How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese?

Edwin G. Pulleyblank

Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 112, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1992), pp. 365-382.

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HOW DO WE RECONSTRUCT OLD CHINESE?

EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK*

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Desiderata for placing the reconstruction of Old Chinese on a more solid foundation and mak­ing it subject to commonly accepted critical standards are discussed u nder the following headings:

( 1 ) the need to use the best linguistic theory available， (2) the need to get one's reconstruction of Middle Chinese right as the essential foundation for reconstructing Old Chinese， (3) the role of

typology in guiding one's reconstruction， (4) the need to use all available evidence and not to give

a privileged position to any one class of evidence.

THE DOMINANT FIGURE in everything to do with the history of the Chinese language throughout the twen­tieth century has been Bernhard Karlgren， whose re­construction of the language of the Qieyun rhyme dictionary of A.D. 601 (1915-26) for the first time put the study of Chinese historical phonology on a rigorous scientific basis. This， together with his further recon­struction of the language of the Shijing rhymes， was published in dictioriary form in Grammata Serica (1940)， revised as Grammata Serica Recensa (1957)， and has been widely used by specialists and nonspe­cialists alike ever since. Though his Qieyun reconstruc­tion has been criticized by many scholars in points of detail， there have been few attempts to reexamine its basic premises， and even for specialists it has retained much of the authority it had over half a century ago. On the other hand his Old Chinese1 reconstruction was always treated with considerable reserve by specialists and there are by now several alternative systems in the field. Without attempting anything like a complete sur­vey， one can mention the names of Lu Zhiw剖， Dong Tongt嗨， Wang Li， Chou Fa-kao， and Li Fang-kuei among Chinese scholars， Rai Tsutomu and Tõdõ Aki­yasu in Japan， Yakhontov and Starostin in the Soviet Union， and such scholars as Bodman， Baxter， and Schuessler in North America. 1 have myself published several artic1es on the subject over the past thirty years and am at present engaged in putting my ideas together

• Edwin G. Pulleyblank was president of the American Ori­ental Society， 1 990-9 1

1 The terms Old Chinese and Middle Chinese correspond better than Karlgren's Archaic and Ancient to accepted usage with respect to other languages and are now generally prefeπed.

365

in a monograph， though 1 would maintain that a com­plete reconstruction of Old Chinese such as is confi­dently presented in Grammata Serica Recensa is sti11 beyond our grasp.

A question that is bound to occur to outsiders look­ing at the field of Chinese historical phonology is why there is so little agreement among the quite small num­ber of specialists working in this area. It is not a situa­tion to inspire the confidence of nonspecialists and it is also discouraging to specialists themselves who would like to think they are contributing to the advancement of knowledge in ways that will ultimately demand wider recognition both from a historical and from a lin­guistic point of view. What 1 propose to do in this pa­per is to set out some of the desiderata， 的 1 see them， for giving our work a more solid foundation and mak­ing it subject to commonly accepted critical standards. 1 shall discuss these desiderata under the following headings: (1) the need to use the best linguistic theory available， (2) the need to get one's reconstruction of Middle Chinese right as the essential foundation for re­constructing Old Chinese， (3) the role of typology in guiding one's reconstruction， (4) the need to use all available evidence and not to give a privileged position to any one c1ass of evidence.

THE ROLE OF LINGUISTIC THEORY IN

HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION

The theoretical background that Karlgren brought to the study of Chinese historical linguistics was， on the one hand， that of Indo-European comparative philology as developed in the late nineteenth century， based on the neogrammarian principle of the regularity of pho­netic change， and， on the other hand， careful phonetic

366 Journal 01 the American Oriental Society 1 1 2.3 ( 1992)

notation in the tradition of Swedish dialect studies. By the time his reconstruction of Middle Chinese was accomplished and becoming known， the new trend of structural or descriptive linguistics based on the theory of the phoneme and emphasizing the analysis of lan句guages as synchronic systems had taken hold and the rising generation of Chinese linguists such as Chao Yuen Ren and Li Fang-kuei who introduced Karlgren's work to their countrymen were trained in this disci­pline. In 194 1 Chao criticized Karlgren's Middle Chi­nese reconstruction from this point of view and， without departing from it in any fundamental way， pro­posed various changes in formulation to remove redun­dancies and make it look tidier and more systematic. In the same vein Samuel Martin (1953)。旺éred a thor­oughgoing phonemic reanalysis of the same reconstruc­tion. Karlgren was unimpressed. He acknowledged the importance of the phonemic principle but commented (1954: 366)，‘'There is a tendency among modern lin­guists to ride this hobbyhorse so blindly as to reduce their efforts to an intellectual sport. . . . This modern trend in linguistics has unduly simplified and thereby distorted the real character of the languages so studied."

This has been quoted by Robert Ramsey as an ex旬ample of Karlgren's old-fogeyism (1987: 132)， but the fault was not all on one side. There are real problems even from the point of view of synchronic analysis with a theory of phonemics based solely on comple­mentary distribution and minimizing the importance of phonetic content. It is even less appropriate to the study of diachronic change. As Sidney Allen pointed out (1953)， it is really impossible to show in a prin­cipled way how a system consisting of， say， thirty phonemes defined solely in terms of their mutual oppo­sitions and assumed to have no inherent phonetic con­tent can change to another system of， say， twenty-nine. Though not all linguists who adopted the new princi­ples were consciously aware of this problem and work of a historical kind continued to be done using the so­called “comparative method，" the divorce between phonemics and phonetics tended to turn reconstruction into a kind of abstract algebra. Moreover， as 1 can well remember from my own experience at the time， there was a real hostility towards diachronic studies among some linguists who felt that they were engaged in a struggle to free themselves from the dominance of the exclusively hist

introduced the notion of universal distinctive features， one of the foundation stones of the new school of ge心erative phonology that emerged in the late fifties and is now the dominant trend in theoretical linguistics. If the synchronic state of a language is looked on as a par­ticular exemplification of universal principles that gov­ern all human language， language change can be analyzed in terms of the same rules and principles that apply to the relations between its parts at any one point in time and， conversely， particular synchronic rules can be seen not merely in terms of the way they function in the economy of the language of our own time but as the outcome of evolution sometimes stretching far into the past. Unfortunately， Chinese historical linguistics has been too little a征'ected by this trend. The older workers in the field received their training before it began and the younger ones are mostly the students of these older masters. The concepts of the forties and fifties have become an inward-Iooking， self-perpetuat­ing orthodoxy. Ramsey's dismissal of the new trend as “excesses (of the Sixties and early Seventies) . . . coin­cid[ing] roughly with the period of political radicalism on campuses around the world" (1987: 132) is as old­fogeyish (or maybe young-fogeyish) as anything Karl前gren ever said and is typical of an attitude that seems still very persistent in the sinological field even though it has dissipated elsewhere. Meanwhile the generative school has continued to grow and mature. The emer­gence in the seventies of autosegmental and nonlinear phonology， which bring syllable structure into the pic­tu間， seems to me to be of particular importance for the study of a monosyllabic language like Chinese. No doubt there are still those whose interest in formaliza­tion leads them to slight the data， but it is my impres­sion that this is much less true of the current generation of generative linguists than of old-fashioned phonemi­cists， who often showed a lofty disregard for “mere phonetic detail."

To illustrate the importance of defining one's pho­nemes in terms of phonetic features and of showing in a rigorous way how diachronic changes result from structural reorganization of these features in the phono­logical system， let me refer to an issue in Chao's pro­posed phonemicization of Karlgren冶Middle Chinese. One of Karlgren's distinctions that Chao found unnec­essary from a phonemic point of view was

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese? 367

netic contrast as significant. Karlgren distinguished官

kuân2 ‘official' (Grade 1) from關kwan‘pass' (Grade 11)，3 partly on the grounds that the Guangyun has sepa­rate kaikou and hekou rhymes， -ân and -uân， for Grade 1， while kaikou and hekou are combined in the same rhyme in Grade 11， and partly on the grounds that the difference in medials explained the difference in the way these finals had developed in Cantonese， in which these two words have become ku:n and kwa:n respec­tively. He claimed that the stronger vocalic -u- had， so to speak， “swallowed up" the following -â-.

Chao pointed out that the distinction between vo­calic and consonantal medials was redundant within Karlgren's system， since the following vowels， back â [0] and front a [a] ， were also different. He also rejected Karlgren's diachronic argume帥， pointing out that in Grade 111， where Karlgren had reconstructed the conso­nantal (or glide) medials， -i- and -iw-， words like 仙siän and宣siwän (in Karlgren's system) had similarly given long high vowels， si:n and sy:n， in Cantonese. Since Chao was only concerned with the internal econ­omy of Karlgren's reconstruction as a synchronic sys­tem， he did not feel called upon 10 suggest an a1ternative explanation for these Cantonese devel­opments. Otherwise he might have wondered whether， instead of r吋ecting Karlgren's hypothesis of vocalic 耐- in Grade 1， one should not extend the hypothesis and also postulate vocalic -i- and -y- in Grade III as the sources for Cantonese ﹒i:- and -y←. This would hardly have been acceptable to Karlgren， since the palatal semivowel or glide in Grade III was one of the founda­tion stones of his interpretation of the Four Grades of the rhyme tables， but Chao should not have been con­strained by this consideration since he had already un­dermined the validity of Karlgren's theory that the supposed yod in Grade III had been responsible for palatalizing the initials it followed.

