On scholarship in Sino-Tibetan Linguistics.

• Author: LaPolla, Randy J.
• Position: Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology. Transcription and Text - Book review

This is a review article of Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology. Transcription and Text. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series, vol. 53. Edited by RICHARD VANNESS SIMMONS and NEWELL ANN VAN AUKEN. Taipei: INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS, ACADEMIA SINICA, 2014. Pp. xxxvii + 463. $60, NTS 1000.

This large book is a Festschrift for one of the greatest scholars of Sino-Tibetan linguistics, Professor Weldon South Coblin, in honor of his seventieth birthday. When one reads the work of a great scholar such as Prof. Coblin (e.g., when I read Coblin 1981), one can't help but be impressed with the depth and breadth of his scholarship and the painstaking attention to detail and rigorous argumentation in his work. His is scholarship that took a very long time and a lot of effort to develop and close, detailed work that took a long time to produce, particularly to Prof. Coblin's exacting standards, and yet his tone is always modest and his conclusions conservative. (1)

This book is a fitting tribute to Prof. Coblin, as it includes a large number of high-quality works from the leading scholars in some of the different areas of Sino-Tibetan linguistics that Prof. Coblin is involved in. (2) It begins with an introduction by Simmons and Van Auken summarizing the chapters and explaining the reason for the volume: then Van Auken presents a short biography of Prof. Coblin and a list of his publications. The individual chapters of the volume are then divided into five sections (in the table of contents, but not in the book itself), based on different areas in which Prof. Coblin has made major contributions.

Section 1, Chinese Historical Linguistics, includes chapters from three of the top names in Chinese historical linguistics. The first chapter, "A model for Chinese dialect evolution," is the last article Prof. Jerry Norman ever wrote, finished just before he died in July 2012. Prof. Norman was a teacher, a colleague, and a close friend and collaborator of Prof. Coblin. (3) The chapter is something of a summary of the work Prof. Norman was best known for, trying to turn Chinese historical linguistics in a more empirical direction, using actual dialect data and the comparative method (as well as reference to the rime books) rather than just relying on the traditional method based only on the rime books. He begins with a discussion of the nature of the rime books, in particular the Qieyun, and problems with the current way they are used. He suggests they be used only secondarily to natural language data, as they (and the rime categories and xiesheng contacts traditionally used to reconstruct Old Chinese) are heterogeneous sources and so lead to the reconstruction of composite systems, not natural systems. Unlike the usual periodization and reconstructions of Chinese, which represent these composite systems, Prof. Norman reconstructs natural systems that are reflected in the modern dialect forms, what he calls Common Dialectal Chinese, which accounts for all the modern non-Min dialects, and Early Chinese, which is meant to account for the distinctions in the Qing Dynasty system of guyin (ancient sounds) found in the modern dialects. Some examples and discussion of finals from Early Chinese are included at the end of the chapter.

The second chapter, "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Phonological problems in imperial naming taboos)," by Prof. Dah-an Ho [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], is built around a critique of a particular work on the history of words that were tabooed because of homophony with the names of emperors (Chen Yuan'an's Examples of Imperial Naming Taboos, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), but at the same time we get something of an introduction to the practices related to the taboos. Prof. Ho first corrects some errors in the book in terms of what should or should not be considered "the same sound" and what should or should not be tabooed, based on his extensive knowledge of Chinese history and historical phonology, and then talks about the different techniques for avoiding taboos: changing to a word that sounds different but has the same meaning, changing to a similarly sounding word, or omitting the word. He also discusses how the historical records of such practices and their discussion can help us to confirm our understanding of Chinese historical phonology. Although a very technical article, Prof. Ho's prose is clear and elegant.

The third chapter, "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (A comparative study of frequently used action verbs in Han and Tang-Song times)," is by Prof. Pang-Hsin Ting [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a former classmate of Prof. Coblin when they were both graduate students at the University of Washington studying with Prof. Li Fang-kuei. Prof. Ting looks at change in the use of action verbs in the period from the Han Dynasty to the Tang-Song period by comparing forms in the explanations of characters in the Shuowen jiezi (Han Dynasty) with those in the Qieyun and Guangyun (Tang-Song period). Although the different books are in most cases explaining the same characters, they do so in many cases differently, and so the forms in the explanations can be taken to reflect forms that an educated person of the time would be expected to easily understand. Prof. Ting lists a number of examples of action verbs, arranged in sets of characters with similar meanings, to discuss the characters used in a particular time period to express that meaning, and finds four sets of verbs: 1. those where there has been little change from the Han Dynasty to the present; 2. those where there is consistent use between the Han and Tang-Song times but not currently; 3. those that began to be used in Tang-Song times and are still in use today; and 4. those used in the Han Dynasty that are still used today, but have acquired new meanings. Prof. Ting then uses the fact that the first type is the most prevalent, i.e., the fact that the use of verbs has been relatively stable, to argue against the idea of the Altaicization of northern Chinese suggested by Mantaro Hashimoto (e.g., 1986).

Section 2 is Chinese Dialects. It includes five articles using evidence from different dialects for understanding Chinese historical phonology. The first article in this section, "Northern Min 'softened' initials in borrowed vocabulary," is by William Baxter. It follows in the same vein as Coblin and Norman's work in showing that reliance on the Qieyun system can be problematic. His example is the pairs of words that are pronounced with the same initial in the Qieyun system, but are pronounced with different initials in Northern Min. He argues that the difference is due to lenition in intervocalic position in forms that he reconstructs with a consonant-vowel syllable before the relevant stop consonant (he does not call it a prefix). He argues the modern distinctions reflect earlier distinctions that were lost in all but Northern Min, and so should be taken into account in reconstructing Old Chinese, as he has done in adding the pre-syllable. That said, there are also some forms in the "literary" (borrowed) layer of lexical items in Northern Min that also have such "softened" initials, and the rest of the chapter presents evidence that these forms are most likely borrowed from an early form of the Hangzhou dialect. There is one confusing typo: in a section on pp. 63-64 where an example of Zhu Xi's commentary on the Shijing is used, the relevant form in Ode 16.2 should have a voiceless initial ([??] paej C in Middle Chinese), as Baxter correctly has it in Table 10, as it is the transitive and not intransitive reading of [??], but possibly because Zhu Xi's annotation is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], with a voiced initial, Baxter talks about it as "

The next chapter is "On the relationship between tones and initials of the dialects in the Shanghai area," by Zhongmin Chen, who did his MA at the University of Iowa under Prof. Coblin's supervision. In this chapter Chen discusses the correlations between initials as historically voiced or voiceless and their current tonal values in five tonal patterns found in the Shanghai area. He shows that what is often called the voiced series of initials in Wu dialects is actually devoiced when in initial position, though...