--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- On Wed, 4/22/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> >
> > E.G.Pulleyblank: The Hsiung-nu
> >
> > 'Only direct linguistic evidence can be of value in solving the
> > problem of the Hsiung-nu language. Unfortunately there is only a > > small body of material available for investigating this question. > > There are many Hsiung-nu words in Chinese transcription but most
> > of them are proper names or titles of which the meanings are
> > unknown. The corpus of words for which Chinese translations are
> > provided is quite limited. Efforts to connect these words with
> > the major languages that later dominated the eastern steppes have
> > not been very successful.
> >
> > One word which early attracted attention was ch'eng-li, EMC
> > thraïn,j-li < *thárn,-ri (?), "heaven". Every one agrees that
> > this must be etymologically the same word as Turkish tängri,
> > Mongol tenggeri, tngri. Pelliot (1944) has, however, given good
> > arguments for thinking that it is a loan word in both Turkish and
> > Mongolian. If this is correct, the word is probably one of the
> > many cultural elements borrowed from the Hsiung-nu by the later
> > steppe empires and may actually be evidence that the Hsiung-nu
> > language was not closely related to either Turkish or Mongolian.'
> But couldn't you just as easily maintain it's a borrowing from
> Chinese tien "heaven"?
Edwin G. Pulleyblank
Central Asia and Non-Chinese Peoples of Ancient China, p. 523
'The view that before their rise to power on the steppe the Xiongnu
had long been neighbours of the Chinese and were not newcomers from
north of the Gobi is supported by evidence of Chinese influence that
we find in their state organization. The full title of their ruler,
Chengli gutu chanyu .. .. .. .. .. .., of which the first four
characters are translated into Chinese as Son of Heaven, is clearly
borrowed from China. Chinese directional color symbolism appears in
the four divisions of their army at the siege of Pingcheng in 201
B.C., with white horses on the west, dappled (bluish) horses on the
east, black horses on the north and red horses on the south. This was
another enduring organizational trait that was passed on to later
nomadic empires (Pritsak 1954. Ma (1962) thinks that directional
colour symbolism was an age-old tradition of northern peoples and
explains the terms Red and White Di in this way as part of his
argument that the Di were Turkish. It is possible but by no means
certain that the terms Red and White referring to sections of the Di
reflect the same directional colour symbolism but, if so, it must
reflect a Chinese, rather than a steppe, tradition. Association of
the four colours, green/blue, red, white and black with east, south,
west and north, as well as with the annual revolution of the seasons,
spring, summer, autumn, winter, sometimes with the addition of yellow
for the centre, was part of very ancient Chinese cosmological
ideas. It was incorporated in the speculations of the Five Phases
School that originated with Zou Yan in the Warring States period and
flourished in Han but it certainly goes back much earlier. As applied
to military organization we find it in the description of the army of
Wu that confronted Jin at Huangchi in 482 B.C.in Guoyu 19.). Long
standing Chinese influence may explain why the Xiongnu were much more
successful in state building than the Xianbei, the fraction of the
Eastern Hu who succeeded them as masters of the steppe in the second
century A.D.54 (On Xiongnu titles passed on to later nomad overlords
of the steppe see Pulleyblank 1962).'
Torsten