'Pan', 'dish' and 'drink' in Chinese: A case study of longitudinal and latitudinal developments of languages
东亚大陆语言发展的方向: 把[以]汉语 '锅', '菜', '喝' 和它们的历史与地区的变体分布为据
Mantaro J. Hashimoto 桥本万太郎
Abstract 摘要
An attempt is made to establish in some principled way the direction of linguistic developments in the East Asian continent, based on the basic lexical items of the Chinese language related to eating and drinking, ‘cooking vessels’, ‘(cooked) dishes’ and the verb ‘to drink’. In order to determine the developmental direction, a) some historical evolutions of the shape and function of cooking vessels and b) regional expansions/reductions of the semantic contents of the verb ‘to drink’ were examined, in addition to the chronological order of these vessels’ transformations and the semantic changes of the verb ‘to drink’ established with the archaeological and philological evidence. The direction and order of the developments were then double-checked with the synchronic distributional patterns of modern Chinese dialectal vocabulary corresponding to these vessel names and various diachronic variants for ‘(cooked) dishes’ and ‘to drink’. Despite the successive occurrences, in the historical documents, of the diachronic variants of these words primarily in the order of the synchronic distribution from the southeastern to the northwestern corner of the continent, it is argued that this order does not necessarily reflect the actual order in which these words came into being in the regional variants of the Chinese language, and some philological evidence for that argument is presented. The order we established reflects the mere appearance order of these diachronic forms in the written history, while the actual words themselves had mostly come into being in the earliest period of the Chinese language. In other words, what is normally described as a linear, longitudinal development along the time axis in the history of the Chinese language often turns out, upon close examination, to be a horizontal or at least diagonal tracing of synchronic distribution of various linguistic phenomena completed in an early stage of the historical period of the language. Here lies, we believe, part of the reason for the beautiful correlations between the longitudinal and latitudinal occurrences of lexical items discussed in his study. The direction we established here by examining the Chinese lexical items related to eating and drinking is supported by the distributional pattern of river names in the East Asian continent examined by geographers.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 11 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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