An aspect of Karlgren's Middle Chinese reconstruc­tion that Chao and other structuralists， with their insis­tence on autonomy of each synchronic stage of a language， ought to have questioned but did not was the fact that his two main primary sources， the Qieyun rhyme-dictionary and the rhyme tables that classified the distinct syllables of the dictionary on a grid， were

2 â in Karlgren's notation means low back unrounded [0] in contrast to low front unrounded [a].

3 The four Grades (deng等)， called Divisions by Karlgren， are a traditional cIassification scheme in the rhyme tables that were invented ， probably in the ninth century， to analyze the Qieyun rhymes.

separated in time by several centuries. Karlgren showed some awareness of the problem from time to time but had no way of taking it into account in a sys­tematic way. Part of the problem was that he had made a serious error about the nature of the Qieyun and the language on which it was based. Since the Qieyun was compiled at Chang'an， the capital of the newly estab­lished Sui dynasty that had shortly before reunited China after nearly three centuries of division known as the Northern and Southern dynasties， Karlgren as­sumed that it was based on the contemporary Chang'an dialect and that under the following Tang dynasty the Qieyun language became established throughout China as a koine， or standard spoken language out of which the modern dialects of most parts of the country except the Min訂ea in F吋ian and northern Guangdong had ul­timately developed. The first part of this assumption was certainly incorre仗， as has been well demonstrated by Zhou Zumo (1963， rev. 1966， see also Malmqvist 1 968). Though Chang'an had been the capital of the Western Han dynasty， by the end of the sixth century it had long been a cultural backwater. During the period of division a standard of pronunciation based u1ti­mately on the Luoyang dialect of Eastern Han had ex­isted among the literati of both north and south as a kind of “Mandarin" and though it had diverged over time in the two regions， much as Mandarin on the mainland and Mandarin on Taiwan are diverging at present， it sti11 maintained its prestige and was the standard that the authors of the Qieyun aimed at re­cording and fixing. It was only in the following cen­tury， after Tang had replaced Sui， that a new standard based on Chang'an emerged. 1 call the older standard represented by the Qieyun itself Early Middle Chinese (EMC). It was the new standard， which 1 call Late Middle Chinese (LMC)， that played the role of the Tang koine and， as Karlgren correctly surmised， played a dominant role in the subsequent evolution of the ma­jority of modern forms of Chinese.

The Tang standard language differed from that pre­scribed by the Qieyun both in phonological categories and in details of phonetic realization. The two forms of speech were， however， descended from a common an­cestor and their phonological categories could be matched with one another. When the so-called rhyme­table system of classification of phonological distinc­tions was invented， probably in the ninth century， it was possi

368 Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 1 2.3 ( 1992)

that had been distinct in the Qieyun might now occupy equivalent positions in the rhyme tables. Conversely， in the case of the labiodental fricatives that had devel­oped out of bilabial stops under certain conditions， the alteration in pronunciation was， at first， not directly shown in the tables but could be inferred from the plac­ing of the finals with which they were associated.

Though Karlgren knew that the rhyme tables had ap­peared much later than the Qieyun， he found that the classification they contained provided an indispensable guide to his reconstruction. Unfortunately， his failure to distinguish clearly the two very di叮érent Middle Chinese dialects that underlay his two main literary sources led him astray in a number of ways. The neces sary procedure (Pulleyblank 1970-71， 1984， 1 991 a) is to make separate reconstructions， first of Late Midd1e Chinese， for which the information is relatively abun­dant， and then Early Middle Chinese， for which the in formation is more exiguous and some details of which therefore remain re1atively uncertain

The fact that the rhyme-tab1e analysis and the Qieyun belonged to different stages in the development of the language and should be reconstructed as two separate synchronic systems was not an issue that was taken up by Chao， and it has been surprisingly difficult to persuade my colleagues that it is necessary to do so and to look for an interpretation of rhyme-table catego­ries that is simple and consistent in terms of those pho­netic features that would have been easily ostensible to native speakers of Late Middle Chinese in the ninth century. Karlgren himself failed to come up with any internally consistent interpretation of the four Grades and fell back on the view that the inventors of the rhyme-table system had arbitrarily violated their own principles in order to fit their material into the grid they had set up. Later scholars have been only too will­ing to follow him in this conclusion and denigrate the value of the rhyme tables as representing a serious phonological analysis of the language (e.g. ， Miller 1975). This is too easy a way out. It is quite possible， 的 1 have shown， to find an interpretation that not only provides a very tidy， self-consistent， analysis of Late 弘1iddle Chinese as a synchronic stage in the language but also accounts much better than Karlgren's system for the subsequent evolution of Northern Chinese， Can­tones巴， and， 1 feel sure， other mo

form of Sino-Japanese) and， on the other hand， for the fact that the vowel in Grade II must have had a palatal quality， since it eventually caused the palatalization of velar initials in northern dialects. The specific choice of French [0] grave and [a] aigu was suggested by Maspero. If we distinguish clearly between the two stages represented by the Qieyun and the rhyme tables， however， we find that the palatal vowel of Grade II be­longs to EMC while in LMC， which alone is relevant for interpreting the rhyme tables， the vowel itself had lost its palatal quality， leaving behind a palatal on­glide after back initials. This is shown clearly by the contrast between Sino-Vietnamese， based on LMC， the Tang koine， and the earlier layer of loanwords bor­rowed into Vietnamese from EMC. For example， 1 re­construct the Grade 11 word jiiín 揀‘select' as EMC kE:n'， LMC kja:n '. Vietnamese has the early loanword kén ‘select\with an unpalatalized initial and a front vowel， in contrast to the standard Sino-Vietnamese form giàn， based on LMC， which shows both the pal­atalization of the initial and the non-palatal vowel. The change in vowel quality， though not the palatalization of the initi訓is also found in the contrast between Go'on， the earlier form of Sino-Japanese based on EMC， which has ken， and Kan'on， the later form based on LMC， which has kan. The corresponding labialized forms underwent the same vowel change but without palatalization of the initial， e.g. ， guàn 慣‘accustomed\borrowed into Vietnamese as quen and later read as quán in standard Sino-Vietnamese. Karlgren was aware of the Sino-Vietnamese evidence for a palatal glide after velar initials in Grade 11 already in Tang times (1954: 241) but did not draw the appropriate conclusion that it should be applied to the interpreta前tion of the rhyme tables. lt would have conflicted with his assumption that a palatal glide was the defining characteristic of Grade III.

In my first reconstruction of LMC (1970-7 1 ) 1 as ­sumed that the vowels in Grades 1 and II were the same and that the whole burden of the distinction could be laid on the preceding medials (just the opposite of Chao's interpretation that laid the burden on vowel quality). Further research led me to the conclusion that， while the vowels in the two grades had the same qual­ity， there must have been a length distinction between a short -a- in Grade 1 and long -aa- in Grade II. This is not directly reflected in any of the contemporaneous evide

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese? 369

ments. The basic syllable template of LMC allowed for vocalic nuclei of two types: (a) a single syllabic vowel V-';)， a， i， u， or y; (b) two syllabic vowels VV， of which the second had to be -a-aa， 尬， ua， or ya. A high glide occurring before a short vowel was subject to a Glide Strengthening Rule， which， among other things， converted EMC -wa- into -ua. (For details see Pulleyblank 1984.) In Northern Chinese VV nuclei were simplified to a single V by rules of great general­ity between LMC and Early Mandarin (EM) of the 13th and 14th centuries (Pulleyblank 1986， see also 1991 a: 8-9). In Cantonese， on the other hand， VV syllables have survived but have been simplified so that there is a straightforward contrast between short and long vow­els. That is， long -aa- is mostly retained unchanged but -i訟， -ua-， -ya- have either become long -i:-， -U:-， -y:­(with fronting of -眩- to -y:- after coronal initials)， or have undergone vowel fusion to long -1;:-， -:l:-， -æ:-， de­pending on the nature of the syllable coda (Pulley­blank， forthcoming). Considered in isolation， either the glide/vowel or the vowel-Iength distinction in LMC be­tween kuan (Grade 1) and kwa:n (Grade 11) could be considered redundant but each implied the other in the economy of the language at the time. There is no ad­vantage to be gained by trying to eliminate one of them for the sake of supposed phonemic tidiness.

