On 2006-01-31 14:16, tgpedersen wrote:
>>Of course a loan from OC to
>>_PIE_ can be ruled out for chronological reasons (as opposed to,
>
> say, a
>
>>loan from some eastern IE dialect into OC),
>
>
> Please elucidate.
The term Old (or Archaic) Chinese as used by Pulleyblank, Baxter and
many other authors refers to Chinese as spoken from the end of the
second millennium to the third century BC, i.e., roughly contemporaneous
with the Zhou Dynasty. OC phonological reconstructions are inherently
tentative and controversial, and vary considerably from author to
author, since they are based mostly on risky extrapolations from Late
Middle Chinese, patched up with whatever can be inferred from sources
such as the rhymes in the Book of Odes (Shijing). Of course if anything
was borrowed into PIE (or pre-PIE) from some linguistic ancestor of
Chinese, that ancestor was not OC but some kind of pre-Proto-Chinese
predating the reconstructible stages by (at the very least) a couple of
millennia. In fact, you would need something like the chronological
horizon of Proto-Sino-Tibetan if you want to look for a possible source
of loans into PIE, but PST words (to the extent that they can be
reconstructed at all) looked very differently from their OC descendants.
Loans from Old and (mostly) Middle Chinese into _Tocharian_ are rather
well known. As for the other direction, there are quite a few suggested
Tocharian loans in Chinese (and I think there are a few Sogdian ones as
well). These are the "eastern" dialects I had in mind.
Piotr