Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log The complexities of a basic word for "barbarian" in Sinitic and neighboring languages

The complexities of a basic word for "barbarian" in Sinitic and neighboring languages

Language Log 2020-06-28

There are scores of words in Sinitic languages that regularly get translated into English as "barbarian".  One of the most conspicuous and pervasive is hú 胡, which we have often discussed on Language Log, perhaps most extensively and intensively in "The bearded barbarian" (8/26/15), with detailed etymological, orthographical, morphological, and philological notes.

The term came up again more recently in "'Carrot' in Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Sinitic, Vietnamese, etc." (6/26/20), where we found it as the distinctive modifier of the Sinitic word for "carrot" (húluóbo 胡蘿蔔 / 胡萝卜).

[N.B.:  Several of my most respected colleagues in Chinese Studies do not permit their students to translate hú 胡 or any of the other Sinitic terms for non-Sinitic peoples as "barbarian".]

In reading PRC written materials, one must be wary of all the words in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) that are written with hú 胡, since the character simplification promoted by the communist government has collapsed at least six other traditional characters into this one (see here), the most interesting of which is the first syllable hemimorpheme of the Sinitic word for "butterfly" (húdié 蝴蝶 / 胡蝶), cf., "'Butterfly' words as a source of etymological confusion" (1/28/16).

For the record, here are the pronunciations of hú 胡 in various Sinitic topolects:

 

The Middle Sinitic reconstruction of hú 胡 is /ɦuo/ and the Old Sinitic reconstruction is

(Baxter–Sagart): /*[ɡ]ˤa/
(Zhengzhang): /*ɡaː/

Source

The "carrot" post elicited this learned comment by Jongseong Park:

In Korean, 나복 蘿蔔 nabok (or 라복 rabok according to North Korean norms) is an obscure term for white radishes of the type sometimes known as daikon, which is normally called 무 mu in Korean. I had never seen the term before and am confident that most Koreans are not familiar with it either; from a quick search I see that it is glossed as an older term from the Joseon period (1392–1910) or as the name used in traditional Korean medicine.

The Korean word for carrot is 당근 danggeun. Interestingly, 표준국어대사전 Pyojun Gugeo Daesajeon ("The Great Dictionary of Standard Korean") does not give any Chinese characters for this term, although the form looks obviously Sino-Korean. Other sources give the Chinese characters as 唐根, literally "Tang (as in the dynasty) root".

The Pyojun Gugeo Daesajeon lists 호나복 胡蘿蔔 honabok ("barbarian nabok"), 홍나복 紅蘿蔔 hongnabok ("red nabok"), and 홍당무 紅唐무 hongdangmu ("red Tang mu") as synonyms, though the last term can also refer to radishes (i.e. the type familiar to most English speakers) or beetroot. Again, I had never heard the terms honabok or hongnabok before.

Hongdangmu is often used in the metaphorical sense, to describe someone blushing, for instance. Growing up I understood it as a synonym for danggeun, the usual word for carrot, and only later found out that it could also refer to radishes or beetroot.

The element 당 唐 dang ("Tang") points to carrots coming into Korea via China. The element 호 胡 ho ("barbarian") also appears in a lot of terms referring to what are considered Chinese imports, such as 호떡 hotteok (a type of sweet pancake that is a popular street food in Korea, literally "barbarian rice cake") or 호밀 homil (rye, literally "barbarian wheat").

Interestingly, pepper is 후추 huchu in Korean and is from Sinitic 胡椒, which in regular Sino-Korean would be hocho. The medical treatise 諺解胎産集要 언해태산집요 Eonhae Taesan Jibyo (1608) writes it as 호쵸 hochyo. So in this latter case, the element ho is actually present in the etymon rather than being the result of the Korean naming strategy for things coming via China. The same for 호두 hodu "walnut", deriving regularly from earlier Sino-Korean 胡桃 hodo as a result of the term being nativized and no longer being felt as Sino-Korean. Since 胡蘿蔔 is already present in Sinitic, honabok would be another such case. However, while the use of the element ho in Korean and 胡 in Sinitic are obviously parallel, many of the common examples of the former seem to be native derivations rather than terms loaned from Sinitic.

Even the original form of hú 胡, before it was picked up by the character simplifiers to represent at least six other different morphemes, was used for three basic meanings:

1. "dewlap"
A derivative is 鬍 (“beard”) (Schuessler, 2007).
2. "steppe nomads"
Etymology unknown (Schuessler, 2007).
3. interrogative word ("what; why; how")
Cognate with 何 (OC *ɡaːl, “what; where; why; how”), Tibetan ག་ན (ga na, “where; how”), Tibetan ག་རུ (ga ru, “to where”) (Schuessler, 2007). See 何 (hé) for more.

As explained in "The bearded barbarian" (8/26/15), 1. and 2. are probably linked, because the massive, full beards of western peoples may have reminded East Asians of dewlaps.  3., on the other hand, would be the borrowing of a substantive to stand for a grammatical particle (in this case an interrogative).

 

Selected readings