Guillaume Jacques

André-Georges Haudricourt

How to reconstruct Old Chinese

The reconstruction of Chinese raises special difficulties due to the nature of the writing system, which only provides indirect evidence concerning pronunciation. The reconstructions proposed by Karlgren and Maspero are revisited systematically. Comparative data from other East Asian languages are adduced, with special attention to early loans from Chinese into Vietnamese and Tai languages, which provide decisive evidence on Old Chinese, i.e. Chinese as it was spoken before the Tang dynasty.

The paper argues against reconstructing a contrast between two series of voiced stops (plain vs. aspirated) in Old Chinese. It provides evidence for the reconstruction of a labiovelar series in Old Chinese, and, taking as a model the development of tonal oppositions from syllable finals in Vietnamese, proposes to reconstruct an Old Chinese derivational suffix *s to account for a series of tonal alternations in Middle Chinese.] [1. Introduction] [1.1 Historical linguistics in East Asian and European languages]

The linguistic history of Chinese bears some analogy to that of Romance: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu (from the lower reaches of the Yangtze River) and Min (from Fujian) correspond to the Romance languages; Classical Chinese, the written language of Korea, Japan and Vietnam, played the 1. [The 1972 reprint includes handwritten Chinese characters for all examples in the text (except in §1.2). These had been omitted in the original publication.]

same role as Medieval Latin, the written language of Germanic, Hungarian and West Slavic countries; early loanwords from Chinese into Miao [Hmong], Thai, Vietnamese and Khmer correspond to the ancient Latin loanwords in Germanic, Albanian, Basque and Berber. 2 There are nonetheless two important differences. First, Latin, an inflectional language, can be classified in a straightforward way as a member of the Indo-European family, to which Germanic, Slavic and Albanian also belong but Basque and Berber do not. But Chinese, a language with invariable words [i.e. lacking inflectional morphology], is more difficult to classify: it belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group, but is it as close to the Tai languages 3 as people have long believed? In this type of language, relatedness can only be assessed on the basis of vocabulary, and the number of Chinese loanwords has often been underestimated. 4 In addition, the concept of "mixed languages" was accepted: when language C had vocabulary in common both with language A and with language B, it was said that language C originated in a mixture of a dialect of A and a dialect of B. 5 It seems now that the best hypothesis is that the languages A, B, and C all belong to the same language family. In East Asia, languages would all be linked in a chain as one large family, Tibeto-Burman and Chinese being related to Miao [Hmong] and Austroasiatic, these two to Tai, and the latter to Malayo-Polynesian. The second difference lies in the writing system: Latin is written alphabetically, and its spelling encapsulates phonetic information that was passed down unchanged through the ages, while the early loanwords from 2. The best recent overview on this subject is [START_REF] Forrest | The Chinese Language[END_REF]. 3. [In the translation, the national language of Thailand is referred to as "Thai", and the name "Tai" refers to what Haudricourt called "Common Thai", or "Thai proper" (Haudricourt 1956(Haudricourt , 1970, in this volume), in this volume), a group comprising Thai, Lao, Shan, etc., but excluding the Zhuang (a.k.a. Dioi) group of languages. It is a lower level group than what comes to mind nowadays when using the terms Tai or Proto-Tai.] 4. [Haudricourt here questions the view that Tai and Chinese constitute a subfamily within Tibeto-Burman (or "Sino-Tibetan") (Maspero 1920:22n1).

Haudricourt's proposed chain of relations (next paragraph) excludes Tai from Tibeto-Burman entirely, following Benedict (1942); this view has gained widespread acceptance, although the Tai-Chinese genetic relationship is still defended by some linguists, especially in China [START_REF] Luo | Sino-Tai and Tai-Kadai: another look[END_REF]).] 5. A case in point is H. Maspero's statement (1912: 117) that "Proto-Vietnamese was born from the fusion of a Mon-Khmer dialect, a Tai dialect, and maybe even a third, yet unknown, language."

How to reconstruct Old Chinese (1954) 3

Latin followed the considerable phonetic evolution of the languages of Europe. These early loanwords are therefore quite eroded in comparison to recent loanwords that retain the Latin graphic form. Chinese, on the other hand, is written ideographically, and hence defenceless against phonetic evolution. The official language as it was spoken varied from century to century, either abruptly -as when the location of the capital city changed and a different dialect came to be looked up to as the standard -or gradually, following the phonetic evolution of the language. In fact, since the capital city was located in the North, in an area which was subjected to invasions by Turks, Mongols, Tungus and Manchus, who founded dynasties and became assimilated after a period of bilingualism, the language of the capital city evolved much more rapidly than the languages of Southern China and Southeast Asia. The vulgar pronunciation of Chinese words from the oldest layers of borrowings preserves the original pronunciation better than the more recent learned borrowings as represented by the official readings of the ideographic characters. Analogous cases are exceptional in Europe, e.g. in German, where the word Kaiser [ˈkʰaɪzɐ] 'emperor', an early borrowing from Latin Caesar, preserves the ancient pronunciation better than the proper name Cäsar [ˈtsɛzɐ, a later, learned borrowing of the same word].