My pu中ose in discussing these already published detai!s of my reconstruction of Middle Chinese is both to show that the phonemicizers fai!ed to apply their own doctrine of strict synchronicity in their critiques of Karlgren's Middle Chinese and to show that even for analyzing the Qieyun or the rhyme tables on a strictly synchronic basis， diachronic studies to establish rules of maximum generality for the way in which EMC (or， rather， a sister dialect of EMC) evolved into LMC and the way in which LMC has evolved subsequently are not only legitimate but essential. Moreover， the kind of linear， segment-by-segment， analysis that was tradi­tional not only among structuralists but also in the gen­erative school until recently is also inadequate. A nonlinear approach that looks at the overall syllabic structure is required.4

MIDDLE CHINESE， THE ESSENTIAL FOUNDA TION

A more radical criticism of Karlgren's Middle Chi­nese reconstruction has come sometimes from scholars whose main field of inquiry is modern dialects and who have argued that， rather than rely on the Qieyun and the rhyme tables， which were the work of bookish pre­modern scholars lacking in modern linguistic sophisti­cation and out of touch with the living reality of the

spoken dialects of their time， one should start directly from modern dialects and use the comparative method to reconstruct a common ancestral form. Though this idea has been around for a long time and continues to be repeated even today， no one has yet offered a seri­ous demonstration of how such a program could be carried out in practice. In my view it is a romantic notion that ignores both the theoretical and practical limitations of the comparative method and the com­plexities of the linguistic history of China， where re­gional forms of the language have not developed in isolation but have always been subject， in varying de­gr間， to influences coming from the shifting political and cultural centers. It is certainly true that none of the early dictionaries or rhyme tables reflect the full com­plexities of the language of their own time. How could they? It is also true that modern dialects， especially but not exclusively those of the Min regi凹， have pre­served traces of old distinctions that were already lost in the form of language recorded in the Qieyun. But even to attempt to reconstruct proto-Min without refer­ence to the Qieyun language， which undoubtedly had the same Old Chinese source as proto-Min and was therefore a sister or cousin， seems to me to be mis­guided. In fact， from what 1 have seen of published 時，

sults， it is obvious that those who have been trying to do this are influenced willy-nilly by Karlgren's Middle Chinese reconstruction in setting up their own proto­phonemes， for instance， in making use of the a - Q con­trast that he set up (misguidedly) to distinguish Grades 1 and 11. Comparison with Middle Chinese as repre­sented by the northern tradition is perfectly legitimate and， in fact， necessary， but it needs to be brought out into the open. It is only in this way that one can begin to distinguish clearly the various levels of borrowing from northern literary standards that these dialects contain and so get down to what is really the distinc­tive colloquial layer. The way in which these literary

4 The only other serious attempt to establish such a dia­chronic picture of the evolution of the language has been that

of Matthew Chen ( 1 976)， also working in a generative frame­work. Unfortunately， instead of distinguishing EMC and LMC

Chen took as his point of departure an artificial construct that

he called Simplified Middle Chinese based mainly on Karl­gren but omitting a number of distinctions that Chen consid­ered unnecessary. His concIusions differ greatIy from mine， but this is not surprising since， Iike Chao， he was only inter­ested in formaIization and did not make any real attempt to examine Karlgren's basic premises and the philological evi ­dence on which his concIusions were based.

370 Journal 01 the American Oriental Society 1 1 2 .3 (1 992)

bo叮owings have been treated in the various southem dialects is also important evidence about their intemal evolution which should not be ignored.

Those scholars who have actually attempted to re­construct Old Chinese have in practice based their work， 的 did Karlgren， on the Qieyun， even when they have expressed doubts about its va1idity. Chang Kun has argued that the Qieyun represents a mixture of northem and southem dialects and made this the basis for a speculative system of finals for Proto-Chinese (Chang and Chang 1972; Chang 1974， 1979). He has not shown， however， how the authors of the Qieyun could have actually performed the task which he sets for them， which would surely have involved giving more than one reading for many common words that must have been cu汀ent in both north and south at the time. There are， it is true， many cases in the Qieyun where a character is given more than one reading but， generally speaking， the meanings of the two readings are also differentiated and， where they are not， it is most often a difference in tone or initial voicing which probably reft凹的， not a dialectal contrast， but an earlier morphological distinction that was obsolete or obsoles­cent by the time the dictionary was compi!ed. As 1 have argued in my book (1984: 130-31)， it is c1ear that some of the phonological distinctions included in the dictionary had been lost in one part of the country or another and probably few speakers anywhere in fact preserved all the distinctions that the dictionary re­cords. But this does not mean that these distinctions were not genuine and had not all existed in the not too distant past in the common ancestor of the literary dia­lects， deriving from the speech of Luoyang in the third century that the dictionary aimed at recording.

If one accepts that reconstructing the Qieyun is an essential stepping stone towards the reconstruction of Old Chinese， it surely follows that one ought to be sure that one has done the first job as correctly as possible before tackling the second. This was why 1 prefaced my own first venture into the field (1962) with a survey of the criticisms that had been made of Karlgren's Mid­dle Chinese reconstruction and proposed a revised ver­sion that would take these criticisms into account. It was also why 1 later decided that a more thoroughgoing revision was necessary and have spent many years try­ing to solve problems in this area. 1 find it surprising that other scholars have con

reconstruction， since it has already been widely re­ceived" (1971: 4; 1974-75: 224). The only significant points where he departs from Kar站ren are (a) in re­placing voiced aspirate initials by non-aspirates (which is correct for the Qieyun itself but not for LMC-the change was one of dialect rather than simply dia­chronic sound-change and may not be as irrelevant to Old Chinese reconstruction as Li assumed)， (b) in re­placing Karlgren's palatal stops by retroftex stops， a change that was suggested by Luo Changpei in 1931 and that 1 myself adopted in 1962.

The only change that Li made in Karlgren's recon­struction of the finals was to introduce purely nota­tional devices for registering certain distinctions that Karlgren had omitted， especially the so-called chongniu distinction in certain rhymes between words with labial or back initials placed in Grade III or Grade IV. Thus， for Grade IV he replaced j- (equivalent to Karlgren's i-)， by j卜， both as an initial and as a medial after labial， velar， and laryngeal initials (except that where ﹒i is the rhyme-vowel he writes -ji in Grade III and -i in Grade IV!). If one reads carefully what he says， one realizes that the digraph ji stands for a single segment and is not to be taken at face value， but it is a trap for the unwary， especially since distinctions between j， i， and ji， pho­netically as well as phonemically intended， also play an important part in his Old Chinese reconstruction. Li's willingness to leave the phonetic interpretation of his distinctions undetermined reftects his adherence to the “phonemicist" tradition. This theoretical position also colors and， in my view， seriously undermines the value of his Old Chinese reconstruction (as 1 shall show in more detai! below). Taking account of the feature composition of the phonemes and the role of phonetic contrasts in the phonological system as a whole is essential， if one is to understand the Old Chinese sys­tem that lies behind it and the evolution that has taken place.

William Baxter gives Karlgr凹's Middle Chinese a more thorough reexamination than Li， but is still confined by it in fundamental ways. Like Li， he makes some emendations to Karlgren， particularly with regard to the initials but also， in some cases， to the finals. He gives lip service to the difference between EMC repre­sented by the Qieyun and LMC represented by the rhyme tables but still applies the Four Grades of the rhyme tables directly to the analysi

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese? 371

Qieyun rather than facing directly the problem of what they meant synchronically in LMC. It is particularly regrettable that he makes no reference at all to the great change in rhyming practice that can be observed when poets began to use LMC (Pulleyblank 1968， 1978b) .

His Qieyun reconstruction is presented in what he has referred to as“typeable Middle Chinese，" avoiding diacritics and sp凹ial letter forms by devices such as us­ing digraphs or stipulating that a letter of the Roman al­phabet does not have its usual meaning. He proposes this as a convenient， practical notation that he hopes others will adopt even if they don't agree with his inter­pretation of it in phonetic terms. 1 think his hope is not likely to be realized. In spite of disc1aimers， he has in­troduced features of his own into the reconstruction that others besides myself will， 1 am sure， regard as contro­versial. To give a single example， he posits the same vowel， u， for the rhymes mó摸 -u (Karlgren uo)， which 1 reconstruct as EMC -J， LMC -u益， and hóu侯 -uw(Kar站ren -:m)， which 1 reconstruct as EMC and LMC -;}w. Not only does a contrast between -u and -uw seem rather suspect on general grounds， but in the case of mo

摸， although Go'on vacillates between -u and -0， all the other sino-xenic evidence for both EMC and LMC points to an 0 type of vowel一-early Vietnamese loans， which usually have -o[汁， Sino-Vietnamese， which has -ô [0]， Kan'on and Sino-Korean， which both have -0. Using u instead of 0 here is convenient for Baxter， since it enables him to use the letter 0 elsewhere for an un­rounded vowel， [;}] or [斗， but this kind of convenience seems out of place when what one is concerned about is getting as exact an idea as possible of the phonetic fea­tures involved. It smacks too much of the traditional at­titude of the phonemicizers that the phonetic content of the phonemes one sets up doesn't matter. But it cer­tainly does matter， from a diachronic point of view， whether the letters u and 0 have the same distinctive features in all their contexts.

