John Armstrong
Member
Thanks for your patient and information-rich comments.
> re: "in that phonetic series have always been one of the main sources for the reconstruction of OC, maybe even the most important of all. " …
I see that this comment comes from a perspective that I did not explain and that you had no way of guessing. In many ways OC is a fairly straightforward projection back from MC with allowance for sound changes which merge and split forms over time. (I’m going to ignore the “dialect” issue and assume linear development.) I see that most of the abundant evidence you rightly call out as pertaining to this straightforward projection. This includes many minor changes but also some major ones, including tonogenesis.
But one aspect of OC as reconstructed by Karlgren and others up through Baxter and Sagart and beyond is the positing of initial and final consonant clusters which are not present (and, from the POV of the reconstruction, have been reduced from their earlier forms) in MC and go beyond simple tonogenesis. These clusters are not part of the straightforward rule-based projection from MC back to OC (including tonogenesis as well as rules of limited scope). They are, in my mind, the one truly “interesting” feature of OC, and the one that dominates the way I think and talk about OC. And I believe that, within Chinese (as opposed to cognates and cross-language borrowings and writings), the main evidence for them is the phonetic series. Whence my hyperbolic statement.
> Re: "I therefore regard it as speculative in the specific sense of being not confirmable or disconfirmable to a reasonable degree of confidence. "
> I just saw a paper given at a conference about how well Baxter & Sagart 2014 vs. 張鄭尚芳 can explain rhyming phenomena in excavated texts, B&S did really well. They did have a problem with 侵部. Interestingly, Sagart gave a paper at the same conference on some geographical differences with OC部 and 侵部 was the main one. I'm pretty sure (though I'd have to confer with the author of the BnS2014 vs. zzsf paper to be 100% sure) that some of the issues he came across were cleared up due to the geographical differences.
> So, to challenge your assertion, here is a case of an excavated texts being used to confirm theories based on the 《詩經》、諧聲、通假、異體字, (all of which are independent from each other), and performing rather well. In places it doesn't perform, it points out areas to fix. That is not circular.
> So, your characterization of OC is not accurate.
Agreed. I have great admiration B and S as a team and individually. But, as I said above, I distinguish between the prefix/suffix (and esp., consonant cluster) aspect of OC and the straightforward projection aspect. I don’t know enough about early rhyming to know how they’re involved in the two aspects.
That said, I think the fundamental point of vulnerability for the modern OC models such as Baxter-Sagart is lack of a fleshed out model of how the language actually worked at a given point in time, particularly as regards morphemic and non/submorphemic prefixes and suffixes and associated connecting vowels. I think that the most effective way to address this weakness is to adduce examples of well attested and even directly observable languages that actually work the way OC might have worked 2500-3500 years ago..
> Re: "what appear as syllables in MC were segmentable into optional prefixes, roots (always present), and optional suffixes; "
> I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that there was suffixation in OC? What "appear as syllables in MC" are syllables. As are the roots plus affixation in OC. I'm not sure what you mean by "appearing as syllables".
All I meant by ‘appearing’ was ‘had become’. And, yes, my understanding is that there was suffixation in OC, though it mostly produced tone alternations in MC (but also qu-ru alternations like those we’ve discussed).
> Re: "My question is, given this situation, why weren’t the prefixes and suffixes represented in the writing system? "
> There are examples of them being reflected in writing. There are cases like, I think it's in 《方言》, where they say that 筆 is pronounced 不律 in some region, which fits exactly BnS2014 "loosely attached" (不律) vs. "tightly attached" (筆) prefix types. I've found other examples where 注釋家 explain some character like:
> 無X，X也. So, "not X" = "X". The reason? The 無 is representing a sound, a loosely attached pre-initial. So, there are instances of your (a).
Thanks for the examples. But the challenge is to find spellings that seem to correspond directly to the prefix-root and root-suffix sequences reconstructed by Baxter and others for OC.
> I don't think your (b) is viable though. How would you know that a given component is representing affixation? I've never seen any marking on a character that would indicate some internal aspect of a character's pronunciation. In fact, native speakers of languages don't analyze word-internal grammar, which is what your (b) is. So, (b) is out, but there are examples of (a). Pre-Qin characters reflect syllables, but not parts of syllables.
> There are things like 合文, where two characters are written together as a single character, but they are usually marked with a = symbol, showing that it should be read as two characters. But having a component represent a prefix doesn't really match how things worked in pre-Qin scripts.
Vietnamese chu nom follows the basic rules of Chinese character composition but is way more dynamic, and includes what can only be described as character annotations. At least one or two of them were added as combining characters in Unicode 13.
> I'm familiar with GONG Xun, but haven't read that particular paper.
I think you’ll like it, esp. if you’re already familiar with Maspero and Haudricourt!
