("Shi Ya Sha, which means to Renounce, Subdue, and Stop").
Most intances of 押煞 ah-suah that I could find in Google treat it as a verb-object compound "to suppress 押 evil spirits 煞" (as in 驅邪押煞, 和瘟押煞, 鎮宅押煞, etc), but in this case it may have been interpreted as a verb-verb compound "to force 押 and restrain 煞" (thus 釋、押、煞). The latter interpretation is specifically Hokkien and is probably original. The verb-object interpretation may theoretically work in Literary Chinese and thus in other Sinitic Language as well.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 17, 2024 @ 9:00 pm
I mean ontologically "䘥" isn't a word; of interest above and always is what a text says or is thought to say. Pursuant to Ben Zimmer's remark, I guess "䘥煞" doesn't have to write a Sinitic borrowing at all but could directly reflect (e.g.) Indonesian.
Jiyun (from the 11th c. and built from earlier rime books) isn't the tool for this job / many jobs… one often doubts the extent to which such works contain "words" at all. But OK, looking at it, the character "䘥" seems to be listed twice. First time under "轄甲切" it is glossed "衿也" and second time under "古狎切" it is glossed "廣雅襦也" (= "IDK, grabbed this from another book.") So yeah.
Anyway why this character was used here remains unclear to me…
Mok Ling said,
December 17, 2024 @ 10:19 pm
@Weh
https://openmuseum.tw/muse/digi_object/9a9c194461189582d270038a04133a99
Looking more into it, a 押煞符 seems to be a specific (and very popular) type of 符! Maybe the spelling with the 衣 component is a kind of visual pun on 神 as well, if not a misspelling.
Weh said,
December 17, 2024 @ 10:37 pm
>intances
*instances
>other Sinitic Language
*other Sinitic languages
—-
Or perhaps these two interpretations of 押煞 ah-suah coexisted from the beginning? There is a similar word 收煞 siu-suah, which also has this double meaning: 1) to conclude; to stop [usu. with a good outcome] 2) to exorcise.
Hokkien has other words with 煞 -suah that unambiguously mean "to exorcise": 制煞 chè-suah, 鎮煞 tìn-suah, 驅煞 khu-suah. They may have influenced siu-suah and ah-suah at some point. I see that in Taiwanese MOE dictionary, ah-suah (spelled 壓煞 in characters) is listed among synonyms of 制煞 chè-suah.
"The Great Taiwanese-Japanese dictionary" (臺日大辭典, 1931-32) has two entries for ah-suah in different spellings:
1) 押息 ah-suah: 強ひて止めさせる。制止する。制する。留める。[all meaning "to stop (forcefully)"]
::你着為伊押息 lí tio̍h kā-i ah-suah ＝君留めてやれ。 [You, stop him!] (personally, I would prefer to write this example as 汝着共伊押息)
2) 押煞 ah-suah ＝收煞 siu-suah: 道士が咒文を唱へ【法索huat-soh】などを用ひて邪神を遂拂ふこと。["of a Taoist priest: to expel evil spirits using a ritual rope while chanting spells"]
David Marjanović said,
December 18, 2024 @ 9:45 am
Hence Yaksha, a Cretaceous amphibian that probably lived in trees and was found in Burmese amber. (It was at first mistaken for an anachronistic chameleon.)
Chris Button said,
December 18, 2024 @ 11:40 am
@ Weh
Oooh… good point!
@ Jonathan Smith
"So yeah" meaning you agree it almost certainly ended in the -p of 甲 and 狎?
Yves Rehbein said,
December 18, 2024 @ 2:42 pm
souw tien pai Lu – "receive all the blessings of prosperity and heaven", @Ben Zimmer.
Cf. recieve – shōudào 收到
> Not to be confused with 受到 (shòudào) which has a similar reading in Mandarin but different meaning.—https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/收到
But shòu 受 "receive" is in the definition, so its use likely not in error.
I used the opportunity to consult Qianziwen and landed on lines 229–331 fú yuán shàn qìng. With the help of my trusty dictionary I am for the first time able to appreciate the poetry. The previous quadruplet contains huò 禍 in opposition to fú 福 (the translator's comment points out) and the next contain fēi 非 in grammatical relation to shì 是. I am not sure if those are staff rhymes on fú and shàn since the structure is relying on end rhymes.
示 semantophore of fú normally reads shì. The stroke order resembles 杀 in the monk's hand fú, that does not look like 煞 to me. So this is exactly what I was hoping to find in the first place.
In comparison to devanagari यक्षि I guess the OBI form resembles क्ष kṣa – in support of @Chris Button.
Victor Mair said,
January 9, 2025 @ 9:19 am
A devoted LL reader asked for the complete version of the Daoist charm 符.