Baxter's treatment of the chongniu problem， whose Old Chinese origin was the central topic of his doctoral dissertation (1977)， is particularly disappointing. He discusses the various proposals that have been made by Chinese and Japanese scholars and by myself to define the nature of this distinction in Middle Chinese， a ques­tion revolving mainly around whether the distinction lies in the nuc1ear vowel or the preceding medial， but Ba

sible to imagine how the medial in Grade IV could be even more palatal in its effect on initials， 的 is proved by Sino-Vietnamese， Sino-Korean， Tibetan transcrip­tions of the Tang period， the句P'ags-pa orthography for Chinese， as well as traces even within Mandarin.

Before leaving the topic of the need to get one's Middle Chinese reconstruction right as the basis for proceeding to try to reconstruct Old Chinese， let me sum up some of the main points where 1 believe my Middle Chinese reconstruction throws new light on Old Chinese origins. Mantaro Hashimoto (1970) thought that one should reconstruct palatal endings in the Late Middle Chinese Geng rhyme-group. Though 1 now reconstruct these consonants as palatalized velars rather than palatals as such， 1 believe his insight， which he supported by a variety of good arguments， w泌的­sentially correct. In the same spirit 1 reconstruct final labiovelars in the Tong and Jiang groups5 and pharyn­gealized velars in the Zeng and Dang groups. These hypotheses not only explain various apparent anoma­lies in EMC and LMC from a synchronic standpoint but also account in persuasive ways for the subsequent evolution of the respective rhyme groups in modern dialects， for example， the -j and -w glides that have been left behind in Mandarin with the loss of final stops in words like bái白 LMC pfiaa些 ‘white' and liù 六 LMC li吟 ‘six'. Needless to s呵， they also offer support to the theory， which 1 had already developed independently， that Old Chinese also had final labio­velars and palatals or palatalized velars.

Another valuable insight that 1 believe 1 have at­tained is through the analysis of the V(V) structure of vocalic nuclei in LMC， a kind of syllabic structure that must also be projected back into EMC (Pulleyblank 1991a) and has implications for the reconstruction of 01d Chinese that remain to be worked out. This kind of syllable template bears a striking resemblance to mod­ern Vietnamese and， in fact， Vietnamese provided a useful model for analyzing the Chinese phenomenon. Tai languages also have significant parallels. 1 don't think this is accidental. Though Tai and Vietnamese belong to separate language families， neither of which is related (unless very distantly) to Sino-Tibetan， both

5 1 am pleased to see that Baxter (forthcoming) now also re­constructs final， as well as initial， labiovelars in Old Chinese and also has w-onglides before the velar endings in these rhyme groups， at least notationally， in Middle Chinese， though he remains uncommitted as to how they should be interpreted phonetically. 1 should Iike to thank Prof. Baxter for his cour­tesy in sending me the first part of his forthcoming book.

372 Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 1 2.3 (1992)

were under very strong Chinese inftuence for many centuries， especially in the millennium from the Qin unification of China in 221 B.C. to the fall of Tang in A.D. 907. That there were strong area1 inftuences during this period among genetically unre1ated languages within the Chinese sphere， probably stemming from the politically and culturally dominant Chinese， is strik­ingly illustrated by the virtual identity in the basic pat­tern of their tonal systems， which must have arisen by similar processes of tonogenesis. This in turn implies a pre-existing correspondence in syllable structure that is unlikely to have arisen by chance and must also reftect areal inftuence (Pulleyblank 1985).

The way in which this analysis of LMC syllable structure explains the rhyme groups (she攝) of the rhyme tables and the way in which they correspond to actual practice in LMC poetic rhyming also provides an important model， along with the analysis of the pho­nological structure of Mandarin and its relation to rhyming， for the two-vowel hypothesis for Old Chinese rhyming.

The most fundamental change that 1 have proposed in Karlgr凹's Middle Chinese system is to abolish the yod which he thought was the determining characteris­tic of Grade III in the rhyme tables， replacing it (as far as the rhyme tables are concerned) with syllabic i and y. 1 have already referred to Chao's argument that the distinction between a consonantal ul and a vocalic [i] was nondistinctive and could be ignored. In general， Chinese linguists who refer to Middle Chinese from the point of view of comparing modern dialects have accepted this conclusion and do not mark the di仔er­ence between syllabic and nonsyllabic forms of the high vowels， even in phonetic descriptions of the dia­lects they are investigating. The fact that， in most forms of Chinese， glide and vowel alternate in ways that are predictable in terms of sy llable structure， is a valuable generalization about the language that has im portant implications for Middle and Old Chinese re­construction. But it is still necessary to establish the rules by which such alternations occur both synchroni­cally and diachronically. As 1 have shown， Karlgren's distinction between medial -u- in Grade 1 and medial -w- in Grade 11， which Chao regarded as otiose， can be justified if it is supported by also positing syllabic -i­and -y- in Grades III and IV instead of Karlgr凹's -i­and -iw-. My hypothesis that these high front vo

size here is that Karlgren's reconstruction of a glide medial in Grade 111 was a purely theoretical construct. Most scholars， including Baxter as well as Li Fang­ku凹， have not only fai!ed to recognize this and to come to grips with the contradictions that it gives rise to when one tries to find a consistent principle underlying the Four Grades， but have persisted in pr句ecting the yod which he reconstructed back to Old Chinese as one of the most stable and unchanging features of the language. 1 shall have more to say below about evi­dence from the use of Chinese characters to transcribe foreign words that， in my view， completely rules out this reconstruction.

THE ROLE OF TYPOLOGY

Accounting in the most economical and general way for the processes by which language has changed， as well as reconstructing coherent synchronic systems for earlier periods， is as important for Old Chinese as it is for Middle Chinese. Another important aspect of lin guistic theory that looms larger the farther back one goes in time and gets farther removed from forms of living speech that one can investigate at first hand is the need to ensure that one's reconstructed language is of a kind that experience shows to be natural and possible for human languages. Roman Jakobson was responsible for a m句or shake-up in Indo-European studies when he criticized views then cuπent on the proto-Ianguage from the point of view of typology (I958). He pointed out that it was unknown for a language to have voiced aspirates distinct from plain voiced stops if it did not also have voiceless aspirates， and that a language with only one vowel， like the single vowel *e that was reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European by some schol ars， would also be highly anomalous

My own two-vowel analysis of the Old Chinese rhymes has been criticized from the same point of view. While noting that pairing of Shijing rhymes with the same final consonants and <J and a as their main vowels was a well-established principl巴， Ting Pang­hsin (1975) argued， citing Jakobson and Halle (1971)， that the vowel triang1e， i， a， u， was a universa1 of lan­guage and that one must therefore have at least i and u in addition to <J and a. Baxter also criticizes my analy­sis of Old Chinese rhymes from this point of view. The idea that two-vowel systems consisting of a mid and a low vowe1 contrasting only in height violate the prin­ciple of the basic vowel triangle may seem to many people to be almost a matter of common sense; but it is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of such

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese? 373

vowel systems， which are certainly wel1 attested. The peculiarity of the northwest Caucasian languages， which are the most notorious examples， is not that they lack front and back-rounded vowels on the surface， which any listener would soon discover is not the case， but that such vowel qualities are whol1y predictable from the consonants that precede and fol1ow the vo­calic nucleus of a syllable and are not inherent in the vowel itself. This is wel1 recognized by scholars work­ing in the field of Caucasian studies and is not contro­versial. What is controversial is the claim by Al1en (1956) and Kuipers (1970) that in at least some of these languages the vowel /白人which frequently fails to appear on the surface， need not be treated as an under­lying specified vowel but can be treated as epenthetic， inserted to carry the accent or for other reasons con­nected with syl1abification; and， even more， Kuipers' claim that in Kabardian the vowel /a/ can be derived from a feature of the preceding consonant， so that the language has no underlying vowels at all (Hal1e 1970). There are， indeed， difficulties in treating /:1/ as always epenthetic in Northwest Caucasian if one uses a tradi­tional linear type of phonological representation， but the advent of nonlinear phonology has made even this idea much more acceptable (Anderson 1978; see also Anderson 1982 for a similar analysis of French schwa).

While accepting the fact that the northwest Cauca­sian languages do indeed have a very limited repertoire of vowel distinctions， some scholars have assumed that this is related， by a kind of compensatory principle， to the very large inventories of consonants that they con­tain. This is by no means a necessary assumption， how­ever. Languages in Australia (Dixon 1980: 141) and New Guinea (Pike 1964; Foley 1986: 49ff.) have been reported with the same type of vowel system and a much more modest number of consonants. The only thing that matters is how the features of fronting and rounding are encoded， whether as underlying vowel phonemes or as underlying glides and secondary artic­ulations of consonants.

From this point of view， it is easy to show that Man­darin Chinese is also a language in which the features of frontness and backroundedness belong only to the high glide/vowels， /i人/u/， and /y/. By cal1ing them glide/vowels， a term used by Chen (1976)， 1 mean that they appear as vowels when they are alone and as glides when they are fol1owed b

ing and the frontness or roundedness of the nucleus is completely predictable from t1叫6 Since this was pointed out by Chao (1934)， many analyses of Manda­rin phonology have been made on this basis， from those of Hartman (1944) and Hockett (1947， 1950， 1955) in the tradition of American structuralism to Cheng (1973) and Chen (1976) in a generative frame­work， not to mention my own studies. It is hard to see how using this pattern to analyze Middle Chinese and Old Chinese phonology， as 1 have done， can be said to violate any linguistic universal.

