19.1.12.23:59:
THE PREHISTORY OF TANGUT 2WUQ1 'TO AID'
When looking at Andrew
West's post about a Tangut hand mirror with the
character
𘑨
0645 2wuq1
which he translated as 祐 'to aid', it occurred to me that 2wuq1
sounds like 우 u, the Sino-Korean reading of 祐. (The
Yale romanization of the reading is visually even closer - wu!)
That makes the Tangut word easier to learn. I try to take advantage of soundalikes whenever I can. But are the two forms related? I don't think so, because 2wuq1 is from Pre-Tangut *Sʌ-ʔwə/oH, whereas u is ultimately from Old Chinese *wəʔ(-s).
1.13.13:49: Commentary on the reconstructions
T0. The only remotely similar words I know of are Old Chinese Pa-type words (my ignorance of the rest of Sino-Tibetan is showing):
扶 *Cɯ.P(r)a > *bɨa 'to help'
輔 *Cɯ.P(r)a-ʔ > *bɨaʔ 'to help'
*Cɯ.P- may have fused into *b-: *N-p- > *m-p-
> *m-b- > *b-. Another possibility is that *-P-
was *-b-, and that *C- has left no trace: *Cɯ.ba
> *Cɯ.bɨa > *bɨa.
輔 may be a *ʔ-suffixed variant of 扶.
The presyllabic and main vowels don't match.
There is no guarantee that Tangut -w- is from a lenited stop
*P.
T1. Pre-Tangut *S- conditions Tangut vowel tenseness that I
indicate in my notation as -q.
T2. Pre-Tangut *-ʌ- conditions the grade of the Tangut syllable (-1). The phonetic value of -u1 was (partly) lower than [u]: e.g., [ou]. *-u (< *-ə or *-o) lowered to harmonize with the height of unaccented *-ʌ- which was later lost.
T3. I have projected Tangut [ʔw] (w- in my notation) back into pre-Tangut. But I suspect that at the pre-Tangut stage there was a sequence *-CVP- that was compressed into Tangut [ʔw]. Pre-Tangut *-ʌ- could have been in that sequence: e.g., *S(ʌ).Cʌ.PəH.
T4. The pre-Tangut vowel could be either *ə or *o;
both merged into -u1 (Jacques 2014: 206).
T5. Pre-Tangut *-H is a laryngeal that conditioned Tangut
tone 2 which I write Arakawa-style at the beginning of my notation. *-H
could correspond to Old Chinese *-ʔ-s. My assumption that
Tangut tones originated Chinese-style from laryngeals could be wrong;
they may preserve Proto-Sino-Tibetan tones or have some entirely
different origin. But if Tangut and Chinese developed similar grade
systems (possibly via contact), they might have developed tones in
similar ways as well.
Old Chinese
C0. 祐 *wəʔ(-s) 'to assist' belongs to a large word family
discussed at length in Schuessler (2007: 581-582). Schuessler
reconstructs a Proto-Sino-Tibetan root *wəs. I don't know how
he would account for the *-ʔ in the Old Chinese members of the
family.
On the other hand, Matisoff (2003: 327, 591) relates 佑 (another spelling of 祐) to his Proto-Tibeto-Burman *grwak 'friend/assist'. The rhyme might work: Matisoff's Proto-Tibeto-Burman *a can be from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ə. See Schuessler (2007: 31-32) on Tibeto-Burman -k corresponding to Old Chinese *-ʔ. I don't believe in 'Tibeto-Burman' except as a convenient term for 'non-Chinese Sino-Tibetan', so 'Tibeto-Burman' here is to be taken as the latter.
As for *gr-, see C1-C2 below.
C1. Baxter and Sagart reconstruct the 祐 word family with *[ɢ]ʷ-. The brackets indicate 'either *ɢʷ-, or something else that has the same Middle Chinese reflex as *ɢʷ-' (wording based on Baxter and Sagart 2014: 8): e.g., *N-qʷ- or *m-qʷ-. *ɢʷ- does look like Matisoff's Proto-Tibeto-Burman *g- (see C0 above). But I am suspicious of it - there is no Chinese-internal evidence that there was ever a stop in this word family. And Baxter and Sagart's system has no simple *w- which is what Schuessler and I reconstruct instead of *ɢʷ- in this word family.