> re: "in that phonetic series have always been one of the main sources for the reconstruction of OC, maybe even the most important of all. " …
I see that this comment comes from a perspective that I did not explain and that you had no way of guessing. In many ways OC is a fairly straightforward projection back from MC with allowance for sound changes which merge and split forms over time. (I’m going to ignore the “dialect” issue and assume linear development.) I see that most of the abundant evidence you rightly call out as pertaining to this straightforward projection. This includes many minor changes but also some major ones, including tonogenesis.
But one aspect of OC as reconstructed by Karlgren and others up through Baxter and Sagart and beyond is the positing of initial and final consonant clusters which are not present (and, from the POV of the reconstruction, have been reduced from their earlier forms) in MC and go beyond simple tonogenesis. These clusters are not part of the straightforward rule-based projection from MC back to OC (including tonogenesis as well as rules of limited scope). They are, in my mind, the one truly “interesting” feature of OC, and the one that dominates the way I think and talk about OC. And I believe that, within Chinese (as opposed to cognates and cross-language borrowings and writings), the main evidence for them is the phonetic series. Whence my hyperbolic statement.
> Re: "I therefore regard it as speculative in the specific sense of being not confirmable or disconfirmable to a reasonable degree of confidence. "
> I just saw a paper given at a conference about how well Baxter & Sagart 2014 vs. 張鄭尚芳 can explain rhyming phenomena in excavated texts, B&S did really well. They did have a problem with 侵部. Interestingly, Sagart gave a paper at the same conference on some geographical differences with OC部 and 侵部 was the main one. I'm pretty sure (though I'd have to confer with the author of the BnS2014 vs. zzsf paper to be 100% sure) that some of the issues he came across were cleared up due to the geographical differences.
> So, to challenge your assertion, here is a case of an excavated texts being used to confirm theories based on the 《詩經》、諧聲、通假、異體字, (all of which are independent from each other), and performing rather well. In places it doesn't perform, it points out areas to fix. That is not circular.
> So, your characterization of OC is not accurate.
Agreed. I have great admiration B and S as a team and individually. But, as I said above, I distinguish between the prefix/suffix (and esp., consonant cluster) aspect of OC and the straightforward projection aspect. I don’t know enough about early rhyming to know how they’re involved in the two aspects.
That said, I think the fundamental point of vulnerability for the modern OC models such as Baxter-Sagart is lack of a fleshed out model of how the language actually worked at a given point in time, particularly as regards morphemic and non/submorphemic prefixes and suffixes and associated connecting vowels. I think that the most effective way to address this weakness is to adduce examples of well attested and even directly observable languages that actually work the way OC might have worked 2500-3500 years ago..
> Re: "what appear as syllables in MC were segmentable into optional prefixes, roots (always present), and optional suffixes; "
> I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that there was suffixation in OC? What "appear as syllables in MC" are syllables. As are the roots plus affixation in OC. I'm not sure what you mean by "appearing as syllables".
All I meant by ‘appearing’ was ‘had become’. And, yes, my understanding is that there was suffixation in OC, though it mostly produced tone alternations in MC (but also qu-ru alternations like those we’ve discussed).
> Re: "My question is, given this situation, why weren’t the prefixes and suffixes represented in the writing system? "
> There are examples of them being reflected in writing. There are cases like, I think it's in 《方言》, where they say that 筆 is pronounced 不律 in some region, which fits exactly BnS2014 "loosely attached" (不律) vs. "tightly attached" (筆) prefix types. I've found other examples where 注釋家 explain some character like:
> 無X，X也. So, "not X" = "X". The reason? The 無 is representing a sound, a loosely attached pre-initial. So, there are instances of your (a).
Thanks for the examples. But the challenge is to find spellings that seem to correspond directly to the prefix-root and root-suffix sequences reconstructed by Baxter and others for OC.
> I don't think your (b) is viable though. How would you know that a given component is representing affixation? I've never seen any marking on a character that would indicate some internal aspect of a character's pronunciation. In fact, native speakers of languages don't analyze word-internal grammar, which is what your (b) is. So, (b) is out, but there are examples of (a). Pre-Qin characters reflect syllables, but not parts of syllables.
> There are things like 合文, where two characters are written together as a single character, but they are usually marked with a = symbol, showing that it should be read as two characters. But having a component represent a prefix doesn't really match how things worked in pre-Qin scripts.
Vietnamese chu nom follows the basic rules of Chinese character composition but is way more dynamic, and includes what can only be described as character annotations. At least one or two of them were added as combining characters in Unicode 13.
> I'm familiar with GONG Xun, but haven't read that particular paper.
I think you’ll like it, esp. if you’re already familiar with Maspero and Haudricourt!
