MULTIPLE ORIGINS OF THE OLD CHINESE LEXICON

上古漢語的多向起源

許思來(Axel Schuessler)

《Journal of Chinese Linguistics》 31卷1期 (2003/01) Pp. 1-71

摘要

This article proposes that Proto-Chinese and subsequent Old Chinese (OC) had absorbed a significant number of words from Miao-Yao, Kam-Tai and Austroasiatic sources as well as loans from Tibeto-Burman. The multiple origin of the Chinese lexicon can already be suspected by the simple observation that Old Chinese frequently has two or more different words for the same thing or concept, and as it turns out, each word can be traced to a different language family. One can distinguish layers of borrowing or absorption because of the different treatment of foreign initial clusters in Old Chinese; for example, putative foreign word initial cluster *kl- can show up in Middle Chinese as th-, t-, k, among others. Finally, these early loans shed some light on OC phonology as well as enigmatic etymological relationships, as cases like 'beard' illustrate.

並列摘要

本文指出原始漢語及後來的上古漢語曾從苗瑤語，侗泰語(Kam-Tai)，和南亞語(Austroasiatic)中吸取了相當可觀的詞匯量，並從漢藏語中借有許多詞匯。從簡單觀察上古漢語對同一事物，同一概念具有兩種甚至更多詞匯表達的現象，就會使我們聯想到是否這些詞匯具有不同來源的問題。那麼，根据上古漢語輔音群的特殊性，我們是能夠具體分離出漢語吸取和借代其它語言詞匯的層次的，譬如，推定得到的輔音群的之一，kl-，後來在中古漢語中表現為th-，t-，k-。再有，這些早期的語言借代現象，像“顪”，即鬍子，所提示的情景，還為探討語音及不可思議的語源關系提供了新的希望。