Read, from Chinese

from "The Roots of Old Chinese"

"
29 WRITING
The oldest texts written in a form of Chinese are the oracular
inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, the earliest of which are dated
to ca. 1400 BCE. These texts were engraved on animal scapulae and
turtle plastrons by means of a sharp metal instrument. They have
been preserved down to this day thanks to the resilience of the
material support on which they were engraved. It does appear,
however, that apart from these inscriptions, the Shang also wrote
documents on bamboo slips which were perforated and bound together
by a cord. The oracular inscriptions occasionally refer to these
texts, which they designate by means of the archaic graph for
ce4 .. 'register' (see below); it also appears that the writing
brush was in use in Shang times: a graph showing a hand holding
vertically a rectilinear object with three hair-like strokes at the
bottom, and which is the graphic precursor of the modern character
yu4 .. 'writing brush' (see below), occurs in the oracular
inscriptions. For a detailed study of writing techniques in early
China, see Tsien (1962).
29.1 To read
The earliest text occurrence of the verb du2 .. [1023m] *[a]lok >
duwk 'to read' (modern meaning) is in Ode 46:
zhong1 gou4 zhi1 yan2, bu4 ke3 du2 ye3 .. .. .. .., .. .. .. ..
"the words of the bedroom cannot be X-ed"
The meaning of du2 .. in this passage is not certain but is clearly
not 'to read': a meaning like 'to say aloud' or 'repeat', with later
semantic evolution to 'read aloud', then 'read' would make good
sense, especially in view of the yan2 .. 'speech' radical in
du2 .. .. .
It is highly implausible that the speakers of the language ancestral
to Tibeto-Burman and Chinese were literate. WT k-log 'to read',
which has been called a true genetic cognate of the Chinese word, is
probably an old loan-word from Chinese, as shown by the secondary
semantics. Peiros and Starostin (1996) reconstructed 'ST' *lok 'to
recite' to account for the Chinese and Written Tibetan forms (plus
other, unrelated forms in other Tibeto-Burman languages), once again
assuming parallel but independent semantic developments to account
for Tibeto-Burman-Chinese agreement on secondary semantics. In the
meaning 'to read', the Chinese word was also borrowed, but later
(after the change *[a]l- > d-), by Yao: Proto-Yao *dwok 'read'
(Theraphan 1993).
"

The [a] is a tone. Disregard it.
So now we have *dok-/*lok- "read". We need a similar word
for "collect".


Torsten