[1.2 Resources for the reconstruction of Chinese]

For the reconstruction of the pronunciation of earlier stages of Chinese, we first have at our disposal the tools of comparative linguistics: comparing Chinese dialects with one another, using early Chinese loanwords into other languages, and assessing to what extent the reconstructions are in keeping with the facts observed in neighbouring languages that are genealogically related to Chinese.

[Another resource is the analysis of the writing system.] Most characters are phonograms, which is to say that they work as rebuses. For instance, the ideogram for the word pa 巴 6 bā 'boa' is used as a phonetic component in the characters 把 bǎ 'to grasp', 靶 bǎ 'target', 耙 bà 'harrow', 疤 bā 'scar', etc. However, this writing system goes back to nearly two thousand BC, and some words whose pronunciation used to be similar at that period are now very different. If we could distinguish with confidence between 6. [See the Appendix for a summary of Pinyin and other transcriptions used in the translation.]

André-Georges Haudricourt

4

phonogram and ideogram, this would provide valuable clues concerning the original pronunciation. Unfortunately, this is not the case. For instance, the character 肥 féi 'fat' contains the ideogram for 'boa'; it is difficult to know whether this indicates the idea of fatness that this kind of snake evokes, the pronunciation of a word beginning by a bilabial followed by an open vowel, or both.

It is apparently only in the third century AD that people started to compare the pronunciation of characters by means of the method known as faňqiè ( 反切): the pronunciation of a character is indicated by two others, the first having the same initial consonant as the target character, and the second the same rhyme. For example, the pronunciation of 'boa', pa, is represented by characters pronounced pak and ka. 7 Basing themselves on faňqiè, on Japanese and Vietnamese readings of Chinese characters, 8 and especially on a rhyme dictionary, compiled in 601, but which until recently was known only in a 1008 edition, 9 Henri Maspero and Bernhard Karlgren attempted to reconstruct the pronunciation of Middle Chinese, the language of the Tang period [7th to 9th centuries]. 10 Maspero and Karlgren were not in agreement on everything, but Karlgren's reconstruction is the more advanced and the more systematic of the two, and it is the one which has been adopted by a majority of sinologists. [START_REF] Maspero | Quelques mots annamite d'origine chinoise [Some Annamite words of Chinese origin[END_REF] and [START_REF] Maspero | Le dialecte de Tch'ang-Ngan sous les T'ang [The Chang'An dialect during the Tang dynasty[END_REF]. Those by Karlgren on the same topic are Karlgren (1915Karlgren ( -1926) and Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary (1923). In the latter work the characters are numbered; we cite these numbers as "AA. The first two series are preserved as such in all dialects. The third remained distinct only in Wu dialects as stops with voiced aspiration. Maspero showed, using Chinese transcriptions of Sanskrit words, that the voiced stops became aspirated only toward the end of the Tang dynasty (8th-10th centuries), and that plain voiced stops have to be reconstructed before the aspirated stage (Maspero 1920: 27). A change from voiced stops to aspirated voiceless stops is also found in other languages of Southeast Asia: in Thai 13 and Karen [START_REF] Haudricourt | Restitution du karen commun [The reconstruction of Proto-Karen[END_REF](Haudricourt , 1953 [this volume] [this volume]), voiced stops became plain or aspirated voiceless stops depending on the dialect. One might argue that the divergence between Maspero and Karlgren is negligible, insofar as, in the following set of correlations :

p t k ph t h kh b(h) d ( h ) g(h)
12. The reconstruction of all characters of this period is found in Karlgren's Grammatica Serica (1940). We refer to the numbering in this publication as "GS". [This reconstructed stage, which Karlgren, Maspero, and Haudricourt call "Archaic Chinese", is referred to as Old Chinese (OC) in the present translation.] 13. It is proven in Thai by the use of an Indic alphabet, where the creators of the script could choose between plain voiced and aspirated voiced stops. [The unaspirated voiced letters b, d were chosen to represent the Old Thai *voiced series. See Haudricourt 1948, 1949a.] 14. On the notion of structural gap-filling, see [START_REF] Martinet | Rôle de la corrélation dans la phonologie diachronique [On the role of correlations in diachronic phonology[END_REF][START_REF] Martinet | Function, structure and sound change[END_REF]. 15. To begin with, we can remark how unlikely it is, from the phonetic point of view, that aspirated voiced stops should be more resistant to sound change than plain voiced ones. 16. We follow Karlgren's transcriptions, with the aspiration sign (') replaced by h. [Haudricourt's original Conversely, some characters for words with a stop initial are used as phonetics for words without an initial stop, as in Table 1b.

