Of chariots, chess, and Chinese borrowings

Having gotten a good earful of Latin last month, Chau Wu was prompted to write this note in response to our previous post on "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24):

“chē 車 ("car; cart; vehicle") / yín 銀 ("silver")”

In my view, these two words are among those most representative of cultural and linguistic transfers from West to East. This comment will focus on 車 chē only. 車 is pronounced in Taiwanese [tʃja] (POJ chhia), quite similar to the first syllable char- of English chariot. I believe, like E. chariot and car which are derived from Latin carrus (see Etymonline on car and chariot), Tw chhia is ultimately also a derivative of L. carrus.

More interestingly, 車 has a second pronunciation, which is the traditional one. In reading Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic, 車 is pronounced in MSM jū, which I learned in my high-school Chinese class. In the Taiwanese literary reading, 車 is read ku. For example, there is a famous phrase 出無車 from a classic story about Feng Xuan 馮諼, a retainer of Lord Mengchang of Qi during the Warring States period, as recorded in 史記 Shĭjì ‘Records of the Grand Historian’ (孟嘗君列傳 ‘Biography of Lord Mengchang of Qi’) and 戰國策 Zhànguócè ‘Stratagems of the Warring States’; this phrase should be pronounced in Tw chhut bû ku / MSM chū wú jū.

Furthermore, in Chinese chess xiàngqí 象棋, which, like Western chess, comes from India, there is a piece named 車 ‘chariot’ whose movements are identical to those of the rook/castle in Western chess. This piece is called in Tw ku and MSM jū, preserving its Classical Chinese pronunciation.

A xiangqi board in the starting position. (The black pieces would normally be facing the player, but here they are rotated to be readable.) From Wikipedia.

Chris Button had written this comment to the "From Chariot to Carriage" post:

It's nice when archeologically focused articles like this back up the linguistic evidence that the word represented by 車 is a loanword.

I've recently been looking at 銀, which for about 150 years has been treated as a loan into Tocharian. The problem is that the Chinese evidence doesn't support that. An article by Witczak independently proposes an internal evolution of the word in Tocharian. If correct, the direction was almost certainly Tocharian into Chinese.

[CB note:  Minor typo: I meant 50 years rather than 150 years. Although it could have been proposed before then. It seems Adams' Dictionary has a reference to Rahder from 1963, but I haven't seen that.]

Chariots or silver, the other issue is a reliable Old Chinese reconstruction, which cam then be reinforced by the proposed loanword origin rather than manipulated to fit it. But that's another matter

This is why Chau brought up chē 車 ("car; cart; vehicle") and yín 銀 ("silver") together here.  I expect that some combination of Chau, Chris, Doug (see forthcoming article below), and others will further enlighten us on the antecedents of yín 銀 ("silver") in Sinitic in due course.

Selected readings

• "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24) — with a lengthy bibliography of relevant posts
• "Bronze, iron, gold, silver" (1/29/21) — with a long bibliography of posts relating to metallurgy
• "Latin oration at Harvard" (5/9/24)
• Douglas Q. Adams, "Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord,’ and possible wider connections", forthcoming in Sino-Platonic Papers.