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15.6.8.23:40: REPLICATING GRAINS OF GOLD

I like Andrew West's English title for the Tangut text that I have been calling the Golden Guide. His latest post is about manuscript copies of the Grains and practice pieces in which characters from the Grains were written repeatedly.

He used my notation to transcribe Tangut readings with a twist: he wrote tones as superscript numerals and grades as subscript numerals: e.g., he wrote the reading of

'moon, month'

as ²lhiq₄ = lhiq with tone 2 and Grade IV. I write it as 2lhiq4 because superscript and subscript numerals are difficult for me to type and to read.

He linked to my notes on the Grains whenever they were available. I still have 96 lines left to translate and annotate. (I stopped at line 104 in January.) Now I want to finish so Andrew can add more links to his entry.


15.6.8.1:58: DID KHITAN AND JURCHEN SHARE A WORD FOR 'GRANDSON' (PART 2)?

I forgot to make a few points about Khitan

191 'grandson'

in my last entry, and I've thought more about the topic since, so here's a follow-up I didn't plan.

Why does 191 mean 'grandson'?

I don't know. I haven't seen Liu Fengzhu and Chengel's (2003: 18) explanation for that gloss. If I can find it, I might write a part 3.

191 occurs four times in the epitaph of Field Marshal Yelü, but none of those four occurrences unambiguously mean 'grandson' (Wu and Janhunen 2010: 159, 161, 190).

191 also functions as a phonogram: e.g., in the female name

191-236-372-361 <191.ur.û.en> (Xiao Dilu 26.26; see Wu and Janhunen 2010: 106-107).

How was 191 pronounced?

Lu Yinghong & Zhou Feng (2000: 49) read it as [mu] because they regarded it as a transcription of Liao Chinese 睦 *muʔ. However, the rest of what they regarded as a transcription of a Chinese phrase is not a good match (Wu and Janhunen 2010: 107). Given that other Chinese final glottal stops may have been Khitanized as (= -h in Kane 2009), perhaps 191 was <muɣ> (which resembles Written Mongolian omuɣ 'clan', though I am skeptical of apheresis; see below).

The fact that 191 is often followed by u-graphs (e.g., 236 <ur> above; see Qidan xiaozi yanjiu 312 and Wu and Janhunen 2010: 317 for others) suggests that its reading may have ended in -u. Perhaps the name above was something like Mu(u)ruen.

Kane (2009: 302) transcribed 191 as <mú>, but his entry for the character on p. 58 is blank, so I do not know his reasoning.

Wu and Janhunen (2010: 264) transcribed 191 as <mó>, presumably reflecting Wu Yingzhe's (2007: 46-47) which I haven't seen. Maybe by part 3 ...

Does the Khitan word written as 191 has external cognates?

If the reading of 191 began with an m-, I doubt it can be connected to Manchu omolo 'grandson', since I don't know of any cases of Khitan C- corresponding to VC- in other languages. Hence I don't think Khitan underwent apheresis. (Is there any language that lost all initial vowels?) A reading mu would make a link even more problematic since I would not expect Khitan u to correspond to Manchu o.

In part 1, I proposed that 191 may have been <om>. Such a short form - if valid - raises other issues. Manchu omolo has apparent cognates throughout Tungusic with the shape omol(g)V (Cincius 1975 2: 17-18). Therefore the word might be reconstructed at the Proto-Tungusic level. Is the word a loan from pre-Khitan (prior to monosyllabic reduction) into ((pre-)Proto-)Tungusic or vice versa? It cannot be a loan from Khitan into Jurchen or any other Tungusic language, since that scenario cannot account for final -l(g)V. Gorelova (2002: 114) analyzed Manchu omolo as omo-lo with a noun suffix -lo. That analysis seems to be synchronically correct since the plural of omolo is omosi with the plural -si replacing -lo before the root.  But is it diachronically correct? Was the Proto-Tungusic root *omo- rather than *omol(g)V, or was the word reanalyzed within Manchu? The Jurchen plural

<omo.lo.shi>  (Kyŏngwŏn inscription 3:2)

 could either be analyzed as omo-lo-shi with double suffixes or as omolo-shi with a trisyllabic root that was later reanalyzed as a root-suffix sequence omo-lo by analogy with other -lo nouns in Manchu. 

Starostin's online Altaic database treats Proto-Tungusic  *omu- (sic) 'offspring, descendant, grandchild' and *umu- 'to lay eggs' as one and the same root. I reject that identity for three reasons. First, the supposed initial vowel alternation looks like an ad hoc device to tie the two roots together. Second, all evidence points to *o as the second vowel of the om-root; *u is another bridging device to make the child root look like 'to lay eggs'. Finally, *umu- was apparently reconstructed solely on the basis of Evenki umū-. A form in a single language cannot be projected back to the proto-language.

All that effort enables Starostin to connect the Tungusic omo- (not omu-!) words to various um-words elsewhere in 'Altaic':

Old Turkic umay 'name of a goddess' < 'placenta'?

If I am reading Clauson 1972: 164-165 correctly, the word is first attested in the 8th century AD as the name of a goddess "whose particular function was to look after women and children, possibly because this object [the placenta] was supposed to have magic qualities". The first attestation of the meaning 'placenta' that I can see in his entry was in the 11th century AD. I assume 'placenta' is the earlier meaning even though it is actually found later.

Written Mongolian umai 'womb'

Korean um 'sprout'

Japanese um- 'to give birth'

The Turkic and Mongolian words must share a common source; one language probably loaned the word to the other.

The semantics of the Korean word are distant from 'womb'. Um may be an -m-suffixed nominalization of an extinct verb 'to sprout'.

The Japanese word may be a chance lookalike like English womb [wum]. Is English 'Altaic'?

Starostin reconstructed Proto-Altaic *úmu 'to give birth'. According to the rules in Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages (2003 1: 18), the first vowel of the reflexes of a Proto-Altaic word with the vowel sequence *u-u should be *U in Proto-Tungusic. The cover symbol *U enabled Starostin et al. to regard both the improbable *umu- and the incorrect *omu- to be descendants of *úmu.


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