[Table 1b. Characters for words with an initial stop used as phonetics in characters for words without an initial stop.] AA character: (1923). Each article typically contains a "phonetic series" consisting of a "title character" and the list of the compound characters in which the title character has been incorporated as a "phonetic", that is, as an indication of pronunciation. For each character cited, the dictionary gives a gloss, modern Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, and Karlgren's Middle Chinese transcription ("K-MC"). We have added [START_REF] Baxter | A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology[END_REF] for the "zero" initial of some characters used as phonetic elements. So, in the Tang period, the relationship of the pronunciation of the phonetic element to the character in which it is used would be as in Table 1c [a "zero-initial" phonetic used to write a word with a sibilant initial], but at a pre-Tang period it would be as shown in Table 1d.

K-MC [B-MC] phonetic in: [gloss] K-MC [B-MC]
[Table 1c. Tang period: Characters for words with "zero-initial" in the Tang period used as phonetics in words with affricated or fricative initials.] To question, following Maspero, the antiquity of the voiced aspirate series bh, dh, gh, dzh, dźh... [and hence the existence of an opposition between two voiced series], we must reexamine the entire reconstruction.

AA character K-MC [B-MC] phonetic in K-MC [B-
How to reconstruct Old Chinese (1954) 9

Karlgren worked in a rigorous way, basing himself on the postulates that phonetic laws are fully regular and that structural gaps tend to become filled; he treated the data as if the Chinese language had had a linear development, free from any dialectal influences, over two or three millennia.

[ [START_REF] Tài | gốc và quá trình hình thành cách đọc Hán Việt [Origin and development of Sino-Vietnamese[END_REF]Ferlus 1992: 114). This is how Vietnamese came to encapsulate a complete set of readings for Chinese characters. Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese words are transcribed using the same system because the Sino-Vietnamese layer is now an integral part of the language and has undergone the same phonetic changes as the rest of the system since the 10th century AD.

The IPA equivalents added in this translation follow Ferlus's analysis of rhymes, set out in the appendix to "The short vowels of Vietnamese" (this volume), and Haudricourt's analysis of initials as set out in Haudricourt (1949b). Note that this constitutes an interpretation of the state of the language in the 17th century, as reflected in [START_REF] Rhodes | Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum [Annamite-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary[END_REF]; it is close to the present-day dialects, but none of the modern dialects makes all the distinctions of written Vietnamese.]

[ and unaspirated on the other tones [cf. tʂuan 'food'], which is the general rule for Mandarin reflexes of Middle Chinese voiced stops. In Cantonese, on the other hand, we find two reflexes, as if there had existed a MC ẓ distinct from ḍẓh. But the phonological contrast between the first two words, Cantonese ṣaī and tshaī is obviously not enough to prove that the initials of these two etyma have always been distinct in Chinese. In fact, written evidence shows that this distinction did not exist in the Tang period, and that the variable reflexes in Table 2 are simply due to borrowing between dialects: the indigenous evolution in Cantonese was ḍẓh > ṣ, as in 'firewood'; words like tshaī 'jackal' were borrowed from the dialects of the central or northern capital cities, where the evolution had been ḍẓh > tsh.

[2.1.1.

Karlgren's MC palatal affricates and fricatives]

Should the dźh vs. ź contrast of the Tang period be projected back to an earlier stage? This is doubtful, as this contrast is not found in modern dialects, as shown in Table 3 If we turn to languages that have early loans from Chinese, we find phonemes that are not stops. For instance, Thai, Dioi (Li 1945 28 ) and the northern Austroasiatic 29 languages Lamet (Izikowitz 1951: 171) and Khmu (Roux and Tran 1927: 184) have borrowed the twelve names of the Chinese 26. Martin (1953: 13) mentions that dźh [dʑʱ] was not counted among the initials in the Tang period. We could conclude that ź and dźh [ʑ and dʑʱ] were not yet differentiated at that time. [Neither Karlgren's nor Haudricourt's analysis of the opposition between ź and dźh [ʑ and dʑʱ] is currently accepted. However, Haudricourt's argument concerns the justification or not of a general opposition between a voiced series and a voiced aspirate series, and whether the fricatives/affricate orders contribute to the evidence.] 27. But Benedict does not dare to criticize Karlgren, and hypothesizes that d and g appeared later in Chinese. [START_REF] Shafer | The vocalism of Sino-Tibetan[END_REF][START_REF] Shafer | Problems in Sino-Tibetan phonetics[END_REF][START_REF] Shafer | The initials of Sino-Tibetan[END_REF] does not take Karlgren's reconstructions of Old Chinese into account. 28. Li formulates clear criticisms of Karlgren in this article. 29. [The original article has "Austronesian" here, clearly unintentionally.] calendric cycle. 30 Two of these names have initials that are of interest to us (see Table 5).