C2. There could not have been an *-r- in this word because *wrəʔ-s
(or Baxter and Sagart's *[ɢ]ʷrəʔ-s) would have become Middle
Chinese †wiʰ (cf. 鮪 *wrəʔ / *[ɢ]ʷəʔ > *wiˀ 'sturgeon'²), not *wuʰ (>
Sino-Korean 우 u).
¹Samuel E. Martin designed the Yale romanization of Korean to be typeable on a standard US keyboard, so it has no diacritics or nonbasic Latin letters. w distinguishes labial wu [u] from nonlabial u [ɯ] (= ŭ in the modified McCune-Reischauer romanization of Korean on this site).
²The Sino-Korean reading of 鮪 should be †위 wi,
but in fact it is 유 yu, presumably by analogy with 유 yu,
the reading of the far more common character 有 'to exist'. There would
be few opportunities to use 鮪 in Korean; the Korean word for 'sturgeon'
is 鐵甲상어 chhŏlgapsangŏ 'iron armor shark'.
The suffix -ngŏ 'fish' is from Middle Chinese 魚 *ŋɨə, but in hangul it is written as <-.ng Ø.ŏ> across two syllables, so it is not associated with 魚 since character readings always only occupy single hangul blocks.
상어 sangŏ 'shark' is from Middle Chinese 鯊魚 *ʂæ ŋɨə, though it cannot be written as 鯊魚 in Korean since its parts do not correspond to syllable blocks/Sino-Korean readings:
Sinographs (aligned with Middle Chinese) |
鯊 | 魚 | |||
Middle Chinese |
*ʂ | *æ | *ŋ | - |
*ɨə |
Korean |
상 | 어 | |||
Korean (transliterated) |
s |
a |
ng |
Ø |
ŏ |
Sino-Korean |
사 |
어 | |||
Sino-Korean (transliterated) | s |
a |
- |
Ø |
ŏ |
Sinographs (aligned with Sino-Korean) |
鯊 | 魚 |
The Sino-Korean readings of 鯊 and 魚 are 사 sa and 어 ŏ,
so 鯊魚 is read as saŏ. I suspect that sangŏ is an old
borrowing from spoken Middle Chinese, whereas saŏ is a
literary Korean creation combining the isolated readings sa and
ŏ (< ngŏ).
19.1.11.23:59: A TR-OUBLING TR-ANSCRIPTION
蔡同榮 Chai Trong-rong passed away fifteen years ago today. At first his name might look Vietnamese because of its tr, a letter combination not used in romanizations of the other major East Asian languages. However:
- Chai is not a Vietnamese surname. It is not even a possible Sino-Vietnamese syllable.
- Vietnamese names are usually made up of Sino-Vietnamese elements, and rồng 'dragon' is not one of them; it is a loan from Late Old Chinese 龍 *roŋ, but it is not Sino-Vietnamese in the strict sense: i.e., it is not the reading of 龍 which is long, a much later loan which may postdate rồng by a millennium.
- The Sino-Vietnamese reading of 蔡同榮 is Thái Đồng Vinh which is quite different from Chai Trong-rong.
- Nothing in Chai's background - beginning with his childhood in Japanese-ruled colonial Taiwan - points to a Vietnamese connection. (At first I thought he might be a Vietnamese immigrant to Taiwan. But he is ethnically Taiwanese.)
The tr doesn't match anything in the other forms of the name listed at Wikipedia:
Mandarin (IPA: [tsʰaj˥˩ tʰʊŋ˧˥ ɻʊŋ˧˥]):
Pinyin: Cài Tóngróng
Wade-Giles: Tsài Tóngróng (sic; the correct Wade-Giles is Tsʻai⁴ T'ung²-jung²)
Tainan Taiwanese Hokkien (IPA: [tsʰwa˥˩ tʰɔŋ˧ ʔeŋ˨˦]):
Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Chhòa Tông-êng
Then it occurred to me that Trong has the same letters as torng, the Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) romanization of 同. The -r- represents a high rising tone, not a consonant [r]. Could Trong be a metathesis of torng? And was the reordering of o and r accidental or intentional?
