Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions

This is a piece that I've been meaning to write for a long time, but never found the opportunity.  Now, inspired by the season and about to embark on extended holiday travel, I'm determined not to put it off for yet another year.

The genesis of my ruminations on this topic are buried in decades-old tentative efforts to identify the fabulous creature known in Chinese myth as the qilin (Hanyu Pinyin), also spelled as ch'i²-lin² (Wade-Giles Romanization) and kirin in Japanese, which the whole world knows as the name of a famous beer (fanciful, stylized depictions of the kirin are to be found on bottles and cans of the beer).

The qilin is usually referred to in English as a kind of unicorn, but I knew that couldn't be right, since no account of the qilin from antiquity describes it as having only one horn.  The Chinese xièzhì 獬豸 ("goat of justice") does have a single, long, pointed horn, but that is another matter, for which see "Lamb of Goodness, Goat of Justice" (pp. 86-93) in Victor H. Mair, "Religious Formations and Intercultural Contacts in Early China," in Volkhard Krech and Marion Steinicke, ed., Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe:  Encounters, Notions, and Comparative Perspectives (Dynamics in the History of Religion, 1 [Ruhr-Universität Bochum]) (Leiden:  Brill, 2011), pp. 85-110 (available on Google Books).  Since customs pertaining to the goat of justice, as with the reindeer, existed in cultures spread across northern Eurasia, I suspect that an extra-Sinitic loanword may also be lurking behind xièzhì 獬豸.

The earliest references to the qilin are in the 4th-century BC Zuo Zhuan (The Zuo Tradition).

For previous Language Log posts about reindeer, see:

"Reindeer talk" (12/24/13)

"Reindeer lore " (12/8/16) — includes 95 comments with words for reindeer in different languages, plus descriptions of customs and culture concerning reindeer.

I will not repeat here the abundance of materials and references concerning reindeer that are readily available in those posts.  Here I wish primarily to focus on the morphology and phonology of the Sinitic word qilin and discuss its possible relationship to the IE word "reindeer".

What led me to draw this parallel in the first place?  Qílín is one of those Old Sinitic disyllabic morphemes, of which there are a considerable number.  See:

"GA" (8/6/17)

"'Butterfly' words as a source of etymological confusion" (1/28/16)

So, when the word was first written down, neither of the two characters chosen to represent its sounds in Sinitic had a meaning of its own.  Qilin may be written either with a cervid radical, thus 麒麟, or an equid radical, thus 騏驎.  Early descriptions and depictions of the qilin represent it as having branching horns, so that fits well with the cervid orthographical form, and it is indeed the usual way to write qilin in characters.  Horses do not have horns, of course, but the mythological descriptions of the creature occasionally do have equid characteristics.  Furthermore, as Kristen Pearson has shown in her remarkable "Chasing the Shaman’s Steed: The Horse in Myth from Central Asia to Scandinavia" (free pdf), Sino-Platonic Papers, 269 (May, 2017), 1-21, the people of the steppes often outfitted their horses with deer antlers and other cervid attributes (see also the lengthy observations of Pita Kelekna below).  This is a key point and indicates the great reverence that people of the steppes had for deer, undoubtedly because they were important for their subsistence.

When the ancient Chinese said they were "waiting for the unicorn", it signaled something of great auspiciousness, perhaps the advent of a good ruler.  Moreover, the unicorn was said not to be indigenous to the Middle Kingdom.  Based on early texts, this is documented in Bryan Van Norden, Confucius and the Analects:  New Essays (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 139-142.  Confucius, who perhaps was hoping to be identified as the longed for sagely ruler, was deeply disappointed when a (qi-)lin was captured by persons who did not recognized its true significance.

Occasionally the first character of 麒麟 / 騏驎 is omitted, leaving just 麟 / 驎.  In essence, this is simply an elision of the onset (anlaut), hence lin / rin.

So much for the morphology and semantics of qilin, at least for the present moment.  How about the phonology?  Just judging from the Japanese phonology, which adheres to Middle Sinitic norms far more closely than Mandarin, I had always felt that the undimidiated form of kirin would have been something like krin or hrin.  That right away made me think of the "rein-" of "reindeer" (the "-deer" part I suspected was either redundant or simply there to indicate that it was a "rein-" type of "-deer", but when I first started looking into this I couldn't find any Old Sinitic (OS) reconstructions that were encouraging in that direction.  More recently (a couple of years ago), however, I discovered that Zhengzhang Shangfang reconstructed MSM qílín 麒麟 as OS *g(ɯ)-rin. (I could not find the word in Schuessler's Etymological Dictionary (2007) or in Baxter and Sagart's 2014 book on Old Sinitic.)

Zhengzhang's reconstruction as *g(ɯ)-rin gave me a shot of adrenalin and spurred me forward.

Next, I had to look at the etymology of "reindeer".  Here's what is given in Wikipedia:

The name rein (-deer) is of Norse origin (Old Norse hreinn, which again goes back to Proto-Germanic *hrainaz and Proto-Indo-European *kroinos meaning "horned animal").

