The Roots of Old Chinese (review)

One of the most important consequences of the last 80 years of research in Old Chinese (OC) concerns the discovery of the morphology of what was regarded as the isolating language par excellence. Reconstructing final consonantal clusters in codas (which carried the rhymes in the major corpus of OC, the poems of the Shījīng) and initial clusters shed light not only on the complex phonotactics of OC but also on the elements of derivational morphology which were responsible for the formation of semantically related words as well as personal pronouns. The main steps in this unveiling process were marked by the works of Bernhard Karlgren (with their culmination in Grammata serica recensa, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1964), Edwin G. Pulleyblank (Middle Chinese, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1984), and William H. Baxter (A handbook of Old Chinese phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992). Whereas all these efforts were focused on phonology and, therefore, any morphological findings were a rather accidental byproduct, Sagart vindicates the figure of Henri Maspero, whose work on OC morphology would have probably reached groundbreaking conclusions if he had not died a victim of the Nazi horror in Buchenwald in March 1945.

In his 1934 article (Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 5.1–112), Karlgren dealt with several morphological alternations within word families, but he did not suggest that affixes were responsible for such alternations. However, in a 1930 article (Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique 23.313–27), Maspero pointed to the existence and productivity of affixes in OC. Ten years earlier, he had also pioneered the research concerning initial consonantal clusters in OC (Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 20.1–124). S summarizes these and other contributions by Maspero (2–4), placing them in the context of the later developments in the reconstruction of OC and the progressive introduction of the concept of affixation as an explanation for what appear as derivational elements employed in both general Wortbildung and in the pronominal system. One of S’s most valuable assets lies in the use of comparative material from other Sino-Tibetan languages which provide further support for some of the proposals made in this book.

After a very informative introduction (1–12), the first half of this book deals with the phonological and morphological aspects of the so-called ‘word families’. S first explains the nature of OC words and roots (13–23) together with their root segmentals and the syllabic structure of OC (24–62). Diverse chapters devoted to several prefixes follow: *s- (63–73), used to derive causative, denominative, directive, and perhaps inchoative verbs, as well as to derive nouns from verbs; *N- (74–78)—instead of the voiced laryngeal *ɦ- as Pulleyblank and Baxter reconstruct—a nasal prefix which assimilates its articulation point to the following consonant and which generates intransitive verbs out of transitive ones; *m- (79–86), which probably marks the controlled or volitional nature of the action indicated with a verb; *p- (87–89), whose function remains obscure; *t- (90–97), deriving mostly intransitive and stative verbs from other verbs, as well as generally uncountable nouns; *k- (98–107), which seems to mark an iterative Aktionsart in many instances; *q- (108–9); and voiced stop prefixes (110).

The reconstruction of infixes in OC is especially interesting for the alleged implications of traditional language types. OC exhibited at least one infix (111–20), *-r-, marking mostly repetitive action in verbs, dual or plural in nouns, and intensive in adjectives. This infix survives in the -l- of some modern Chinese dialects (e.g. Western Mı̌n Jiànōu kau₈-lau₈ ‘to stir’ from kau₈). The study of prefixes and infixes is followed by chapters on initial clusters (121–30), suffixes (131–36), reduplication and compounding (137–38), and issues of etymology (139–141).

The second part of the book is devoted to the study of different semantic fields and grammatical...