Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions

[The first page of this post is a guest contribution by Chris Button.]

I've been thinking a little about the word represented by chái 豺* which I would normally reconstruct as *dzrəɣ (Zhengzhang *zrɯ) ignoring any type a/b distinctions. However, it occurred to me that a reconstruction of *dzrəl (for which Zhengzhang would presumably have *zrɯl) would give the same Middle Chinese reflex (I'm not citing Baxter/Sagart since they don't support lateral codas presumably for reasons of symmetry). I'm not sure if outside of its phonetic speller cái 才 there is any reason to go with -ɣ rather than -l in coda position for 豺. However, if we go with a lateral coda as *dzrəl, it looks suspiciously similar to Old Iranian šagāl from Sanskrit śṛgāla (perhaps even more so if we fricativize the Old Iranian /g/ to /ɣ/ intervocalically as in modern Persian).

[*VHM:  This is always a challenging word for translators.  "jackal" and "dhole" are two possibilities.]

What do Language Log readers think of Chris's postulations?

A brief note on the etymology of English "jackal" from the American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed.:

[Turkish çakal (influenced in English by Jack, man, fellow), from Persian šaghāl, from Middle Indic sigāl, from Sanskrit śṛgālaḥ, of unknown origin.]

Let me [VHM] begin my part of this joint post with a brief explanation of how it happened.  To put it simply, last night as I was walking home, I was trying to think of a title for Chris's post, and the first thing that popped into my mind (don't ask me why, that's just the way minds work), was "Jackal and hide".  As I continued walking, I started to wonder about Sino-IE possibilities for "hide", since Sino-IE interactions are the theme of Chris's note on "jackal".  By the time I reached the door of my house five minutes later, I had sketched out the rudiments of what follows.

The Sinitic word for "skin; hide; pelt; fell" [N.B.!] is pí 皮, Middle Sinitic (MS) /bˠiᴇ/ (Zhengzhang) and Old Sinitic (OS) /*bral/ (Zhengzhang).

I remember, more than three decades ago, reading through the whole of Carl Darling Buck's magisterial A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1949) searching for groups of cognates of distinctive cultural terms that were similar in Old Sinitic and Indo-European languages.  Many of the groups I identified at that time have continued to stick in my mind all this while, and they have proven useful in the series of posts about Sino-IE correspondences I've written on Language Log for the last couple of years and elsewhere for a much longer period of time.

One such group that stayed strongly in my mind for all these years was Buck, 4.12 (p. 200b), namely Latin pellis, with cognates in Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, New English, Dutch, Old High German, Middle High German, New High German, Greek, and Lithuanian.  There are no secure cognates of the *pel ("skin") root in Tocharian.

Thus the Latin word for "hide; skin" is pellis, and there are cognates in many European languages, including even in English ("fell" [N.B.!] and "pelt").  For updating and ease of transfer, here is the relevant section from the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European roots:

pel-³

The last item rings resonant bells, does it not?  See "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17), where we studied words for that type of shield in considerable depth and breadth and found persuasive evidence for correlations between Graeco-Latinate and Sinitic terminology.  So what we said there about the particular type of shield called a peltē in Greek and fá 瞂 (MS bjwot) in Sinitic mutually reinforces what we have discovered here about parallels between Graeco-Latin, Germanic, and Lithuanian cognates for "skin; hide; pelt; fell" and Sinitic pí 皮, Middle Sinitic (MS) /bˠiᴇ/ (Zhengzhang) and Old Sinitic (OS) /*bral/ (Zhengzhang).

The following, concluding section is relevant both for Chris's part of this post and mine.

Skeptics will naturally want to question, even if there are strong correlations between particular cognate sets of terms in IE and Sinitic, how could they possibly come in contact in premodern times?  The answer is very easy:  based on archeological, anthropological, historical, art historical, technological, cultural, genetic, and linguistic evidence, there have been robust contact and exchange between the eastern and western portions of Eurasia (bronze, wheat, horses, chariots, weapons, textiles, magi, and so forth) for at least the last four millennia and more.

What is especially noteworthy is that there is clear evidence for the involvement of numerous IE groups in the eastward transmission of cultural attributes, including language:  Greek, Latin, Tocharian, Indic, Iranian, Germanic, etc.  See, among other sources, the following works:

Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).  2 vols.

P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000).

"Early Indo-Europeans in Xinjiang" (11/19/08).

Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawai'i Press, 2006).

Victor H. Mair, "Language and Script: Biology, Archaeology, and (Pre)History," International Review of Chinese Linguistics, 1.1 (1996), 31a-41b.

Mair, Victor H., "Old Sinitic *Myag, Old Persian Maguš, and English Magician", Early China, 15 (1990): 27–47.  Available on JSTOR here.

Plus all of the previous posts in this long-running Language Log series on IE and Old Sinitic reconstructions

A final word:  with their horses, carts, wagons, and chariots, IE peoples were highly mobile from the fourth millennium BP on.  Just taking the Scythians as an example, already from about the 8th century BC, they were ranging from western Eurasia through Central Asia to East Asia and even down into Southeast Asia, taking with them their technology and art.

As for the proto-Germanic peoples, they may have been active as a linguistic entity by around 500 BC, and the Greeks were ensconced in Central Asia by at least the latter part of the 4th century BC, having a strong impact on the local cultures and beyond, all the way to the East Asian Heartland (EAH).  Alexander the Great's generals founded walled cities as far east as Alexandria Eschate ( Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἐσχάτη ["Alexandria the Farthest"]) at the southwestern end of the Ferghana Valley in modern Tajikistan.  See "The Greco-Chinese War Over the Heavenly Horses".  The research of Richard Barnhart (Yale) and Lukas Nickel (Vienna) has revealed evidence of Greek influence on the terracotta army of the First Emperor of the Qin (259-210 BC).  Other scholars have demonstrated traces from the west through the investigation of beads, glass, coins, and so on already during BC times.  Linguistically, as we have shown before on Language Log and elsewhere, the words for "coral", "honey", and a famous legendary sword come from Iranian (Khotanese Saka), Tocharian (a well-known borrowing), and Germanic (see the very first post in this series [3/8/16]) — all from Han Dynasty times (202 BC-220 AD) or earlier.

Readings

• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16)
• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2” (3/12/16)
• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3” (3/16/16)
• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4” (3/24/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
• "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17)
• "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)
• "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)
• "Of dogs and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/17/18)
• "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16)
• "Old Sinitic reconstructions and Tibeto-Burman cognates" (4/18/16
• "Of ganders, geese, and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (10/29/18)
• "Of honey, bee, mead, and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (11/1/18)

[Thanks to Hannes Fellner, Douglas Adams, and Lucas Christopoulos]