Rong is the GR romanization of 榮, but Chai is not the GR romanization of 蔡 which is tsay with y signalling [j] preceding a high falling tone.
1.12.13:41: Later last night it occurred to me that someone
unfamiliar with Chinese might have accidentally spread the r-
of -rong to the preceding syllable: Tong-rong > Trong-rong.
But why would Chai adopt someone else's error?
19.1.10.23:59:
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF 'OLD' IN THE SINO-JURCHEN VOCABULARY OF THE
BUREAU OF INTERPRETERS
Two days ago I rediscovered this passage in Juha Janhunen's magnum opus Manchuria: An Ethnic HIstory (1996: 141; emphasis mine):
As a matter of fact, most of the differences conventionally assumed to exist between Jurchen and Manchu are illusory, being due to the poor compatibility of both the Jurchen and the Chinese script with the actual phonological shapes of Jurchen words.
It is reminiscent of what I wrote
last week about "Manchu-like [Jurchen] forms distorted through
the lens of the Chinese finite syllabary."
But I also wrote,
That is not to say that all apparent slight differences from Manchu in those transcriptions [of Jurchen] can be explained away as inescapable compromises. Some transcriptions do represent genuine dialectal variants [in Jurchen].
So one must avoid the temptation to see Manchu-like forms at all costs. One must always ask, does this Jurchen form differ from Manchu only because of the limitations of the Chinese script?
In the following case, I think the answer is 'yes'.
In the Sino-Jurchen vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters, the Jurchen for 舊橋 'old bridge' (#195) is listed as
佛忽伏倫
Ming Mandarin *fo xufulun
The word for bridge - presumably hufulun or hufurun
- doesn't look anything like Manchu doohan ~ doogan
(< ?*daugan¹) 'bridge'. Kane
read it as hufurun. I do not know why he decided the liquid was
-r- rather than -l-. Ming Mandarin had no *r,
so 倫 *lun could have represented a Jurchen lun or run.
In part 1 of my response to Kawasaki's article on
Jurchen, I followed Kane and read the word for 'old' as fo. I
thought fo and standard Manchu fe 'old' were different
compressions of an earlier Jin Jurchen disyllabic
<pu (g)e> = pu(g)e (奧屯良弼餞飲碑 Aotun Liangbi picnic inscription 1)
But as I was editing the article for uploading, I realized that there was no Ming Mandarin *fə which would have been a perfect phonetic match for a Jurchen fe [fə]. Ming Mandarin *fo might have been the closest available phonetic match. That does not mean I think the Ming Jurchen dialect² in the Sino-Jurchen vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters was directly ancestral to standard Manchu. I simply think that the two varieties³ shared the same compression of pu(g)e.
¹1.11.1:23: Could *daugan be from a
Khitanic language? It vaguely resembles Written Mongolian dughui
'narrow bridge', but the vowels rule out a direct borrowing from
Mongolian. Hence it is not surprising that Manchu doohan ~ doogan
is not in Rozycki's Mongol Elements in Manchu (1983).
²1.11.0:26: Perhaps I should have just written "Ming Jurchen", as closer examination of the vocabulary may reveal a mix of dialects or a single dialect with a smattering of loans from other dialects.
³1.11.0:36: That is, the variety that is the
source of this phrase fe hufu(r/l)un 'old bridge' and standard
Manchu. I am hesitant to regard all of the Jurchen forms in the Bureau
of Interpreters vocabulary as being from the same dialect. My suspicion
is that the vocabulary is a collection of bits and pieces gathered from
informants with diverse bakgrounds. But the problem awaits detailed
examination.
19.1.9.23:59: TODAY IN JURCHEN HISTORY
By coincidence, two major anniversaries today are exactly 23 years apart:
- the fall of the Northern Song capital of Bianjing (now Kaifeng) to the Jurchen:
Emperor Qinzong and his father, Emperor Huizong, were captured by the Jin army. The Northern Song dynasty came to an end.
