Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 452    Christopher I. Beckwith Chinese linguistic influence on the Pai-lang language as a whole 1 and partly to T’ien Kung. The reason for the presentation and performance of the songs was to receive from the Chinese emperor the favors that the Pai-lang king wanted, so it is not surprising that some purely Chinese political expressions occur verbatim, or nearly so, in the Pai-lang texts as well as the Chinese versions, to achieve the desired panegyric effect. It may be surmised that these elements were added by T’ien Kung, presumably with the help of the Pai-lang poet. The discovery that the songs not only rhyme, but they do so in unusual, highly artistic ways, has made their reexamination far more involved than I had originally expected, and of quite a different nature. This study therefore represents only some preliminary comments on the poems and their language, amounting essentially to suggestions for further detailed work on them. It is devoted almost entirely to an attempt to reconstruct the rhymes and reveal some of what I believe to be the art with which the poet crafted them. All three songs contain many examples of the unique Pai-lang internal rhyming devices. They do have end-rhyme (the only thing that is considered to be ‘rhyme’ in normal Classical Chinese poetry), but their end-rhyme patterns are not isolated. The first song (see Appendix A) has a head-syllable rhyme pattern that is very closely tied to its end-rhyme pattern. The second song (see Appendix C) also has regular end-rhyme, again following an interesting pat- tern, but different from that in the first song. The third song (see Appendix D) has end-rhyme, following yet another pattern, and a related head-syllable rhyme scheme, as well as a complex, very carefully constructed scheme of internal rhymes. Unfortunately, it also has much more Chinese in it than the other songs, but this material — along with the rhyme system represented by the songs as a whole — might perhaps be helpful to anyone who would like to reconstruct the Chinese dialect of Shu (Szechuan) in the first century ad . Considering the poor quality of the Chinese translations purely as poetry, one can only sympathize with the Pai-lang poet, who was clearly very talented and must have found it extremely difficult to work with a weak poet like T’ien Kung. If both songs were actually composed by one bilingual person — pre- sumably T’ien Kung — one can only sympathize even more strongly with whichever of his personalities was on the losing side of the battle. In order to develop a large enough fund of rhymes to be able to use them as a control in reconstruction it is necessary to use all clear rhymes, wherever 1 In addition to numerous Chinese loanwords, Pai-lang appears to have VO syntax, one of the distinctive features of Chinese (rather than OV syntax, which is all but universal in Tibeto-Burman). However, the texts are poetry, written by a highly skilled poet; it is quite possible that he modeled his syntax on Chinese specifically for these poems.