[Table 5 All these pieces of evidence converge to show that the consonants that ought to be reconstructed for these "zero" initials are not stops, but voiced fricatives. Karlgren's second argument vanishes and instead of an Old Chinese system such as:

[2.2 Initial consonant clusters]
Another point of divergence between Maspero and Karlgren is the reconstruction of initial consonant clusters. When one finds characters using the same phonetic element which transcribe both words in land words in k-, the two scholars agree in interpreting the kas the reflex of old *kl-. For Maspero, these are words with initial *l-, to which a *k-prefix has been added. For Karlgren, the words with lin Modern Chinese originate from words with a *gl-initial.

Maspero had an advantage in that he made use of Tai evidence 33 (see [START_REF] Maspero | Préfixes et dérivation en chinois archaïque [Prefixes and derivation in Old Chinese[END_REF]). The study of early loanwords from Chinese is indeed the only method which makes it possible to solve this problem. For instance, Vietnamese. 34 The complex initials *kland *plwere present in Vietnamese until a relatively late period, but to this day we have not found either of these initials in any word of Chinese origin. Tai evidence is more revealing. Some examples are shown in Table 7.

33. [Maspero indicates : "The comparisons with the Thai languages are made on the sole basis of Siamese, because it is the only language of the group (apart from Ahom, too poorly known to use) which preserved the initial consonant clusters kl, pl, etc. This method, totally indefensible from the theoretical point of view, [...] was the only one practically possible." "Siamese is given in a transliteration of the written form." (1930 : 321n1)] 34. On the basis of a collection of comparisons of this kind, [START_REF] Wulff | Chinesisch und Tai: sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen [Chinese and Tai: comparative linguistic studies[END_REF] believed that he had demonstrated the existence of infixes in Chinese and in Tai.

[ Only the study of faňqiè spellings that predate the Tang period could indicate whether Old Chinese distinguished *l from *r, as most Sino-Tibetan languages did.

[2.3 An uvular series in Old Chinese]

Proto-Tai distinguishes the velar stops *k and *g from the uvulars *q and *ɢ, and some Chinese loanwords display a uvular, e.g. *ɢam 'gold' and *qaŋ 'pig iron', raising the issue of whether Old Chinese too had such a contrast. Loanwords never constitute decisive proof, but they provide valuable clues that should not be overlooked.

[

The reconstruction of rhymes]

Karlgren's reconstructions of vowels raise even more serious difficulties.

[

Medials]

We know that the syllabic structure of Modern Chinese allows for a medial phoneme: a semi-vowel j, w or ɥ placed between the initial consonant and the main vowel. When they started their reconstructions, Maspero and Karlgren believed that the -wof Modern Chinese could be traced back to the hékǒu [i.e. rounded] category of the rhyme tables 36 , and the -jto a difference of "division" (děng). 37 8 and Vietnamese sen 'lotus' in Table 9). In the third example, we observe both the change *ɔ>*uo>wɒ and the change from *-r-to -i ̯-[-j-] that we have already seen in the word for 'bee' (Table 7).

Another origin for the medial -wcould be found in the breaking of earlier labiovelars into velar+w. It seems that scholars have overlooked the fact that some rhymes 40 in the Analytic Dictionary only appear with velar initials (k, kh, g, x, ng), 41 for instance -iʷei, -ʷɒng, -iʷäng, 50. Karlgren (1940: 71-72) admits that his reconstruction does not account well for the ancient Wu dialect ("Go" is the Japanese pronunciation of 吳 Wú), but concludes that this Wu dialect was a mixture. Is it plausible that the first system of Chinese readings to come to Japan in the 6th century was more mixed than the dialect of the capital in the 8 th century? [START_REF] Demiéville | Review of The Chinese Language (Forrest 1948)[END_REF] to reveal However, beside these reflexes with ɔ, there are also some in a, as shown in Table 11b.

[ 55. [Haudricourt is alluding here to the fact that the numeral 'three' in Chinese has an irregular development. In the Book of Odes, it rhymes as *-ɨm; the expected outcome in Middle Chinese is som, but Baxter's Middle Chinese reconstruction (based on strong evidence) is sam, similar to Karlgren's sâm).

