Old Sinitic "wheat" and Early Middle Sinitic "camel"

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

OC uvulars tended to condition rounding (e.g OC q- becoming EMC kw-). In the case of ʁ-, we sometimes get m- (for a modern-day example, note how惟, which also had a ʁ- onset in Old Chinese, gives an m- reflex in Fuzhou Min). The classic example is 卯, where Pulleyblank once postulated ʁ- and Li Fang-kuei notes lack of evidence for a cluster, such as ml- or mr-, in its Tai loan. Unfortunately Li’s Tai evidence tends to either be ignored (e.g. 丑 ^hr- is often erroneously reconstructed with a nasal ^hn- based on misleading xiesheng evidence) or overly literally interpreted (e.g. 戌 χ- being treated as something like sm-).

麥 məɨkʲ ← ʁək “wheat”, comparable with Proto-Indo-European rugh- (or rw̩kʱ-) "rye", makes far more sense as a loan for 來 ləj ← rəɣː “come”. If the word for 麥 had an original m-, why on earth would the graph have been borrowed for a word with r- as an onset?

As for駱駝 “camel” (EMC lak.da in which the l- comes from earlier r-),  its alternative spelling of 橐駝 (EMC t^hak.da) in interesting. Clauson suspected a Tocharian origin that he thought was lost. The reconstructed Tocharian form partākto “camel” accords well with Chinese apart from the beginning portion. I wonder if 匹 EMC p^hjit was reanalyzed as a measure word as part of the loan process so that we’re really dealing with 匹駱駝 or 匹橐駝? In terms of a form prior to EMC, we would probably have had something like pətrakda, but I’d need to think about that a little more (Pulleyblank notes how OC *-al rhymes, such as 駝, are used for *-a from the 3rd century and occasionally earlier.)

 

Selected readings

• "So spoke Zoroaster: camels and ancient Sinitic reconstructions" (1/13/21)
• "Old Chinese onsets and the calendrical signs" (1/12/23)
• "The Alphabet and the Zodiac" (12/6/22)
• "On the Origins of the Alphabet: The Cycle of Emmer Wheat and Seed/Word Selection within the Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician/Hebrew Alphazodiac and the Chinese Lunar Zodiac," by Brian R. Pellar.  (free pdf)
• "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)
• "Old Ukrainian windmills and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/27/22)
• "Words for cereals" (7/27/16)
• "Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn" (8/8/14)