Though Li Fang-kuei's basic system of four vowels， /i/， 沁人/:1/， /a人looks quite neat and symmetrical and at first sight seems impeccable， it is in fact open to objec­tions from a typological point of view.7 The distribu­tion of Li's four vowels is defective， since， while /:1/ and /a/ are found before al1 classes of final consonants， /i/ is found only before dentals and velars， not before labials and labiovelars， while /u/ is found only before velars. The absence of /u/ before labials and labiove­lars could be the resu1t of dissimilation but the absence before dentals is less easy to understand. Li suggested that in this environment /u/ may have broken to /ua/ before the time of the Shijing， a change which he be­lieved had affected /u/ before velars in the Han-dynasty dialect. He did not offer an explanation for the restric­tions on the distribution of the vowel /i/. Moreover， in addition to the four simple vowels， Li reconstructs three vowel clusters， /i:1人/ia/， and /ua人 which also have a very uneven distribution. They do not affect rhyming， since /i:1/ is assumed to rhyme with /:1/ and the others are assumed to rhyme with /a/. VV diph­thongs of the type /ia/ and /ua/ are certainly possible in languages. They are found， for example， in Vietnamese and in southern British English， and 1 reconstruct them myself for LMC. In these languages， however， one also has contrasting long and short vowels to fil1 out the pattern of V(V) nuclei. Moreover， 1 doubt that one will anywhere find such a contrast as /i:1/ vs. /ia人in which the second element of one of the diphthongs is under­lyingly a schwa vowel.

Another striking difference between Li's vowel sys­tem for Old Chinese and what one is used to in modern Chinese languages is the extraordinary stability of the

6 Mid-front or back-rounded vowels without an accompany­ing glide are only found in interjections， Iike [t]‘you know' and [:>]‘oh， 1 see\

7 Baxter (forthcoming) also criticizes Li's system from this point of view.

374 Journal 0/ the American Oriental Socieη1 12.3 ( 1 992)

glide Ijl as a medial element， quite distinct from the vowel lil and able to combine with it without any mutual interchange. It is true that 1 myself reconstruct 寸 卜， and -ji- as distinct formations in Middle Chi­nese， but each was the product of specific and related historical processes; and over a few centuries， much less than the space of time between Old and MiddIe Chinese， these contrasts were simplified in Mandarin， first by a change of the sylIable template from V(V) to V， which resulted in lia/ either fusing to IEI or changing to Ija/; secondly， by loss of medial Ijl before li/. In other words， the relation between glide and vowel was a dynamic and constantly evolving one. In my view， the treatment of行I and lil in Li's system smacks of contrivance and is unconvincing in terms of Iinguistic naturalness

Another serious anomaly in Li's system from a typo­logical point of view is that he reconstructs only cIosed sylIables， ending either in a stop consonant， or a nasal， or -r. There are no sylIables at alI ending in a vowel or a glide. Wang Li expostulated even about Karlgr凹'ssystem， which has open sylIables corresponding to parts of Li's -ar， -ag， and -ug cIasses:“In no language in the world is there such a poverty of open sylIables" (1957: 64). He must surely have found Li's system even harder to accept. In fact， Karlgren himself (1963: 21 24) castigated， on grounds of Iinguistic plausibility， un­named Chinese scholars (probably referring to Dong Tonghe 1948 and Lu Zhiwei 1947) who had posited final -g for his -a， -å， -0， and個u cIasses. The trouble is that the logic of Karlgr凹's system requires reconstruct­ing consonantal finals in alI the so-calIed yin categories (those which correspond to open vowels or glides in Middle Chinese)， since these show contacts through oc­casional rhyming or through the structure of the char­acters (xiesheng) with corresponding yang (nasal final) and ru (stop final) categories. Very early on， Karlgren (1926) decided that the missing consonants must be voiced stops， though， at that time， he only recon­structed them in words in the Departing Tone， where many peopIe now would reconstruct a suffixed *-s， fol­lowing Haudricourt (1953). When Simon soon after (1927 -28) proposed final voiced fricatives throughout the yin finals， Karlgren was at first unwiIling to accept the necessity of extending consonantal finals so widely but gradualIy came round to the view that it was indeed necessary in many cases. He neve

at alI in OId Chinese but solved this problem by split­ting up three of the traditional rhyme categories.

Li was unwilIing to accept Karlgren's splitting up of established rhyme groups. He also thought both that the Middle Chinese tonal categories-Level， Rising， Departing and Entering-were implicit in Shijing rhyming and that it was easier to account for occa­sional cross-rhyming between these categories as vio­lations of tonal distinctions than to alIow for rhyming between different final consonants. He therefore recon­structed final stops， *-b， *-d， *-g， throughout most of the yin categories. The only exception was to recon­struct -r in the Ge歌rhyme group， where Karlgren had also reconstructed -r in a few cases， as well as in a few exceptional words in the Zhi脂category. Though he caIled 丸b， *-d， *-g “stops，" he drew on the prin ciple of phonemic indifference to phonetic content and added the remark，“Among the stops we need not fur­ther distinguish surds， sonants， stops and fricatives such as *-t， *-d， *δ， *-k， *-g， *-y， etc." (1971: 25; 1974-75: 249). This suggests that， in spite of using different letter symbols， he regarded *-b， *-d， *-g as al­lophones of *-p， *-t， *-k rather than separate pho­nem肘， any further distinction being carried by the tone rather than the consonant. This is further implied by the remark，“Phonetically speaki月， finals *-p and *-b， *-d and *寸， *-g and *次， etc. ， do not necessarily imply voiced voiceIess distinctions. On the other hand， we dare not say that there were no distinctions between them. Yet since we have recognized that there were four tones in Archaic Chinese， other distinctions seem unimportant. "

At the very least we have to say it is setting a trap for the unwary， to use symbols for voiced and voice­Iess stops if that is not in fact what one means. It seems to me that Li falIs into his own trap when he speculates on the possibility that some words may have had dou­ble readings in *-d - *-r， after concIuding that as ini­tials“*r and *d were very cIose and could alternate in hsieh-sheng series" (1971: 27， 1974-75: 251). This im­plies that he regarded final *-d as both phoneticaIly and phonemically identical with initial *d-; but the latter was certainly not an allophone of initial *t- and must have been voiced， in order to alIow for the kind of pho­netic comparison that Li wished to make

Li acknowledged the fact that his system aIlowed for no open sylIables and accepted it unflinchingly. 1 think， howev

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese? 375

hand， there are certainly languages that allow only metrically heavy syllables of the type CVC or CVV， at least in stressed positions. Cantonese is such a lan­guage and the same applies to stressed word-final monosyllables in English. This is the direction in which one must look for the way out of the dilemma presented by the evidence of Old Chinese rhyming and xiesheng patterns.

In my first study of Old Chinese phonology ( 1962)， 1 noted the absence of c!ear-cut criteria for Karlgren's splitting up of traditional rhyme categories. 1 therefore reconstructed final consonants throughout the yin rhymes but 1 did not confine myself to the ones that Karlgren had proposed. 1 reconstructed *-ts corre­sponding to Karlgren's 丸d， which always gave rise to the Departing Tone in Middle Chinese; *-ps， changing to 丸俗， co叮esponding to most cases of Karlgren's 丸b'and 丸δ corresponding to Karlgren's *-r， extending it to the whole of the Ge歌category， which Karlgren had divided between *-â， with an open vowel， and *-âr. 1 also reconstructed 丸ks to account for cases in which there were xiesheng contacts between yin finals in the Departing Tone and 丸k and the final laryngeals， *-fi and *-? (depending on the Middle Chinese Tone) co叮bsponding both to Karlgren's *-g and as a consonantal c!osure for syllables that he had reconstructed with open *-0 or *-u. 1 justified the possibility of a language having at least some laryngeal feature as the obligatory closure after an open vowel by a comparison with Old Mon， using information provided by H. L. Shorto (1962: 212任). In more recent studies 1 reconstruct 丸lin place of my earlier 丸δ， and *-y， *-j， *-w， *-q in place of laryngeal *-fi (where *-y stands for a friction­less approximant rather than a fricative). Ting (1976: 23-24) cited my justification of the concept of a lan­guage with no open syllables in support of Li's recon­struction. There is， however， a world of di缸erencebetween the sort of language Li reconstructs and a lan­guage that requires some kind of laryngeal c!osure to syllables ending in vowels， like Old Mon.