No satisfactory explanation has been found to this day for this irregularity.] 56. [Haudricourt's argument is that the vowel in Sino-Vietnamese readings is ă whereas an earlier stratum of loanwords has ɯ. This is confirmed by examining the Sino-Vietnamese readings of characters in Karlgren believed that front vowels in Old Chinese were always followed by a consonant. However, early Vietnamese loanwords show that one of the reading of the corresponding character (德 dé) in the system referred to as 'Sino-Vietnamese'; in light of Haudricourt's argument, it can be hypothesized that the early Chinese loanword for 'virtue' was carried over into the new (Sino-Vietnamese) system for reading Chinese characters. On the topic of interferences between different layers of Chinese borrowings in Vietnamese, which created exceptional readings within the Sino-Vietnamese system, see Nguyễn Tài Cẩn 1979. A further glimpse into the complex overlay of Chinese loanwords into Vietnamese is offered by Haudricourt's first example, 得 dé 'to obtain': prior to its Sino-Vietnamese reading as đắc [ɗak⁷], this word had been borrowed with yet another vowel (neither ă nor ɯ), as được

[ɗɯək⁸].]
57. [The gloss that Haudricourt cites represents the oldest sense of this etymon, i.e. 'bull, male (animal)', attested both in Old Chinese and as an early Vietnamese loanword. In Modern Chinese, the meaning of 特 tè is 'special, exceptional' (as also in Sino-Vietnamese, where 特 reads đặc [ɗak⁸]). The sense development from 'male (animal)' to 'special' is well documented from the end of the Old Chinese period onward.] 58. [Haudricourt's original mentions five vowels but only lists the first four, as: u, ô, o, å.] -i rhymes [the Middle Chinese rhyme 之 zhī] originated in a central vowel 59 (see Table 13).

[Table 13 These Vietnamese reflexes agree with those found in Proto-Tai for three names of the twelve-year cycle [START_REF] Fang-Kuei | Some old Chinese loanwords in the Tai languages[END_REF], as shown in Table 14.

[Table 14. Proto-Tai comparanda for three names of Earthly Branches.]

GS n° char. K-OC K-MC [B-MC] Proto-

29

Maspero noticed that the four tones of Middle Chinese 65 are not evenly distributed among sets of words written with the same phonetic element [i.e. the words that make up phonetic series]. The pi ́ng and shǎng tones on the one hand, and the rù tone on the other, are never found in the same series. This is not surprising, since the rù tone is the only one [of the three] that occurs on words ending in -p, -t or -k, while the pi ́ng and shǎng tones occur on open syllables, or syllables ending in sonorant consonants. But the qù tone appears in series of both of these categories. Words in the qù tone whose phonetic element is a rù tone character never have nasal finals.

Examples are provided in Table 17.

[Table 17 Karlgren goes further. Noticing that in the oldest poetry book, the Book of Odes, qù tone words which belong to rù tone phonetic series (reconstructed with a final *-g) rhyme perfectly with qù tone words which belong to pi ́ng or shǎng series, he generalized the reconstruction of *-g to all words belonging to these series. The result of this choice was to suppress all -j and -w finals in his Old Chinese system. The word 'cat' [貓 maó, K-MC mi ̯äo, B-MC maew], which sounds so clearly onomatopoeic, becomes Old Chinese *miog (GS 1159c)! Even from the point of view of the rhyme patterns of the Book of Odes, the resulting reconstruction is not satisfactory, as Karlgren is led to conclude that his *-o and *-âg rhymed with each other, and to postulate a dialectal evolution in the most archaic of all classical texts (Karlgren 1940: 31).

65. In the Tang period, according to the rhyme dictionaries, Chinese only had four tones. The loss of the voicing contrast doubled the number of tones from the 9th century on. See Martin (1953: 10-13) for a clear overview.

Vietnamese data allow for the formulation of a different hypothesis. The oldest layer of Chinese loanwords into Vietnamese shows a correspondence between the Chinese qù tone and the Vietnamese hỏi and ngã tones [START_REF] Haudricourt | De l'origine des tons en vietnamien [The origin of tones in Vietnamese[END_REF], as recapitulated in Table 18.

[Table 18 Maspero (1912: 102) showed long ago that these Vietnamese tones come from a final fricative *-h originating in a yet earlier *-s. This word is found in Tai, Khmu and Lamet as mot. According to our hypothesis, we would reconstruct *mwəts or *mots. The lenition of the *-ts finals must have occurred shortly before the Tang period, as during that period we find a whole series of finals that only appear in the qù (not pi ́ng or shaňg) tone: AA -âi, -uâi , -iʷäi, -iʷei, etc. 66

The function of this *-s suffix still needs to be determined. In my opinion we should avoid the excessively "mentalist" approach of Karlgren, when he comments:

We have the word pair âk 'bad' and âg 'to hate'. Here the voiced final -g indicates a verb. But we also had the word pair dhâk 'to measure' and dhâg 'a measure'. Here the voiced final indicated a noun. (Karlgren 1949: 96) The best way to resolve this issue is not to start out by trying to determine which "part of speech" a given word would belong to according to its translation into a European language. What matters is to identify the word's basic meaning [and to distinguish it from the derived meaning]. Thus, in my opinion, the pairs of words mentioned by Karlgren in the above citation participate in a system of derivation, as set out in Table 19.

