Khmer historical phonology

[This is a guest post by John Whitman]

I have a Thai student writing a dissertation on Khmer historical phonology who wrote a qualifying paper using the Zhenla Fengtuji 真臘風土記, a late 13^th century gazetteer on Cambodia written by one Zhou Daguan, who was sent to the Angkor court as an emissary. The most cited source on this text is a 1951 translation by Pelliot There is a more recent English translation by Harris (2007), but it relies on Pelliot for linguistic matters. Pelliot identifies and transcribes 37 of the 44 Khmer words in the text.

Like Chinese (but probably slightly later), Khmer was undergoing loss of its voicing distinction in obstruents, but in a different way: Old Khmer voiceless obstruents became implosives, and voiced obstruents voiceless. For reasons that he doesn't explain very well, Pelliot assumed that Zhou was using early Mandarin values for his Chinese transcription characters, with aspirated Chinese initials representing Old Khmer voiceless initials, and unaspirated initials to represent OK voiced initials. This leads to chaotic correspondences with the Khmer material.

My student has shown, I think, that Zhou used the MC voicing contrasts to represent the Khmer contrast. This shouldn't have been surprising, because (1) the best evidence is that Zhou came from Zhejiang (2) my sense is that MC voicing distinctions were used for "official" linguistic purposes well after the contrast was lost in northern speech. For example the Hongwu zhengyun 洪武正韻, which was compiled in almost exactly the same period, retains the voicing distinction.

But there are a few problematic cases, and I'd like to ask you about one of them. 孛 is used twice to represent an initial labial stop, both in labial/liquid clusters, but one has Old Khmer initial voiced *b, the other voiceless *p. Zhou uses a fanqie spelling for clusters like this:

Zhou                      Old Khmer

孛藍                      pram 'five'

孛賴                      brah 'holy one' (< Skt.)

The spellings are otherwise very precise, but just in this case, the voicing distinction on the initial is not represented. My specific question about this is whether 孛 was used (e.g. in Buddhist texs) to represent the first member of an initial consonant cluster in transcriptions of foreign words, and thus here might have been used for both /p/ and /b/. My second, more general question is whether anyone has written, in English or Chinese, an good description of (foreign language) transcription character practice, from Han times on down. It would be a massive task, but it seems like something of that sort ought to be out there.

 

Selected readings

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• "On the propinquity of Vietnamese and Sinitic" (5/11/18)
• "Vietnamese in Chinese and Nom characters" (5/28/13)
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• "Bahasa and the concept of National Language'" (3/4/13)
• "Mutual intelligibility" (5/28/14)
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
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• "A variable, transcriptional Chinese character" (2/24/14)
• "'Horse' and 'language in Korean" (10/30/19)