A further typological objection to Li's reconstruction is his assumption that syllables ending in (voiced?) stops already had the same tonal distinctions as those ending in nasals (or even an additional distinction， if *-b， *-d， *-g and *-gw are regarded as merely allo­phones of *-p， *-t， *-k and *-kw). This is contrary to all our experience of tone systems， not only in Chinese but in other East Asian langu

sulting syllables ending in a vowel or glide were distributed in various ways over the existing tonal cate­gories in di仔erent dialects. Even if we ignore Li's equivocation about the phonetic meaning of his final *-b， *-d， *-g and take them at face value as voiced stops there are typological objections. While a contrast between voiceless and voiced final stops is certainly possible-it is found in English-such a contrast is quite unknown in other languages of East Asia to which Chinese is typologically or genetically related. It also seems highly unlikely on typological grounds that， if such a contrast existed， syllables ending in voiced stops would carry the same tonal contrasts as un­stopped syllables， rather than constituting a distinct c!ass like the syllables ending in a voiceless stop. A language in which syllables ending in stops had more tonal distinctions (Level， Rising， Departing， and Enter­ing) than syllables ending in nasals or liquids (Level， Rising， and Departing only)， as seems to be implied by Li's statements， would be even more anomalous

ON USING ALL THE A V AILABLE EVIDENCE

A. Transactions and Loanwords

Since 1 am not concerned in this paper with actually putting forward and justifying a reconstruction of Old Chinese but in pointing to what 1 consider to be meth­odological errors in competing approaches， 1 shall not go into detail about conflicting interpretations of the main sources for Old Chinese reconstruction， the rhym­ing of the Shijing and the phonetic elements in the writ­ing system， jiajie and xiesheng. Nor shall 1 discuss my hypothesis that the twenty-two ganzhi signs were in­vented as phonograms for the initial consonants of the language. 1 have discussed all these points elsewhere in published or forthcoming papers. What 1 want to dis­cuss and combat here is the tendency to restrict the dis­cussion to rhymes and xiesheng contacts， giving these kinds of evidence a privileged position that they do not deserve and cannot sustain.

One of the primary reasons for the dissatisfaction with Karlgren's Archaic system that first led me to try to revise it was its manifest failure to account in a satisfy­ing way for the transcriptions of foreign words in Chi­nese in the Han dynasty. 1 cited a good many examples of such transcriptions in my first artic!e on the subject. In his cross-tempered response Karlgren asserted:

The argumentation is largely based on Chinese tran­scriptions of foreign words， mostly Central Asian and Indian. This is a very risky method. On the one hand，

376 Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 12. 3 ( 1992)

they are sometimes based on pure Sanskr此， sometJmes on s甘ongly Prakritized forms learned in Central Asia，

and when guessing ， in individual cases ， which is which ， we are on highly unsafe ground. On the other

hand ， and above all， the transcriptions can only be used

to a Iimi ted extent. Some general phenomena can be

gleaned but details in ancient Chinese pronunciation cannot be ascertained through them， for the welI­

known reason that the Chinese equivalents have mostly

been chosen in an u nsystematic， careless and approxi­

mate way. ( 1 96 3 : 1 8- 1 9)

Others have uncritically echoed these comments. A more attentive reading of my article should have made it clear that 1 was not basing my reconstruction on the evidence of transcriptions， which could have only led to fragmentary and highly ambiguous results， but try­ing to set up a coherent system that would account for the same evidence that Karlgren had used but be more convincing as a natural language and also make better sense of the way in which the Chinese had interpreted foreign words. Li Fang-kuei was more generous and accurate but expressed essentially the same attitude when he said:

If there were a fair number of loan words in exis tence ，

regardless of their country of orig恤， they would be very useful for our reconstruction of Archaic Chinese， providing they dated from the Ch'in-Han period or

even earlier. E. PulIeyblank ( 1 962-3) used not a few of these materials to substantiate his Archaic system . 1 too ， have studied the problem of loan words in the Old

Tai language ( 1 945) . Unfortunately， words such as

these are not numerous enough， nor can they be easily

uti lized as a basis for a systematic study. They amount

to nothing more than fragmentary proo，β and confirma­

lions [my emphasis] of some theoretical issues. Yet they remain iIIuminating and thei r usefulness should not be ignored. ( 1 97 1 : 3; 1 974-75 : 223)

There is， 1 believe， a basic methodological flaw un­derlying these remarks. The assumption is that one ex­amines a closed body of evidence (in this case the Shijing rhyme categories and the evidence provided by xiesheng as compared to Middle Chinese) and arrives at conclusions， after which one may look for confirma­tions in other kinds of evidence. The true Popperian method of science is， however， a process of testing and refuting hypotheses. One sets up hypotheses that one hopes will account for a body of data and then looks not so much for evidence that will confirm one's guesses as for counter-evidence that may force one to

abandon them. Of course it is only human nature to be pleased when the evidence does appear to support one's chosen theory， but if one is really more interested in advancing knowledge than in protecting one's reputa­tion for being able to make coπect guesses， one will look hardest at the weak points and be as open-minded as possible about the possibility of having to modify or even abandon a cherished idea. In the long run the lat­ter approach is better even from the point of view of protecting one's reputation， since one may be sure that others will not be so delicate in trying to explain away contradictions and sweep difficulties under the carpet.

Both Li and Karlgren made occasional use of tran­scriptions or loan words when these happened to sup­port hypotheses for which they had little or no other evidence， while tacitly or explicitly ignoring cases where such material contradicted hypotheses supported only by their own fallible reasoning. This is just the wrong way to use such evidence. Let me give examples from the work of each of these scholars.

(1) The assumption that chan 悍 is a transcription based directly on Sanskrit dhyana played a major role in Kar站r凹's justification for his assumption that the voiced palatal fricative i that he had reconstructed in Middle Chinese went back to an Old Chinese voiced palatal stop (1923: 23; repeated in 1940: 15 and 1954: 279). In fact this early transcription is undoubtedly not based directly on Sanskrit but on a Prakrit form such as jana in which j stands for an a仔'ricate， not a stop (Bailey 1949: 133-34; Brough 1962: 59-62) . It there­fore gives no evidence for the survival of an unpalatal­ized stop in Chinese at such a late date. It is rather， like some other examples that Karlgren cited from early Buddhist transcription， evidence for an affricate rather than a fricative in Middle Chinese (Pulleyblank 1962: 67-68).

(2) The assumption that Chinese shi 獅 ‘lion' was a borrowing from Persian sër ‘lion' played a m句or part in Karlgren's choice of *-r as the final consonant in words with open vowels or final -j in Middle Chinese that show contacts in Shijing rhymes with final -n (1933: 29-30; 1 954: 301). He took this etymology from Pelliot (1929: 141).8 Unfortunately， Pelliot was， for once， cer-

8 PeIliot's proposal was part of a complicated argument about the Xiongnu word for “beIt buckle，" which appears in a variety of forms in Han-dynasty texts. One form ， cited from the poem “Dazhao" 大 招 in the Chuci， is xianbei 1鮮 卑 EMCsian 到i昌， identical with the name of the well-known northeast­ern tribe of Xianbei. Other forms from Zhanguo 凹， Huain­anzi， Sh叭， and Hanshu i nclude shibi 師 I;b EMC � i 到 i ' or �i

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese ? 377

tainly mistaken. In the first place， the Middle Iranian word for ‘lion' was sary， which is not nearly as close to the supposed Chinese pronunciation as Persian sër. Karlgren learned this from his Scandinavian Iranist col­league， G. Morgenstierne， and duly reported it but was not deterred. An even more serious objection is that the Chinese word first appears in Han dynasty sources as a disyllable， shizi 獅 子 EMC �i tsi'. Though the second syllable has been inte叩reted in more recent times as the common noun-forming suffix， it must have originally been part of the transcription， since the use of zi 子 的a noun-forming suffix had not yet appeared at that time. As I have proposed elsewhere， the Chinese word was probably borrowed from Tocharian， which has �ecake in the A dialect and sisäk in the B dialect， the former being closest in form to the Chinese. The dental a何ri­cate ts- in the second syllable was probably still a pal­atal in Western Han and the final glottal stop stood for the foreign -k (Pulleyblank 1962: 109， 128， 226).

I don't want to get into a long discussion here about how to reconstruct the Shijing finals for the traditional Zhi 脂 rhyme category， which Karlgren reconstructed as *-:lr. More recent practice divides it into two catego­ri肘， Zhi脂and Wei 微 ， for which I posit the finals *吋and 丸訓， respectively. Even at the time of the Shijing the two categories seem to have been in the process of merging， presumably because *-1 was becoming pala­talized to *才. This 尬， no doubt， why the Qing philolo­gists failed to find a clear separation between them and why twentieth-century scholars have disagreed on ex­actly how to draw the line. What is abundantly clear is that they were not distinguished in rhyming by Han times and almost certainly no longer had any trace of a

bji ， sipi 私 純 EMC si bj i ， xupi 胥 緝 EMC siã bj i ， and xipi 庫 雌 EMC 吋 bji . The fi nal -n i n the fi rst syllable of the

fi rst transcription could i ndeed stand for foreign -r and Pelliot

gave good arguments from a later 甘anscription that the name of the Xianbei people was something li ke *Serbi or * S ä rvi but there is no reason to thi nk that this proper name had any­thing to do with the Xiongnu word for belt buckle. Besides shi 自前 ， which is the fi rst syllable of the loanword or ‘lion'， si 私 and xi 庫 also belong i n the Old Chinese Zhi 脂 rhyme

category， which Karlgren reconstructed as -ar. Xu 賈 (omittedby Karlgren in his citation of Pelliot) ， however， belonged i n the Old Chinese Yu 魚 category， which Karlgren recon­structed with an open -0. The original of the Xiongnu word is really quite unknown. Apart from that， i t i s ， 1 believe， qui te certain that whatever dental ending the Wei 微 subdivi sion of the Zhi 脂 rhyme category originally had was lost long before Han tim肘，

dental final consonant. One can hardly hope， therefore， to find Han-dynasty evidence for the original ending of the Wei 徹 category.