[ A second major finding reported in this article consists in the hypothesis that there were labiovelars in Old Chinese. This idea was used later by Yakhontov (1960a) and Pulleyblank (1962) to revise the reconstruction of the Old Chinese vowel system, and is the basis for the six-vowel system that is common to the recent systems of [START_REF] Starostin | Реконструкция древнекитайской фонологической системы Rekonstrukcija drevsnekitajskoj fonologicheskoj sistemy [Reconstruction of the Old Chinese phonological system[END_REF], [START_REF] Baxter | A Handbook of Old Chinese phonology[END_REF] and Zhengzhang (2003).

On the other hand, two of the ideas proposed by Haudricourt have been disproved since the time of publication. First, in his discussion of the Middle Chinese initials *dzy-and *zy-, he argues that the contrast is only due to dialect mixture. However, we now know that (i) the phonetic reconstruction of these initials in Middle Chinese by Karlgren was erroneous: it was based on a wrong interpretation of the philological evidence; and (ii) these two initials have entirely distinct origins in Old Chinese, and reflect a genuine contrast, though this contrast is poorly preserved in modern dialects.

or simplifications without incidence for the linguistic argument; we have restored Karlgren's notations without comment in many cases.

In the introductions to his dictionaries Karlgren explained the conventions adopted for the notation of his Middle and Old Chinese reconstructions in articulatory terms. We can summarize some of the possibly unfamiliar conventions as follows (aspirated consonants are not listed):

A For Middle Chinese tones in AA, Karlgren used half-circles before and after the syllable: pi ́ng (平) tone ˓ba; shǎng (上) tone ʿba; qù (去) tone baʾ. No tone mark is used (or needed) on syllables with stop-finals; the latter suffice to identify the rù (入) tone. No tones are reconstructed for OC. Haudricourt often cites Karlgren's OC and MC forms together, with a GS identifier, as [OC form] > [MC form]. Karlgren omitted tonal notation from the MC reconstructions in GS. In cases where the MC forms have tone markings, we assume that these are in fact from AA. Note that no asterisks appear in Haudricourt's article; the present translation follows both Karlgren and Baxter in marking OC, but not MC forms, with asterisks.

Baxter's transcriptions

Reconstructions/transcriptions of Middle Chinese from Baxter 1992, the first complete system published since Karlgren, have been added to the translation to give a point of comparison with more recent work. Although both systems are based on the same written sources, their objectives, and their views concerning the principal source for MC, the Qièyùn, are somewhat different. Where Karlgren claimed to present a strictly phonetic transcription of the dialect spoken in the Tang capital (1957:4), Baxter (1992: 26-31) aimed at a phonologically structured representation of the distinctions made in the Qièyùn, which many believe were somewhat more numerous than would have been found in any single dialect, and of whose precise phonetic values he claimed less certainty. The following illustrate Baxter's transcription (which was designed to be typeable on an American keyboard 69 ) with approximate IPA equivalents: aspiration: h (e.g. ph, th, etc.: IPA pʰ, tʰ, etc.) palatal sibilants, affricates: Cy (e.g. sy, zy, tsy; IPA ɕ, ʑ, tɕ) retroflex stops, sibilants, affricates: Cr (tr, sr, tsr; IPA ʈ, ʂ, ʈʂ) yod: initial: y; medial: j; IPA: j. 69. Karlgren (1954:366) famously characterized phonemic analysis, and notations adapted to the typewriter, as a "craze".

laryngeal: x (voiceless), h (voiced); IPA x ~ h, ɣ ~ ɦ. tones: capital letters at the end of open syllables: pi ́ng (none); shaňg -X, qù -H; rù (stopped) tone is indicated by syllable-final p, t, k.

Pinyin (Mandarin)

For modern Mandarin, Haudricourt used the now obsolete French transcription of Demiéville 1953, which we have abandoned. In the translation, we have systematically provided Mandarin transcriptions, in the standard Pinyin romanization, alongside all Chinese characters cited, as an aid to identification and reference. But because the correspondence of Pinyin to standard phonetic categories is not transparent, we have also provided IPA segmental equivalents (see below) for the few words whose Mandarin pronunciation is under discussion. Pinyin can be recognized by the fact that it appears in italics, without an asterisk, and has tone marks over the vowels (macron for Mandarin tone 1, acute accent for tone 2, haček for tone 3, grave accent for tone 4). In Pinyin, voiceless unaspirated stops (IPA: p, t, k, ts, tʂ, tɕ) are represented by b, d, g, z, zh, j, and voiceless aspirated stops (IPA: pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, tsʰ, tʂʰ, tɕʰ) by p, t, k, c, ch, q. Coronal fricatives (IPA: s, z, ɕ, ʂ, ʐ) are represented by s, z, x, sh, zh. Yod is represented by y (IPA: j).

