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

 455  The Pai-lang Songs the Earliest Texts in a Tibeto-burman Language...   proposed identifications of Pai-lang words with Proto-Tibeto-Burman and Proto-Lolo-Burmese words. Coblin noticed the predominance of examples where the Tibeto-Burman onset * r corresponds to his reconstructed tran- scriptional onset * l . The explanation is evidently not Tibeto-Burman lamb- dacism or Chinese rhotacism, nor even that his Old Chinese * r and * l recon- structions are largely reversed (as they are), but simply that Chinese already had only one liquid onset by the time of the transcriptions (as is the case in Middle Chinese and most Chinese languages and dialects today other than Northern Mandarin). Appendix E gives a short list of reconstructed Pai-lang forms with comparison to Proto-Tibeto-Burman or other early Tibeto-Bur- man forms, and some comments mainly on the phonology of the transcrip- tions and rhymes. It is clear from the rhymes that the transcriptional language — the first century western Szechuan dialect of Chinese — was much closer to Middle Chinese than to the mostly unperiodized theoretical constructs that have been presented as ‘Old Chinese’ reconstructions by scholars working in the frame- work of the traditional ‘rhyme-table’ system 1 . While [Coblin 1974, 1983] and [Starostin 1989] in particular have commendably made some attempt to reconstruct specific periods of Late Old Chinese based on specific texts or types of texts, their reconstructions are nevertheless at variance in many respects with the Chinese dialect used to transcribe the Pai-lang songs. More work is therefore needed. Finally, the traditional view that Pai-lang is a Lolo-Burmese language continues to be supported by a few specifically Lolo-Burmese isoglosses, es- pecially * j w /* jim [ 淫 ] ‘house, home, family ( 家 )’, 息 * siʔ /* sik ‘tree, wood ( 木 )’, and 理 * rja ‘hundred ( 百 )’. There would not seem to be any particular reason to think that the Pai-lang language is especially close to Proto-Tibeto- Burman, other than the relatively early date of the songs. However, this issue too needs careful attention by Tibeto-Burmanists. In conclusion, this study has only been able to propose a basic frame- work that can be used to reconstuct the language of the Pai-lang songs. Nevertheless, it is obvious that these songs, the earliest texts preserved in any Tibeto-Burman language, contain extremely valuable material for Late Old Chinese and Early Middle Chinese reconstruction, as well as for Proto- Lolo-Burmese reconstruction. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the Pai-lang songs are very fine pieces of literature that deserve to be studied further as literature. 1 See [Beckwith 2004].