(3) Li drew on his extremely valuable study of Tai forms of the Twelve Earthly Branches (1943)， referred to in the above quotation， as almost the only evidence he could find to support his reconstruction of 行 的 theOld Chinese source of Middle Chinese initial j﹒ The fact that Tai forms for the tenth Branch， you 回 EMCjuw'， imply Old Tai *r is certainly of interest and something that demands explanation， but it is far from being a justification in itself for the assumption that the Old Chinese initial was *r or that this was the only source of Middle Chinese j_.9 Li did not refer to the fact that， as his own study showed， Tai forms for the third Branch， yin 寅 EMC jin have a palatal or velar nasal corresponding to Middle Chinese j- . He also ig­nored evidence that I had published (1962)， following Pelliot， that in the Han-period words with Middle Chi­nese initial j- were used to transcribe foreign 1-， while words with Middle Chinese 1- were used to transcribe foreign r-; and that cognates in Tibeto-Burman showed a similar pattern. He did refer to one Han-dynasty tran­scription， Wuyishanli 烏 弋 山 離 EMC ?;) jik �:lÏn liã =

Alexandria， that shows exactly the pattern I have de­scribed， but he argued， perversely as it seems to me， that while Chinese *1- was used for foreign r-， Chinese *r- was used for foreign 1- . To justify this strange pro­posal he suggested that his Chinese *r might have been a flap similar to intervocalic -dd- in ladder， an unsup­ported ad hoc comment that， even if correct， would not explain why this sound should be chosen in preference to the phoneme he posits as Chinese *1 or why the lat­ter should be chosen to represent the foreign r-.

These examples illustrate very well how not to use transcriptional and loanword material as evidence for

9 For my present views on this problem， see Pulleyblank 1 99 1 b : 的 -65. Brie旬， 1 thi nk that the i ni tial of you 茵 wasoriginally the front-rounded glide 叫- and that this had merged with 行'- in some environments in the Western Han standard dialect in the same way that Middle Chinese j 間 ， when

subject to rounding， has given r- i n Mandari n i n some cases，

e .g叫 rUI 銳 LMC jyajh， rong 容 LMC j yawl]. This wi11 缸"

count not only for the Tai bOITowings of the cyc1i cal sign but also for the paronomaslic glosses wilh words in Middle Chi­nese 1 - in some Han dynasty texts and for graphic confusion with words i n 1- that properly have mao 9P as phonetic， e .g . ， 噩 for liu 官 . When the Western Han dialect， based on Chang'an， was replaced by the Eastern Han dialect based on Luoyang， you 商 was pronounced with i ni tial j 間 ， 的 i n EMC.

378 Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 1 2 .3 ( 1 992)

reconstruction. They certainly do not invalidate the procedure when used with appropriate safeguards both for developing hypotheses to be tested on other evi­dence and for testing hypotheses based on other con­siderations. Indeed， 1 want to stress that examining evidence of this kind， where it exists， is essential if one is serious about trying to find out how Chinese was actually pronounced at various periods in the past and not just in setting up abstract formulas. To illustrate this 1 could cite the evidence for final *-s that 1 have brought to light in transcriptions from various lan­guages from Western Han down to the beginning of the sixth century in the south. This conclusion， which ties in with Haudricourt's theory of tonogenesis in Old Chi­nese， is gradually being accepted， though Li and his followers have strongly resisted， since it runs counter to their assumption、 based on no real evidence， that the Middle Chinese system of tones was already fully es tablished at the time of the Shijing. l O

On the other hand， there has been great reluctance to acknowledge that， 的 1 pointed out in my first article on Old Chinese (Pulleyblank 1 962: 99)， transcription evi­dence makes it impossible to accept Karlgr凹's medial yod hypothesis (apart from the other evidence 1 have cited above to show that it cannot hold for the rhyme ta­bles for which it was first devised). As 1 showed， this hypothetical yod is completely disregarded in pre-Tang transcriptions. Though 1 gave only a few examples， the pattern is entirely consistent and applies to material of all kinds regardless of the original language. One of the most striking illustrations of the disregard of the sup­posed feature is in the consistent use of the characters yδu 聖 and y伽 懼 ， both EMC ?uw 何況l in Karlgren's Middle Chinese reconstruction)， for the Sanskrit letters u and û in transcriptions of the devaniigari alphabet from the fifth to the seventh centuries (Li Rong 1952: table following p. 52). In one case we find yù 郁 EMC?uwk (Karlgren 項uk)， for short u， which shows the same pattern as far as Karlgren's yod is concerned. The pat­tern changes with the emergence of transcriptions based on LMC， in which EMC -uw became -iw and 心wk be­came -iwk. Thereafter the characters used for short u are

1 0 1 am pleased to note that in a recent paper in which Cob­lin studies Sanghabhara's Mahãmãyurí transcriptions ( 1 989) he now agrees with my claim that they prove the exis tence of a final sibilant in certain rhymes that ended in 寸h in the Qieyun in a dialect spoken in the southern capital around the year 500. From my point of view， this means a fortiori that such a sibilant must have existed in earlier tim肘，

息 LMC ?u且 (specified as Rising Tone as an indication of shortness)， 塢 LMC ?uãh (specified as Rising Tone)， 屋 LMC ?gwk， 國 LMC ?gW (specified as short)， and for long 函 are 烏 LMC 而且， 汙 LMC ?u昌， 國 LMC ?gW (specified as long). It is highly unlikely that the Chinese Buddhist transcribe悶， who one has to assume were striving for accuracy in representing the sounds of their sacred language， would have consistently and quite un­necessarily disregarded an obtrusive j- in the syllable onset if it had actually been present. The early Han­dynasty Buddhist transcriptions discussed by Coblin ( 1 98 1 ) show exactly the same pattern for transcribing initial u- as the later transcriptions of the devaniigari al­phabet. Of the 18 transcriptions of words with this ini­tial， 1 1 have yδu 慢， 5 have yù 鬱 EMC ?ut (Karlgren 在uat)， while δu 溫 EMC ?gW occurs twice in transcrip tions of upiiyakausalya. lf we extend our examination to other transcribed syllables， the evidence from t出his one cωolleωct complet臼el句Y i挖gnored i臼s qu山it紀e overwhelming. 1 have com mented elsewhere on the contrived argument that Cob­lin made to defend yod at all costs (Pulleyblank 1 985) It is an extreme case of trying to force the evidence to fit a preconceived conclusion instead of modifying a hy­pothesis to fit the evidence. 1 J

There 此， of course， a reason why my respected col­leagues， who are certainly not lacking in knowledge and intelligence， remain so firmly attached to this yod. It has become detached from its origin as a hypothesis about the structure of the rhyme tables and even from Karlgren's hypothesis that its palatalizing effect was re­sponsible for the separation of two distinct sets of fan­qie spellers for velar initials in the Qieyun (1 have given what 1 believe are cogent arguments that the real allo­phonic distinction between the two classes of dorsals was between uvulars in front of non-high vowels and velars in front of high vowels， hence the exclusive use of the latter to transcribe lndian velars [Pulleyblank 1965， 1982; see also Yakhontov 1956]). The real stick­ing point is that it has seemed to provide the best expla­nation for the palatalization of Old Chinese alveolar initials. The EMC palatals 缸， tc;;h， d旱， I) are in comple-

1 1 In his study of the Mahãmãyurï transcriptions (see n. 1 0)

Coblin does not deal with the question of yod. The pattern for

the transcription of ini tial -u in that material is the same as in

the transcriptions of the Indian alphabet and the Han-dynasty

Buddhist inscriptions . There is as l i ttle support here for the

supposed medial yod as in any other transcription material

that is， none

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese ? 379

mentary distribution with the a1veo1ars t， 阱， d， n， and must be derived from them. They are p1aced in Grade 111 in the rhyme tab1es (not because they were followed by yod but because， in LMC， when they had merged phonemically with the retroftexes， they were a1ways followed by ﹒i or -y--initia1 j- itse1f， which remained pa1ata1 and was a1so the product of pa1atalization of an Old Chinese a1veo1ar， in this case *1， was p1aced in Grade IV in the rhyme tab1es， an embarrassing paradox for Karlgr間's theory). Neverthe1ess， there could have been a yod at some stage and， if there had been， it wou1d indeed be a good exp1anation for pa1atalization of a1veo1ars. The troub1e is that there is really no posi­tive evidence at all that there ever was such a yod and much counter-evidence against there having been one. So we have to find another exp1anation. As 1 have ex­p1ained e1sewhere (1984: 178一79)， 1 be1ieve we can. It is， however， a question that will have to be addressed at greater 1ength in connection with the separation of Type A and Type B fina1s in rhyming during the transi­tion from Old to Early Midd1e Chinese.