For modern Cantonese, we have followed Haudricourt in using Karlgren's transcriptions (but with h for aspiration as above).

The editors

[ 3 . 5

 35 Reconstructing a suffix *-s in Old Chinese]Let us now postulate the existence of a suffix *-s in Old Chinese. This suffix could be added to any word: to words with a vocalic or nasal rhyme (the pi ́ng/shǎng series), or with a stop-final rhyme (the rù series). In the latter case, the finals *-ks, *-ts, *-ps changed to *-gs, *-ds and *-bs, and then to *-js, *-ws and *-s. It seems that rhymes in *-ks became vocalized in *-ws / *-js as early as Old Chinese, as they rhyme in the Book of Odes with rhymes ending in *ws and *js which result from the addition of the *-s suffix to words with *w and *j finals. The *-ts finals, for their part, survived longer. One of the characters of the 12-year cycle [viz. the eighth, 未 wèi], hence belonging to the earliest layer of loanwords into Tai (and the only one of these names to be in the qù tone) is reconstructed by Karlgren as GS 531 *mi ̯wəd>mjwə̯ i [B-MC: mjɨjH].

  i, e, ɛ, ø, ɔ, u a a "aigu", an open a, French patte a â â "grave", French pâte (not considering the length of the vowel) u, with the tongue position of ə and half narrow labialisation ɵ ʷ a subordinate labial vowel in Anc. Chin. ʷ The difference between back and front "a"s, which is symbolized in the IPA by script [ɑ] vs typographic [a], was marked by diacritics both by Karlgren and by Haudricourt, distinguishing ɑ̂ from ɑ in Karlgren and in Haudricourt 1954, and distinguishing â from a, in the 1972 reprint and the present translation.

  Karlgren called this language, of the Sui (581-618) and Tang (681-907) periods, Ancient Chinese.] 11. Maspero's two works on Middle Chinese are

11 Moreover, going backwards in time from this Middle Chinese reconstruction and using the phonograms and the rhymes in the Book of Odes [11th-8th centuries BC], Karlgren also 7. [The faňqiè formula for this character is 巴伯加切 |boa uncle add cut|, which translates as: "'boa' cuts up into 'uncle' and 'add'", i.e. "its pronunciation is composed of the initial of 'uncle' and the rhyme of 'add'".] 8. [Local systems of pronouncing Chinese characters became established in medieval times in neighboring countries which adopted Chinese writing; these readings, called Sino-Japanese, Sino-Vietnamese, etc., evolved independently of the pronunciations in Chinese, and are used in reconstructing older Chinese pronunciation.] 9. An edition of this dictionary [the Qièyùn] dated 706 has been discovered in Peking in recent years; an article by Wang Lianceng 王聯曾 on this topic is in press in T'oung-Pao 通 报 [this article was published several years after Haudricourt's article as Wang 1957]. 10. [

  ..". [This dictionary is arranged by phonetic series: e.g. the series 'boa' cited above is AA683.] attempted to reconstruct the pronunciation of the epoch of Confucius, the Zhou dynasty [11th to 3rd centuries BC].12 Karlgren's two reconstructions are linked; we will examine first the initials and then the finals. Arguments for Maspero's three OC series vs. Karlgren's four] Maspero and Karlgren agree in reconstructing three series of stops in Middle Chinese: a series of plain voiceless stops, p, t, k, a series of voiceless aspirated stops, ph, th, kh, and a third series, on whose phonetic reconstruction they do not agree. For Maspero these were plain voiced

	[2. Initials]
	[2.1

stops, b, d, g; for Karlgren they were aspirated voiced stops, bh, dh, gh.

Table 1a .

 1a Characters for words without an initial stop used as phonetics in characters for words with an initial stop. 17 ]

	AA 264 292 249 239 184	character 用 yoǹg 匀 yuń 又 yoù 炎 yań 台 taí	K-MC [B-MC] phonetic in: i ̯ʷongʾ yowngH 筩 tǒng 通 tong 桶 tǒng 誦 soǹg ˓i ̯uen ywin 均 jun ji ̯ə̯ uʾ hjuwH 求 qiu灰 huī ˓ji ̯äm hjem 談 tán 毯 tǎn ˓i yi 治 zhi 治 zhi ̀18 始 shǐ 胎 taī	K-MC ˓dhung ˓thung ʿthung zi ̯ʷongʾ ˓ki ̯uen ˓ghji ̯ə̯ u ˓xuâi ˓dhâm ʿthâm d′hiʾ ˓d′hi ʿśi ˓thâi	[B-MC] duwng thuwng thuwngX zjowngH kjwin gjuw xwoj dam thamX driH dri syiX thoj

note goes on to explain and disambiguate the different meanings of apostrophe in his original transcriptions; these have all been changed in the present translation. In particular, Karlgren's half-circle notations for the tones pi ́ng, shaňg, and qù have been restored; Haudricourt used opening and closing single quotation marks for the latter two, and left the pi ́ng tone unmarked (see Appendix). Haudricourt's remarks on Vietnamese transcription have been moved from the present note to a note introducing Table