- the assassination of Emperor Xizong in 1050
Emperor Xizong felt depressed by the loss of his sons that he developed an addiction to alcohol and started neglecting state affairs. He also became more violent and ruthless, and started killing people indiscriminately. One of his victims was Ambaghai, a Mongol chieftain and great-granduncle of Genghis Khan.
Emperor Xizong was overthrown and murdered by his chancellor, Digunai, and other court officials in a coup d'état on 9 January 1150.
Xizong is of linguistic interest as the man attributed with the
creation of the
mysterious Jurchen small script whose fate may have been intertwined
with his:
During the 1970s a number of gold and silver paiza with the same inscription, apparently in the small Khitan script, were unearthed in northern China. Aisin-Gioro has analysed the inscription on these paiza, and although the structure of the characters is identical to the Khitan small script she concludes that the script is not actually the Khitan small script but is in fact the otherwise unattested Jurchen small script. She argues that this small script was only used briefly during the last five years of the reign of its creator, Emperor Xizong, and when he was murdered in a coup d'état the small script fell out of use as it was less convenient to use than the earlier large script.
If Aisin Gioro Ulhicun is right, the only two surviving samples of the script are those that she has identified. I have written about the first twice before; I should finally get around to writing about the second six years later.
19.1.8.14:58:
THE JURCHEN SCRIPT: INNOVATION OR DERIVATION? (PART 1)
(Edited 1.10.0:41 before posting.)
川崎保
Kawasaki Tamotsu's 「渤
海」文字資料からみた女真文字の起源に関する一考察 ('An Observation Concerning the Origin of
the Jurchen Script as Seen
from Parhae Script Materials', 2014), a response to Alexander Vovin's
"Did
Wanyan Xiyin
Invent the Jurchen Script?" (2012), contrasts two views of the
Jurchen
large script: 発明 hatsumei 'invention' (the ex
Khitanis¹ hypothesis) and 発展 hatten 'development' (the ex Parhis² hypothesis).
To try to parallel how both terms begin with the root 発 hatsu- (hat- before t-) 'go out', I have loosely rendered 発展 hatten as 'derivation' in the title so that it has the same ending as invention.
Kawasaki first summarizes Vovin's English-language paper in Japanese before presenting his own views.
Vovin read a Parhae stamped tile in Jurchen as
pe gorhon ni
'old thirteen GEN' = 'of Old Thirteen'
Kawasaki interpreted the first two characters as a single Jurchen
character looking like Chinese 舍 'to set aside; lodging'.
I am not sure what to make of this stamp for several reasons. Here
are the first two.
1. The first character on the stamp has 人 on the top rather than ス. There is no evidence that those two elements were interchangeable in the Jurchen large script, as no ス-graphs have 人-variants in Jin Qizong's dictionary (1984: 23-24). Nonetheless that does not refute Vovin's reading because 人 and ス could have been interchangeable in the earlier Parhae script. Alternately, the stamp may show an older Parhae form with 人 that was replaced by ス in Jurchen.
2. Vovin interprets
as Jurchen pe 'old'. At first this seems plausible given that (1) the Manchu word for 'old' is fe and (2) Jin Jurchen p- corresponds to Ming Jurchen and Manchu f-. Parhae Jurchen predated Jin Jurchen and probably would also have had p-.
However, the word for 'old' is attested in the
Jurchen large script
as disyllabic
<pu (g)e> = pu(g)e (奧屯良弼餞飲碑 Aotun Liangbi picnic inscription 1)
and not as a monosyllabic pe. The contraction of pu(g)e
to Manchu fe may have been a post-Jin innovation in some but
not all varieties of
Ming Jurchen. The Bureau of Translators vocabulary has disyllabic fuwe
(transcribed as 弗厄 *fu ə and spelled in the Jurchen large
script as in the Aotun Liangbi picnic inscription; #667) whereas the
Bureau of Interpreters
vocabulary has a monosyllabic transcription 佛 *fo, presumably
for a form like fo in a Ming Jurchen dialect that compressed fuwe
differently than the ancestor of standard Manchu. (o is labial
like -uw- and mid like e [ə].)
