A note on the etymology of the Tangut name Ngwemi.

• Author: Jacques, Guillaume
• Position: Report

Many Tangut family names are attested in both Chinese and Tangut sources. However, the etymology of those names has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this note, I will present evidence for explaining the origin of the most famous of all Tangut names, that of the imperial family, transcribed in Chinese as Weiming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and in original Tangut [eta]w[e.sup.2]mj[i.sup.1][TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (1)

Stoddard (1997: 90 n. 73) proposed equating Tangut [eta]w[e.sup.2]mj[i.sup.1] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] with the name of the Tangut emperor as it appears in a Tibetan myth attested in several fourteenth-century Tangut texts. (2) According to these texts the First Tangut emperor, when he was a child, was abandoned and nourished by a cow. (3) His name Ngo.snu'i is explained in the following way (quoting the version of this story found in the Deb.ther dmar-po):

rus.pa ngo.snu'i zhes-pa Bod-skad-du bsgyur-na || bone Ngosnu'i call-NMLZ Tibet-language-ALL translate.PST-if ba-la 'o.ma 'thung-ba zhes zer cow-DAT milk drink-NMLZ call say His clan name was Ngo.snu'i, which can be translated into Tibetan as "he who drinks milk from the cow." However, in Jacques 2008 I showed that this name Ngo.snu'i was not a transcription of the actual Tangut imperial family name [eta]w[e.sup.2]mj[i.sup.1] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], but instead a rendition in Tibetan orthography of the Tangut form *[eta]w[e.sup.2]nj[u.sup.2][TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] which can be translated as "the cow ([eta]w[e.sup.2] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) gives milk (nj[u.sup.2] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])," or rather, in the context of a personal name, "the one who was fed milk by the cow."

It can hardly be a coincidence that the first syllable of the name [eta]w[e.sup.2]mj[i.sup.1] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] itself, though written differently, is homophonous with [eta]w[e.sup.2] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'cow', and the second syllable is homophonous with mj[i.sup.1] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'feed', mj[i.sup.1] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is an irregular verb whose first and second singular form is mj[o.sup.2] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (4) It can be used with a human object:

[TEXT NOT [TEXT NOT [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [tchji.sup.2] [tchji.sup.1] lw[[partial [rjar.sup.2] derivative].sup.2] immediately meat buy [TEXT NOT [TEXT NOT [TEXT NOT...