Chinese Philology and the Scripts of Central Asia

SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS

Number 30

October, 1991

Chinese Philology and the Scripts of Central Asia

by M. V. Sofronov

Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA vmair@sas.upenn.edu sino-

SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair.

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M.V. Sofronov, "ChmesePhilology and the Scripts of Central Asia" Sino-Phonic Papers, 30 (October, 1991)

M.V ,Sofronov CHINESE PHILOLOGY AND THE SCRIPTS OF CENTRAL A S I A

The period o f the tenth t o fourteenth centuries was a time when the peoples who conquered Northern China established their own states and proceeded t o create their own w r i t t e n culture. They rightly saw the basis of a new state culture in their own script. The Kidan state o f Liao w a s established in 916 i n the northeastern p a r t o f China. I t was conquered b y the Jucen state Jin i n 1126. The Tangut state o f Hsi Hsia was established on the northwestern frontiers o f China in 1032. A l l o f these states created their cultures i n accordance w i t h historical circumstances and taking into consideration the achievements o f older cultural centers o f East and South Asia,

The oldest and most powerful philological tradition which exerted an influence on the scripts o f Central Asia was that o f the

Chinese . This tradition developed under the specific conditions o f the

Chinese character script. Primarily, it elaborated the problem of the explanation o f the meanings o f the characters and the establishment o f their correct readings.

One o f the i m p o r t a n t achievements o f the t r a d i t i o n a l Chinese

philology was the method o f

f a n q i e

P

("cut and sJiceW) according to

which the unknown reading o f a character is described b y means o f

two other characters with known readings. Originally f a n q i e was

designed, presumably under the tutelage o f Indian phoneticians, to

indicate the readings of characters in the philological works. With the

development o f Tantric Buddhism in China it was extended to the

transcription o f Sanskrit d h a r a n i s and related texts. In these

transcriptions, Sanskrit syllables with phonemic components

d i s t r i b u t i v e l y i n c o m p a t i b l e i n Chinese w e r e c o n s t r u c t e d . In these

cases the Sanskrit syllable was rendered by t w o Chinese ones. This

pair o f Chinese syllables formed the f a n q i e binom provided w i t h

M. V. Sofronov,"ChinesePhilology and the Scripts of Central Asiaw Sino-Platonic Papers, 30 (October, 1991)

appropriate diacritics. For rendering initial consonant clusters, t w o o r three Chinese syllables w e r e used respectively f o r clusters o f t w o o r three Sanskrit consonants. These binoms o r trinoms w e r e provided with diacritics, respectively e rh e ("two together") or s a n h e ("three together"). This method of transcription constituted the

_Z c o u n t e r p a r t t o t h e o r t h o g r a p h i c *(Lechniques o f the rendering o f consonant clusters in Sanskrit and Tibetan syllabic scripts.

Thus Chinese philologists who worked in the field o f transcribing Sanskrit and other foreign texts developed suitable techniques for coping with them despite the limited phonological capabilities o f the.Chinese s c r i p t . The next step they might have taken was t o create something analogous to the alphabet f o r transcription, i.e., a s e t o f symbols where one Chinese character stands f o r one syllable o f Sanskrit. But this did not happen. Characters used f o r the purpose o f transcription have not been completely standardized. In principle, any character o f the Chinese script can be used for the purpose o f transcription. The most frequent binoms tended to coalesce in one character. They w e r e purely phonetic characters describing the spelling of a foreign syllable. Ordinarily these characters were not included in dictionaries, the exception being L o n g k a n s h o u j i a n ,

The

edited in4Jucen state o f Jin.

Both the Chinese and the Sanskrit philological traditions hold the syllable t o be a unit o f the graphic rendering o f language. The oldest scripts o f Central Asia were syllabic as well. In the syllabomorphemic languages, the syllable i s the basic meaningful unit o f language. In other types o f languages, the syllable as a r u l e is not a bearer o f independent meaning. Therefore, the graphic rendering o f syllables i n languages o f this type has different semantic functions. In the f i r s t case, a syllabic letter renders a monosyllabic w o r d or meaningful p a r t o f it; i n the second, it renders p a r t o f a w o r d without i t s own meaning.

M. V. Sofronov, "ChinesePhilology and the Scripts of Central Asiaw Sino-Platonic Papers, 30 (October, 1991)

The Kidan great s c r i p t was created in the state o f Liao in 920, soon a f t e r i t s e s t a b l i s h m e n t . A c c o r d i n g t o e v i d e n c e f r o m t h e Q id a n g u o z h i , it consisted o f 3,000 c h a r a c t e r s . B u t immediately

0-F

afterwards the invention* the Kidan small script was revealed. Actually, it i s hard to judge to what degree the latter was alphabetic, for the body o f the script has still not been established, though we know quite a l o t about it. It i s essential t o note that, f o r the Altaic languages, t o which Kidan belongs, the character s c r i p t proved to be unfit. This is the main reason why the alphabetic script appeared a few years after the Kidan characters.

The creation o f the Tangut s c r i p t took into consideration the experience o f the Kidan script and typological features o f Tangut itself. Tangut was a syllabomorphemic language, therefore each syllable could be rendered graphically with a separate meaningful character. The principles o f composition o f Chinese characters were evidently laid down as a base for the process o f the creation o f the Tangut script. One o f them w a s a s t r i c t separation o f meaningful and phonetic characters. The main principle o f the creation o f the Tangut

phonetic characters was f a n q i e . The reading o f these characters

w a s t h e sum o f r e a d i n g s o f t w o c h a r a c t e r s i n a c c o r d a n c e w i t h t h i s

method. Tangut characters f o r transcription had no meanings o f their own and were utilized j u s t to render sounds. Thus the Tangut character s c r i p t w a s complemented by phonetic c h a r a c t e r s w h i c h on the whole m a y be considered as an unstandardized syllabic alphabet.

The Tangut script which has been conserved in numerous texts may provide u s w i t h some general ideas about t w o other s c r i p t s o f Central Asia - Kidan and Jucen. To one degree o r another, both s c r i p t s contain logographs for the graphic rendering o f a word - monosyllabic in Tangut and polysyllabic i n Kidan and Jucen. These w e r e used together w i t h transcriptions o f foreign words. The proportion o f logographs and phonetic characters i s different f r o m these scripts logographs prevailed in Tangut, phonetic characters prevailed i n the Kidan and Jucen scripts, whose logographs functioned dissimiliarly.

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