It is unlikely that a monosyllabic Parhae Jurchen pe
expanded into a Jin Jurchen pu(g)e and then recontracted into fo
or fe. Parhae Jurchen pe may be an anachronism unless
it is from a dialect not ancestral to the more conservative varieties
of Jurchen
with disyllabic pu(g)e/fuwe. Could standard Manchu fe
be a descendant of the Pohai Jurchen pe-dialect (or another
Pohai Jurchen dialect with the same type of *uge > -e
compression)?
'Old' in Jurchen: a simplified possible family tree
(† = expected but not attested)
Proto-Jurchen *puge |
||
Parhae Jurchen dialect 1: pe | Parhae Jurchen dialect 2: †pu(g)e | |
Jin Jurchen dialect 1: †pe | Jin Jurchen dialect 2: pu(g)e (Aotun 1) | |
Ming Jurchen dialect 1: †fe | Ming Jurchen dialect 2: fo (Bureau of Interpreters) | Ming
Jurchen dialect 3: fuwe (Bureau of Translators) |
Standard Manchu fe | (Did
these dialects survive into the Manchu era?) |
Maybe, though Manchu does have a single word with -uge: buge
~ buhe (rather than †be < *buge) 'gristle'.
Are those loans from noncompressing dialects? How heterogenous is
standard Manchu?
And I would like confirmation of the sound value of
.
Ideally I'd like to see a polysyllabic word written with that
character in the Parhae material that corresponds to a Jin Jurchen pe
or Ming Jurchen/Manchu fe. Without such interlocking of both
internal and external evidence, I have no way of knowing how
would have been read in Parhae. Graphic similarity does not entail phonetic similarity: e.g., Jurchen 日 'day' and 月 'month' look exactly like Jin or Ming Mandarin 日 and 月 but are pronounced completely differently: inenggi and biya instead of *ʐi and *ɥe. I am convinced that there is graphic continuity between the Parhae and Jurchen scripts. I am more agnostic about projecting Jin Jurchen values back onto an earlier script that may have been used to write other languages, related or otherwise. (In theory even Koreanic and para-Japonic speakers in Parhae could have used the Parhae script.)
I am not even sure there is graphic continuity between this particular Parhae script character and its Jurchen (near-)lookalike. I have already mentioned the problem of the different shapes of the top elements. Might the Parhae character be the source of
in the Khitan (not Jurchen!) large script?
To the best of my knowledge, the character
is not attested in
Jin Jurchen; it is only known - at
least to me - from the Ming Jurchen 永寧寺碑 Yongning
Temple Stele (lines 3 and
4) where
<pe ing>
transcribes Ming Chinese 平 *pʰiŋ.
There is no evidence thatwas read with final -e or any other vowel since it is only
followed by -ing in the corpus. Could that character have been
devised in Ming Jurchen to write Ming Chinese *pʰ, a
consonant absent from native Jurchen words (in which p [pʰ] had
shifted to f)? I would prefer to read that character simply as p.
Jin Qizong (1984: 24) suggests that
is derived from Jurchen
<FORTY> dehi 'forty'
or from the aforementioned Chinese character 平 *pʰiŋ.
I
would add that there is an even closer match for the shape of Jurchen
<p> in the Khitan large script:
<FORTY> (北大王墓誌 Epitaph for the Grand Prince of the North 5; font from CCAMC.org)
One other potentially related Khitan large script character
is a lookalike for simplified Chinese 圣 'sage'. Unfortunately
nothing is known about the phonetic or semantic value of 圣 in Khitan.
Although <FORTY> in the Khitan and Jurchen large scripts and what I read as p certainly look similar, I can't understand why one would decide to write a phonogram <p> as a modification of a logogram <FORTY>. Jurchen dehi has no p in it, and the Khitan word for 'forty' probably sounded something like Written Mongolian döcin 'forty' which also lacks p. Why not add a dot to, say,
be (accusative marker)
to create a phonogram for <p(e)>?
In fact a dotted phonogram derived from <be> already exists -
the aforementioned
<(g)e>
which is only attested in noninitial position after sonorants
(vowels and l; Jin Qizong 1984: 100).
