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The historical phonology of "Han", the main Chinese ethnonym

Language Log 2020-04-14

[VHM:  This is a guest post by Chris Button.  It will be primarily of interest to specialists in the phonological history of Sinitic.  Since there are quite a few such scholars on Language Log, I expect that it will occasion the usual lively debate that follows posts on such subjects.  It will also undoubtedly be of interest to historical phonologists in general, as well as to a broad spectrum of Sinologists and their colleagues focusing on other Asian cultures and languages.]

I've been thinking about the etymological associations of Hàn 漢. It's often reconstructed with an aspirated coronal nasal as *hn-, in spite of the Middle Chinese x- then being somewhat unexpected (Baxter and Sagart put it down to dialects), largely on the basis of the *n- in 難. But its etymological association with 艱 and its velar *k- make this problematic. A regular source of MC x- would be *hŋ- which then at least would be a velar onset to parallel *k-. The *n- in 難 could perhaps be put down to some sort of assimilation of *ŋ- with the *-n coda (one might compare 般 *pán < *pám where there is dissimilation of the coda unlike in its phonetic 凡 *bàm) . At the very least, 漢 most likely went back to something like *hŋáns and then *xáns with a velar onset and the -s eventually becoming qu-sheng. An alternative option is rhinoglottophilia whereby a *ʔ became *n- as attested in cases like 憂 *ʔə̀w and 獶(夒) *nə́w a I mentioned here.

The one thing that can be said for sure is that it was some kind of back onset. Speculating wildly, that does of course make me think of the Mongolian title "khan", but I doubt there is a convincing historical association to be made there. Just wondering if you had any thoughts on the matter?

I noticed that Schuessler doesn't reconstruct it with "n" but with a fricative of sorts. He could be right about the fricative, but I think he's wrong about the phonetic in the graph not playing a phonetic role. The etymological associations between 難 and 艱 and others in the word family show that it was  undoubtedly phonetic. He also doesn't recognize the schwa/a ablaut so I suppose for him only the codas match. For me the problem is purely the onset.

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