Readers 读者
Chinese Etyma for River
汉语河流词源考
Hongming Zhang 张洪明
Abstract 摘要
This paper is a study of the origin of the two Chinese characters for river: jiang 江 and he 河. The geographical distribution of the names of rivers in China reflects certain patterns. River is called he in the northern areas, and jiang in the southern parts of China. How do we explain this phenomenon? Both Norman-Mei (1976) and Hashimoto (1978) claim that both jiang and he are loanwords, which are borrowed from Austroasiatic Languages and Mongolian, respectively. Based on linguistic data, ethnological evidence, geographical distribution, and historical documents, I will argue against these leading hypotheses as well as some other speculations on the origins of these words, including those which attempt to show that they originated from Thai or Tibetan. In addition, I will prove that both jiang and he are in fact Chinese indigenous words. In my analysis, I will also propose and elaborate on the opposite view that the respective forms of jiang and he in the other languages are most likely loanwords from Chinese. One of the other topics of this paper is to discuss the principles used to distinguish Chinese etyma from loanwords. This topic has remained a puzzling question in linguistics. I will attempt to answer the question by proposing the following principle for the differentiation: the naming processes of the etyma in a language share certain common ground and take place under an integral cognate system; the word loaning processes do not possess these properties. I will demonstrate in this paper that the evolution of jiang and he in Chinese conforms to this principle and thus testifies to its validity.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 26 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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