Might the graphic similarity between
<be> and <(g)e>
indicate that *-g- might have lenited to [ɣ] ~ [β] - the latter perhaps just after u? - justifying the choice of <be> as a basis for <(g)e>? Cf. how Proto-Koreanic *-p- lenited to [ɣ] and [β] in different dialects:
Proto-Koreanic *tupur 'two' > southeastern Old Korean 二肸 <TWO.> tuɣur but western Middle Korean 두ᄫᅳᆯ tuβur
(This is a revision of Alexander Vovin's proposal that Proto-Koreanic *-b- became [ɣ] and [β] in different dialects. Now neither he nor I follow S. Robert Ramsey's proposal to reconstruct *b in earlier Korean.)
Medial lenition is common to both Jurchen/Manchu and Korea, and a
detailed
comparison of the process in the two might be interesting.
¹I originally wrote ex nihilo, but that could be misinterpreted as a straw man, as no one has ever claimed that Wanyan Xiyin had invented the Jurchen large script without any influence from other scripts. 'From the Khitans' is better since the orthodox view is that Wanyan Xiyin took the existing Khitan large script and arbitrarily changed it.
On the other hand, I side with Janhunen who thinks the Jurchen script is a modification of the Parhae script which was a sister of the standard Chinese script. Contrasting the two views:
Ex Khitanis
Chinese script |
Khitan large script |
Jurchen large script |
There is no Parhae script for the Jurchen script to derive from in
the orthodox view which holds that the Parhae wrote exclusively in
Chinese characters.
Ex Parhis (Janhunen)
Proto-Chinese script |
||
Standard
Chinese script |
Nonstandard
northeastern
Chinese script |
|
Parhae script | ||
Khitan large script |
Jurchen large script |
Today it occurred to me that the lost Tabghach script might fit into
the above schema as the ancestor of the Khitan large script:
Ex Parhis (this site)
Proto-Chinese script |
||
Standard
Chinese script |
Nonstandard
northern
Chinese scripts |
|
Tabghach script? | Parhae script | |
Khitan large script |
Jurchen large script |
In the above scenario, one could speak of a para-Mongolic (or
'Xianbeic' = Shimunek's 'Serbic'?) line of scripts (Tabghach and
Khitan) and
a possibly 'Tungusic' line of scripts (Parhae and Jurchen). But
this is extremely speculative, as we have no idea what the Tabghach
script looked like; it might not have been what Janhunen called
'sinoform' (i.e., Chinese-like). It may have had no relationship to any
of the other scripts in the diagram above.
Janhunen (1996: 153) wrote,
In view of the later ethnic situation in the border zone between Korea and Continental Manchuria, and in the absence of any contradicting evidence, the most natural assumption about the states of Koguryo and Bohai [= Parhae] is that they were dominated by people ethnically ancestral to the Jurchen. It is well known that the Bohai ruling elite as largely formed by descendants of Koguryo nobility [...] there are no indications that any significant number of people linguistically connected with the modern ethnic Koreans would, during this period, have been present outside of the United Shilla territory.
To some extent, the above conjecture about the possible Jurchen identity of the Bohai population is complicated by the fact that the Bohai people continued to be counted as a separate ethnopolitical entity even after the fall of the Bohai kingdom. Not only the [Khitan] Liao [dynasty] but also the [Jurchen] Jin [dynasty] system of ethnic administration registered the Bohai people as distinct from the Khitan and Jurchen populations.
Another complicating factor is the absence of Jurchenic elements in the Koguryo onomastic material which is split between Koreanic and Para-Japonic items.
My attempt to reconcile the above points:
- Koguryo was a multiethnic state with a Chinese-influenced Koreanic-speaking elite ruling over Tungusic (including Jurchenic), Koreanic, and Para-Japonic-speaking subjects.
- As there is no evidence for Para-Japonic in Parhae, the Para-Japonic language(s) of Koguryo may have become extinct by the time Parhae was established in 698. Or Para-Japonic speakers were in the part of Koguryo that Shilla conquered: i.e., the part that did not become part of Parhae.