The word deer was originally broader in meaning, but became more specific over time. In Middle English, der (Old English dēor) meant a wild animal of any kind. This was in contrast to cattle, which then meant any sort of domestic livestock that was easy to collect and remove from the land, from the idea of personal-property ownership (rather than real estate property) and related to modern chattel (property) and capital. Cognates of Old English dēor in other dead Germanic languages have the general sense of animal, such as Old High German tior, Old Norse djúr or dýr, Gothic dius, Old Saxon dier, and Old Frisian diar.

Basically, when I'm trying to compare "reindeer" and "MSM qílín < OS *g(ɯ)-rin, I can disregard the "deer" part, because that is an add-on to reinforce the fact that the "rein-" ("horned animal") is indeed a "-deer" ("animal").  Thus the "rein-" part by itself signified the animal in question, and the other Germanic word, the "deer" part, was added relatively late in the history of the word.

And how did the word "reindeer" come into English?

Juha Janhunen reexamines some of the evidence adduced above and introduces words for reindeer from non-IE languages:

The English word reindeer is composed of two elements, rein, which originally means 'reindeer', and deer, which originally means 'animal'. In modern Swedish, for instance, these meanings are still preserved: ren 'reindeer', djur 'animal'. In German, a folk etymology has given the form Renntier, as if it was 'running animal', from rennen 'to run' and Tier 'animal'. (A similar folk etymology is Maultier for 'mule', as if it was from Maul 'animal's mouth' + Tier 'animal'.)

The Saamic languages (c. 10 of them, of which Northern Saami is the most spoken today) have an extensive reindeer vocabulary, with items for different types, sexes, ages, colours, and parts of the animal. You can find a complete reindeer terminology (in Northern Saami) in the Saami (Lappish) Dictionary of Konrad Nielsen (3 vols., I think the reindeer terminology is in vol. 3). The general word for domestic reindeer in Saami is (Northern Saami) boazu (: genitive bohcco), which would presuppose a Proto-Saami shape like *poco. This has been compared with Finnish poro 'reindeer', though the consonant correspondence *c : *r is not regular. Finnish also has a separate word for wild reindeer, which is peura < *petra, also present in Estonian pôhjapôder = 'northern deer', from pôhja- (gen.) 'of the north' and pôder 'deer'.

Needless to say, all Siberian languages spoken by populations dealing with reindeer breeding in different forms have a likewise developed reindeer terminology. For instance, Tundra Nenets is the only Uralic language which has a native word for 'thousand', Tundra Nenets yonar. This is because the word originally means 'a flock of one thousand reindeer'. The Nenets, like other Tundra peoples, can own domestic reindeer in the thousands, while the forest peoples normally have only up to 50 reindeer per family. The flocks of wild reindeer, as on Taimyr Peninsula (and also in Alaska) can, of course, comprise thousands (totally hundreds of thousands) of animals.

Samoyedic (a branch of Uralic, which also comprises Nenets) has a word for 'reindeer' which seems to go back to Proto-Samoyedic, a language that was spoken in Southern Siberia around year zero. This – the Upper Yenisei basin and the Sayan mountains – is the region where the reindeer was probably first domesticated along the patterns already known from horse domestication. It seems that the Samoyedic word *cë(x) was also borrowed into Mongolic, where reindeer is caa or caa bugu (with bugu 'deer'). Turkic languages have no primary word for the reindeer. In Yakut, for instance, reindeer is taba, which is the Turkic word for 'camel'.

Laila Williamson wrote an MA thesis on reindeer in 1974.  She recalls that the Finnish word for reindeer is poro, female is vaadin, calf is vasa, male is hirvas and castrated male is härkä. In Swedish reindeer is ren [VHM:  once again N.B.].

Returning to Germanic terms for "reindeer", Donald Ringe states:

It's true that the -deer part was added later; in the only Old English text where the animal is mentioned, they're just called hra:nas (I'm using the colon to indicate vowel length here).  However, it looks like OE hra:nas is basically a loan from ON hreinn, pl. hreinar made by someone who knew both languages well enough to figure out what the word "should" look like in OE.  Otherwise the ON word has no cognates in other Gmc. languages, so you can't project "*hrainaz" back into PGmc. unless there are outside cognates–and there are not; nothing like "*kroynos" appears anywhere else, and *-oyno- is not a suffix that appears in other words.  It does look like the ON word might be a formation ultimately related to the "horn"-words, but that's as much as can be said.

Pita Kelekna, author of the The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), which I will refer to as HHH below, adds the interesting fact that the reindeer is a European semi-domesticated caribou, which is milked by Sami / Lapp women.  She also dug up this bit of Word Lore:

Further details of what Pita has written here may be found in the following sections of HHH: "The Horse – Sacred Symbol of Rebirth", (p.78), "Steppe Kurgans and Ritual Burial" (p. 79), "Regalia of the Pazyryk Kurgans" (p. 82), as well as her treatment of Elena Kuzmina's Andronovo material (p.55).

Tomorrow night, when you see Rudolph and his companions pulling Santa's sleigh through the sky, you'll know something of their pedigree.

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)
• "GA" (8/6/17)
• "Of dogs and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/17/18)
• "Of ganders, geese, and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (10/29/18)
• "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16)
• "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions" (11/12/18)
• "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)

For all manner of lore about "The Mythic Chinese Unicorn", see Jeannie Thomas Parker's monograph with that title.

[Thanks to Laila Williamson, E. Bruce Brooks, and A. Taeko Brooks]