15.6.5.23:59: DID KHITAN AND JURCHEN SHARE A WORD FOR 'GRANDSON'?

Last weekend, I opened Wu and Janhunen (2010) at random and saw this passage about the Khitan small script character

191

on p. 107:

Even so, assuming that the value [mu], here romanized as mó, is approximately correct, the Khitan item for 'grandson' may perhaps be compared with Manchu omolo id., suggesting that the actual pronunciation might also have been [omo] (Wu Yingzhe 2007f: 46-47).

222 [iń] ~ [ńi].

The Jurchen word for 'grandson' was omolo as in Manchu. I suspect that the character variously written as

was originally a logogram for omolo (though it is not attested alone) which later acquired a following <lo> (see my posts from 6.1 and 6.3) in the attested spellings:

or 

(Kyŏngwŏn inscription 3:2, mid-12th century; the spelling on the left is from Jin 1984: 205 and the spelling on the right is from Jin and Jin 1980: 336)

(Deshengtuo inscription 14, 1185; Jin 1984: 205 also reports this in Yongning 12, but Jin and Jin 1980: only list the second of the next two spellings in Yongning 12.)

or 

(Yongning temple inscription 12, 1413; the spelling on the left is from Jin 1984: 205 and the spelling on the right is from Jin and Jin 1980: 364)

(Hua-Yi yiyu Berlin ms. people section 14, before c. 1500?)

I have not seen any of the originals, so I am not certain about the details.

I have not yet been able to find an exact match for Jurchen <omo> in the Khitan large script. Characters 0170, 0204, and 0205 in N4631 are vaguely similar, but until their readings and/or meanings are known, I cannot regard them as prototypes for Jurchen <omo>.

15.6.3.23:45: KHITAN SMALL SCRIPT CHARACTER 346 IN QIDAN XIAOZI YANJIU

Qidan xiaozi yanjiu (1985), the foundation of current studies on the Khitan small script, only lists four instances of 346 in the texts it covers:

244-346-273 <s.?.un> (道 14.11, 24.16, 仲 17.37) and 251-346-273 <n.?.un> (許 57.33)

Are those genitives of nouns, or is <un> part of the stem? If <un> is a genitive suffix, the vowel of 346 should be u according to the present understanding of Khitan vowel harmony. So perhaps that is partly why Kane (2009) transliterated it as <uŋ> and Wu and Janhunen (2010) transliterated it as <ung₂>. The final nasal reflects the assumption that 346 is a variant of single-dotted 345 <ung> from my last post:

345 is much more common. Qidan xiaozi yanjiu lists 72 occurrences of 345 which can appear by itself (on the murals where characters are often not grouped into blocks) and in first, third, and fourth position: e.g.,

345-041 <ung.us> (興 25.3), 334-019-345 <g.iu.ng> for Liao Chinese 宮 *giung (or *güng?) (道 6.33), 048-092-261-345-341 <?.ud.l.ung.er> (許 61.2)

Is 346 simply a variant of 345 (Kane 2009: 77), or is it a distinct character? If it is the latter, was its reading similar to <ung> (e.g., <üng>) or was it something else with an u-vowel? 346 coexists with 345 in all three texts where it was found (道, 許, 仲). Was the number of dots on the bottom random like the dots in the three variants of Jurchen <lo>?

The fact that 346 only occurs in blocks of the type <C.346.un> suggests a deliberate choice, though it could also be an artifact of extremely limited data. Qidan xiaozi yanjiu does not list the blocks <s.ung.un> and <n.ung.un> with 345 instead of 346. Is this complementary distribution accidental or meaningful? Have any such blocks been found in the three decades following the publication of Qidan xiaozi yanjiu? The closest block with 345 is

244-345 <s.ung> 宋 'Song (dynasty)' (仁 8.13)

which might be the stem of

244-346-273 <s.?.un> (道 14.11, 24.16, 仲 17.37）

if 345 and 346 really are equivalent and if <un> is a genitive suffix.

If 244-346 is also 'Song', could 251-346 be a loan of a Liao Chinese word *nung?

15.6.2.23:59: AN 'ETERNAL' LINK BETWEEN THE KHITAN SMALL SCRIPT AND THE JURCHEN (LARGE) SCRIPT?

<üng>

for the transcription of Ming Chinese 永 *yüng 'eternal' resembles a cross between the Khitan small script characters

106 ~ 345 ~ 346

which are slightly different ways to transcribe Liao Chinese *-ung. (I assume 106 is an abbreviation of 345. The function, if any, of the extra dot in 346 is unknown.)