- The majority population of Parhae was Tungusic-speaking; their languages were not prestigious and hence almost totally absent from written records except in the Parhae script at a local and unofficial level.
- 'Parhae' as an ethnonym could have been a cover term for various peoples speaking Jurchenic and/or para-Jurchenic languages: i.e., Tungusic languages more or less related to Jurchen.
- The Jurchen script, then, was an official version of the previously informal Parhae script originally used to record one or more relatives of Jurchen but possibly not Jurchen itself. Wanyan Xiyin may have introduced new usages or characters to adapt the script to Jurchen. This introduction may not have been by him alone; it could have paralleled what happened when the Mongolian script was adapted for Manchu five centuries later. Roth Li (2000: 13) wrote,
The process of modifying [the Mongolian] script [for Manchu] occurred over at least a decade and was not, as some Chinese, sources made it appear, carried out singlehandedly by Dahai in 1632.
Dahai may have been the new Wanyan Xiyin: i.e., the man later attributed with the result of a slow process involving multiple people. As far as I know, there is no contemporary documentation indicating that Wanyan Xiyin 'created' the Jurchen large script in 1119 according to his biography in History of the Jin Dynasty 73; that 'fact' may be a later oversimplification. The later dates from other sources (1121 in the Wanyan Xiyin inscription and 1123 in the Record of the Great Jin State) could be reconciled by viewing the 'creation' of the Jurchen script as a process spanning years before and after 1120. Cf. Wikipedia:
The date of the creation of the script (1119 or 1120) varies in different sources. Franke (1994) says that "[t]he Jurchens developed ... [the large script] ... in 1119". Kane (1989) (p. 3) quotes the Jin Shi [History of the Jin Dynasty], which states that "[i]n the eighth month of the third year of the [天輔] Tianfu period (1120), the composition of the new script was finished". The two dates can be reconciled as one may imagine that the work started in 1119 and was completed in August–September (the eighth month of the Chinese calendar) of 1120.
In fact Tianfu 3 is 1119, so Kane's (1989: 3) 1120 may be an error; his 2009 book has 1119 on p. 3. (The date of the script is on page 3 of both books!)
²My guess at the Latin ablative of Parhae.
I declined Parhae like Thebae 'Thebes' and Sinae
'China' which are pluralia tantum (though of course no such
concept exists in Korean or Chinese [the Korean name is the Sino-Korean
reading of the Chinese place name 渤海).
19.1.6.23:59: WHAT IF THE LANGJUN INSCRIPTION WERE IN JURCHEN?
It just occurred to me that the Jurchen large script was fifteen years old when the 郎君 Langjun inscription was written in Khitan in 1134. The Arkhara inscripton of 1127 demonstrates that the Jurchen large script was already in use in the years between its 'creation'¹. So why wasn't the Langjun inscription about a Jurchen aristocrat - none other than the emperor's brother - written in his language?
It would be interesting to try to construct a Jurchen version of the inscription. At least I can guess that they would have written 'Tang dynasty' as
<ta ang> (attested in 1185 in 大 金得勝陀頌碑 26)
which partly parallels the structure of the Khitan small script spelling
<ta.ang>
from the Langjun inscription, though of course the Khitan small script fuses two characters (<ta> and <ang>) into a single block unlike the Jurchen large script characters which remain full-sized.
All that makes me wonder about the influence of Khitan writing
practices on the Jurchen script - and if they can be differentiated
from Parhae writing practices. Were the Parhae the first to write CVC
syllables as <CV VC> sequences?
¹Not the best word, as I agree with Juha
Janhunen (1994) who first proposed
that the Jurchen script is actually derived from a preexisting Parhae
script rather than being invented on the spot. It was Alexander Vovin
who introduced me to Janhunen's idea over twenty years ago. I just
found 川崎保 Kawasaki Tamotsu's 「渤
海」文字資料からみた女真文字の起源に関する一考察 (2014), a response to Vovin's "Did Wanyan
Xiyin
Invent the Jurchen Script?" (2012).
Next: My thoughts on Kawasaki's article.