A few of my colleagues have tried to take serious1y the evidence against projecting Kar1gren's yod back into Old Chinese. Bodman (1980) has recognized that in many cases it has to be ignored in Sino-Tibetan comparisons and therefore ta1ks of primary and sec­ondary yod. In my view “primary yod，" that is， -j- as the second e1ement of an initia1 consonant cluster for which there is evidence in Tibetan or other Tibeto­Burman 1anguages， has nothing at all to do with yod as reconstructed by Kar1gren. It can correspond equally with Chinese Type A syllab1es (non-yodized in Karl­gren's terms) and with Type B syllab1es (yodized in Karlgren's terms). The Russian scho1ar， Starostin， is the on1y one that 1 know of besides myse1f who is pre­pared to try to do without yod a1together. Just as 1 first proposed many years ago， he thinks it co汀esponds to a 1ength distinction in Old Chinese， but he reconstructs 1ength in the opposite way-that is， he postu1ates 10ng vowe1s in Type A and short vowe1s in Type B. My own present view is that the contrast was originally pro­sodic一-that is， an accent that cou1d fall either on the end of a syllab1e (Type A) or the beginning of a sylla­b1e (Type B) .

B. Pre-EMC Dialect Forms

One of the main kinds of evidence that Kar1gren used for his Midd1e Chinese reconstruction was com­parison of the categories provided by the Qieyun and the rhyme tab1es with the reftexes of individua1 words

in modem Chinese dia1ects. He found that， in genera1， it was possib1e to set up consistent pattems of coηe­spondence in this way between Midd1e Chinese and modem dia1ects. On1y in the case of the colloquia1 1ay­ers in Min dia1ects did he find such comparisons often 1ed to inconsistent resu1ts that presumab1y imp1ied ear­lier distinctions that had been preserved in these dia-1ects but 10st in the dia1ect under1ying the Qieyun. He quite right1y excluded such distinctions as irre1evant to his reconstruction. One might have expected that， hav­ing made this exclusion as far as Midd1e Chinese was concemed， he wou1d have used colloquia1 Min as a source in reconstructing Old Chinese， but he did not. One of the reasons， no doubt， though he did not say so， was that it wou1d in fact have been a very difficult task to sort out what was really re1evant for this purpose in the evidence availab1e to him at the time， even for comparative1y well-described Min dia1ects such as Xia­men (Amoy)， Chaozhou (or Swatow)， and Fuzhou. Our know1edge， not on1y of these but of other Min dia1ects and other southem dia1ects that preserve archaic fea­tures even if 1ess obvious1y and abundantly， has great1y increased in recent times through the work of such scho1ars as Bodman and Norman in North America as well as many investigators in China and Japan， and there is no 10nger any excuse for ignoring this kind of evidence for Old Chinese. 1 have made some attempt myse1f to use Min evidence more fully than Karlgren was ab1e to do in his Midd1e Chinese reconstruction by distinguishing within what is now considered to be co1-10quia1 Min a 1ayer of borrowing from the literary stan­dard that ftourished in Southem China in pre-Tang times， that is， EMC (Pulleyb1ank 1984)， and to use Min evidence in discussing various prob1ems of Old Chi團nese reconstruction as we11.

C. Sino- Tibetan Comparisons and Morphology

1 shall dea1 quite briefty with these two topics， which are interre1ated though they are， strict1y speaking， dis­tinct. Karlgren (1931) severe1y criticized Simon's com­parisons between Chinese and Tibetan (1929) and was， in genera1， quite rigorous in excluding comparisons be­tween Tibetan or other Tibeto-Burman 1anguages from consideration when it came to the intema1 reconstruc­tion of Chinese. Though he did refer to the Tibetan fina1s in -r， -1， and -s when looking for a possib1e den­ta1 fina1 to reconstruct in the Zhi 脂 category， his choice of *-r was not， as we have seen， based on sup­posed cognates in Tibetan. Li has followed him in this. Others have not been so scrupu1ous. In my own case，

380 Journal of the American Oriental Society 1 1 2 .3 (1 992)

the conclusion that Midd1e Chinese 1 - went back to an earlier *r and that there was another phoneme in Old Chinese， represented in Middle Chinese by d- or 去，which corresponded to Tibeto-Burman *卜， was based partly on presumed cognates as well as on Han-dynasty transcription evidence. Though Li chose to ignore this evidence， 1 feel it is quite legitimate to proceed in this way. One is， after all， only setting up provisional hy­potheses， and if one keeps this constantly in mind and is prepared to abandon or modify a hypothesis ìf ìt can­not be sustained， there is no harm done.

In general， however， 1 think Karlgren was right to in­sist that， rather than compare indivìdual lexical items in Chinese and Tibetan or other related languages， one ought first to establish “word families，" that is， sets of etymological Iy related words based on a common root， in each of the languages separately. Unfortunately， though he gathered together quite a few sets of appar­ent cognates in Chinese and detected certain recurring patterns， he was unab1e to suggest what morphological processes lay behind them. A breakthrough came with Haudricourt's hypothesis ( 1 954) that such sets as hão 好 EMC haw' 'good'， 的。 好 EMC hawh ‘love\ t 惡EMC 7ak ‘bad'， wù 惡 EMC 7;)h ‘hate'， reflected a suffix 丸s that had given rise to the Middle Chinese Departing Tone. Departing Tone as a derivational process in Old Chinese had been overlooked by Karlgren but had been pointed out by Chinese scholars， especially Wang Li， and was the subject of an extensive study by Downer ( 1 959). Forrest drew a comparison wìth the suffix -5 of Classical Tibetan ( 1 960) and， 的 mentioned above， 1 was able to show that there was abundant transcription evidence for such an *-s in Han times and later. In spite of the resistance of such conservatìve scholars as Li Fang-kuei and his fol Iowers， the hypothesis is be­coming quite wìdely accepted.

A difficulty that has been noted is that it is not easy to find good cognate sets between Tibetan -5 and the hypothetical *-s suffix in Chinese. One case that seems obvious as far as the correspondence between Tibetan -s and the Chinese Departìng Tone ìs concerned ìs èr 二EMC l)ih ‘two' and Tibetan gnyis ‘two'， but there is no reason to regard -s as derivational in this case. 1 don't think this is an insurmountab1e dìfficulty， however. There is a two-thousand-year gap between the begìn­nings of the literary tradìtion in the two languages， and the suffix obviously must have had an acti

relationships in OId Chinese. One of the most impor­tant of these is the ablaut between the two rhyme vow­els， *:J and *a， whìch， 1 believe， corresponds to the alternation between -0 and -a in the Tìbetan noun suffixes， mo - ma， bo - ba， etc.， and to the similar al­ternation ìn Tibetan verb conjugation (Pulleyblank 1965b， 1 989). This ìs， of course， intimately bound up with the two-vowel theory of OId Chinese rhymes and has been resisted for that reason. 1 shal l not go into that further here. Nor shal l 1 discuss varìous other proposals that 1 have made for derivational processes based on comparisons wìth Tibetan. Besides already published papers (especially Pulleyblank 1 973， 1 989)， 1 have an article now in the press which goes into such questions ìn more detail.

CONCLUSION

To sum up， 1 have tried to show in this paper that the reconstruction of Old Chinese ìs a historìcal problem ìn which one is not merely tryìng to set up abstract for­mulas that wil l accommodate comparisons between phonemic systems but to get as close as possible to the actual pronunciation of the language at specific periods of tìme in the past. The degree to which this goal is at­tainable naturally diminishes the farther back one goes in time， but apart from that， certain times in the past are specialIy favored by the kinds of contemporaneous sources that are available. There are no rigid ru1es that one can lay down as to how one should handle these sources. The method must be that used in dealing with any kind of historical problem， that is， setting up hy­potheses and testing their implications as rigorously as possible on alI relevant data. One has， of course， to treat written sources with the same kind of rigorous philological exactitude that one applies to other kinds of historical documents. One also has to use the best available general Iinguistic theory and be prepared to modify one's conclusions in accordance with advances in linguistic theory as wel l as in the light of new his­torical data or better interpretations of previously known data. To conform to alI these requirements is a counsel of perfection and unattainable for one mere mortal. The only hope is that by the combined efforts of many scholars we can gradually make some progress. lt is in this spirit that 1 0叮叮 these remarks， critical as they are of the work of some of my col明1eagues. For it is only by frank and open discussion di­rected to a common objective rather than to defending or enhancing personal reputations that eπors can be de­tected and advances achieved

PULLEYBLANK: How Do We Reconstruct Old Chinese ? 38 1

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