Review of Comparison of Languages in Contact: The Distillation Method and the Case of Bai by WANG Feng
书评: 《接触语言之比较——还原比较法和白语》. 王锋著
Bit-Chee Kwok 郭必之

Any scholar who attempts to clarify the relationship among the languages in the Sino-Tibetan (=ST) family inevitably encounters a critical question: how to distinguish loanwords from true cognates shared by different languages? It is well known in historical linguistics that only cognates can “convey the information relevant to establishing genetic relationships between languages” (p.1). Loanwords cannot. Unfortunately, as most words in Chinese are monosyllabic in nature with little morphological marking, traditional methods employed in Indo-European studies to identify loanwords (see Bynon 1977:274-275) are not sufficient to pick out borrowed terms from Chinese loanwords in other members of the ST family. As a result, there is a great demand to bring up for a new method that can effectively distinguish loanwords from cognates in monosyllabic languages such as Chinese and many other languages in Southeast Asia. Probably encouraged by a series of successes in reconstructing different language strata in various southern Chinese dialects, particularly Min and Wu (for examples, Yang 1982, H. Wang 1986 and Xu 1991), different proposals on the stratification of related words shared by Chinese and some of its neighboring languages have been put forward since the new millennium. Notable works include:

 Sagart & Xu (2001): on Chinese and Hani (ST);
 Huang (2002): on Chinese and Dong (Tai-Kadai);
 Q. Gong (2003): on Chinese and Thai (Tai-Kadai);
 Zeng (2004): on Chinese and Shui (Tai-Kadai);
 Lan (2005): on Chinese and Zhuang (Tai-Kadai);
 Nakanishi (2005): on Chinese and She (Hmong-Mien);
 F. Wang (2006): on Chinese and Bai (ST).

The monograph under review, F. Wang (2006), appears to be just one of the many proposals. But what makes it more striking than the others, in my opinion, is that the author does not simply follow the traditional practice of comparing the Sino-Bai related words in the framework of Middle Chinese (=MC) phonology. Rather, he initiates a brand-new, rigorous and systematic method -- what he terms as the “Distillation Method” -- to examine every related pair of words shared by the two languages. It turns out that the conclusion he arrives at is highly plausible and reliable.

Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 36 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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