Was the Jurchen character derived from 106/345/346, or is the similarity a coincidence? Normally Jurchen characters are thought to be derivatives of Khitan large script characters or 'sisters' if not descendants of those characters. So I would expect Jurchen <üng> to be somehow related to Khitan large script characters such as these two (1692 and 0555 in N4631):

N4631 glossed 1692 as 'first' and listed the reading [tʰur] (= <tur> in my Khitan transcription). There is no semantic or phonetic resemblance to 永 *yüng 'eternal' or its (near-)homophones.

Nothing is known about 0555. Was it pronounced üng?

The Khitan small script character for Chinese transcription

181

that Kane (2009) transcribed as <iúng> may have been pronounced üng. It of course does not look anything like Jurchen <üng> unless one is imaginative. I doubt the Jurchen - who were literate in Khitan - overlooked it and chose a small script character with a somewhat different reading (106/345/346) as the basis for their <üng>.

6.3.1:06: Maybe I am wrong about 181 being üng. The Liao Chinese rhyme that it transcribes was also transcribed in the small script as 019-345 <iu.ung>: e.g.,

334-019-345 <g.iu.ung> for 宮

So was 181 <iung>? (I see no reason to add an acute accent, as there is no <iung> distinct from <iúng> in Kane 2009.)

Another possibility is that the Liao Chinese rhyme was -üng, and the Khitan had two strategies for writing it: a spelling reflecting a partially nativized -iung (if Khitan had no ü) and a spelling with a character specifically designed for -üng. The degree of phonetic mismatch between Liao Chinese and Khitan must have been considerable, though it eludes precise measurement.

15.6.1.23:59: LAST OF THE OLD JURCHEN SCREENCAPS

Yesterday I discovered a screencap of Jurchen characters that I made four years and two laptops ago. At the time I created images of all but two that I didn't upload until tonight:

<i(r)> and <lo>

Those two might be the last all-new images of 72-point characters on this site. All future images will be of 48-point characters or be derivatives of existing 72-point character images.

Although the two characters look very similar, they have completely different phonetic values.

<i(r)> was transcribed as Ming Chinese* 一兒 *ir in the Sino-Jurchen glossary (Kiyose 1977: 91) and in turn transcribed the initial *y- of Ming Chinese 永 on the Yongning Temple Stele (lines 1, 6, 8, 10, and 13). A dotless variant

appears on line 9 of that inscription.

<lo> corresponds to the Ming Chinese phonetic transcription 洛 *lo of the name

<cu.ung.ge.lo> = 充哥洛 *cunggolo (<ge> was also transcribed as Ming Chinese 革 *ge.)

in memorial XI (Kiyose 1977: 201) and has dotless and single-dotted variants:

The dotless variant from the Yongning Temple Stele looks like the Chinese character 早 *dzaw and the Khitan large script character

whose reading is unknown. Was 早 also read <lo> in Khitan?

The two appear together - ignoring variation - in the transcriptions 

and 

<i.üng.lo> (line 8 and 10) and <i.üng.lo> (line 13*)

of 永樂 *yünglo in the Yongning Temple Stele inscription. That word illustrates how the presence of absence of a left-hand bend in the central stroke is the key difference between the two graphs.

*6.2.1:08: Ming Chinese reconstructions are in the same non-IPA orthography that I use for Jurchen and Khitan to facilitate comparison. The use of identical letters in different languages does not necessarily entail exact phonetic matches: e.g., Ming dz [ts] was voiceless unlike Khitan

104~354 <dz>

which may have been voiced [dz].

**6.2.0:54: The two-character transcription

<i.lo>

of 永樂 *yüŋlo in line 6 is presumably an error for

<i.üng.lo>

attested on line 13.

15.5.31.23:59: THE KHITAN SMALL SCRIPT IS SMALL AGAIN ON MY NEW LAPTOPS!

Thanks to Andrew West for solving yesterday's screen capture mystery. It turns out that if I went to Control Panel\Appearance and Personalisation\Display on my 1920 x 1080 Windows 8 laptops, "Change the size of all items" was set to medium on one and "Larger" on the other. Hence screen captures were 25-50% larger than I expected. Changing the setting to "Smaller" makes screen captures the size I'm accustomed to - but makes text in programs even harder to reader than it already is. So I now have both laptops set to "Larger" for maximum legibility, and instead of resetting them to "Smaller" every time I want to make new Tangut, Jurchen, or Khitan character images, I'll use 48-point characters instead of 72-point characters. I tested that new technique, and the results are almost indistinguishable from my old technique: e.g., Khitan small script <TWENTY>