2

.] [

numbers in the Table refer to articles in Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary

	425 1006	谷 gǔ 'valley' kuk kuwk 多 duō 'many' ˓tâ ta	欲 yù 裕 yù 爹 diē 移 yí	to desire opulent dad to move	i ̯ʷok i ̯uʾ ˓t′i ̯a ˓ie̯	yowk yuH trjae ye
	17. ["AA"

Table 2

 2

	shows the reflexes of Karlgren's MC initial ḍẓh [ɖʐʱ] in Beijing Mandarin, in Cantonese, and in Sino-Vietnamese. 19,20
	19. In Vietnamese we follow the official orthography (as does Emeneau 1951). Orthographic ư and ơ (with the "horn") represent central vowels: ɯ and ə, respectively. Note that b and đ are preglottalized consonants [IPA ɓ , ɗ ] (see Haudricourt 1950), while d and g are fricatives [ð, ɣ]. 20. [Sino-Vietnamese refers to the reading of Chinese characters by officials and literati in Vietnam in the second millenium. When the Red River delta acquired political independence from China in the 10th century, becoming the Đại Việt, the variety of Middle Chinese spoken in the area by Chinese settlers, and also by an important fraction of the city dwellers, became isolated. Its entire phonological system was eventually absorbed into the Austroasiatic (Viet-Muong) ancestor of Vietnamese, spoken in the Red River delta (Nguyễn

Table 2 .

 2 Reflexes in Mandarin (Mand.), Sino-Vietnamese (SV) and Cantonese (Cant.) of Karlgren's MC words with a retroflex affricate initial dẓ ʰ.]

	AA 1096 firewood 柴 chaí [gloss] [Pinyin] K-MC ˓dẓhai 1024 jackal 豺 chaí ˓dẓhai 1170 slander 讒 chań ˓dẓham 1259 weak, unfit 孱 chań ˓dẓhi ̯an 1062f bed 床 chuańg ˓dẓhi ̯ang dzrjang sàng [B-MC] SV dzrɛɨ sài dzrɛj sài dzrɛm sàm dzrɛn sàn 386 peak 岑 cén ˓dẓhi ̯əm dzrim sầm 1088 to worry 愁 choú ˓dẓhi ̯ə̯ u dzrjuw sầu, xầu ṣ aȗ Cant. Mandarin ṣaī tʂʰai tshaī tʂʰai tsham tʂʰan ṣan tʂʰan~tʂʰuan tshong tʂʰuaŋ ṣam tsʰən 21 tʂʰou 1114 to worship 崇 chońg ˓dẓhi ̯ung dzrjuwng sùng ṣung tʂʰoŋ 834 food 饌 zhuaǹ dẓhwanʾ dzrjwenH soạn tsan tʂuan 877 scholar 士 shi ̀ ʿdẓhi dzriX sĩ ṣi ʂʅ 889 to serve 事 shi ̀ dẓhiʾ dzriH sự ṣi ʂʅ

We observe that the reflex of this initial is regular in Vietnamese, where we find a fricative s [ʂ], and almost regular in the Beijing dialect, where we find an affricate [Pinyin ch

[tʂʰ]

or zh [tʂ]], with two exceptions [Pinyin sh

[ʂ]

]. The Mandarin affricate is aspirated on the pi ́ng tone [marked as "˓"]

  How to reconstruct Old Chinese(1954) 13 It appears from Table3that Beijing Mandarin has exactly the same reflex for MC ź as for dźh. It cannot be argued that the Mandarin treatment [of MC z] reflects an old *dź distinct from *dźh, since its reflex is aspirated in the pi ́ng tone 23 in the same way as the reflexes of the stops reconstructed by Karlgren as bh, dh, gh. Sino-Vietnamese, like Cantonese, shows that dzh was treated as the voiced counterpart of ś. In Sino-Vietnamese, MC ś [ɕ] becomes th [tʰ] 24 [with upper register tone, parallel to the change of dzh to SV th [tʰ] with low register tone shown in Table 3]. By contrast, the voiceless Middle Chinese affricates tś and tśh [tɕ and tɕʰ], respectively, became SV ch [c] and x [ɕ]. 25 Maspero (1920:15) cites a sixth-century author, Yan Zhitui 颜之推, who reported that Southerners confused the following pairs of words zí ̯äk (石 AA 883 [B-MC: dzyek]) and dzhi ̯äk (射 AA 865 [B-MC: zyaeH]) zíe̯ This sound change is part of a larger chain shift that occurred in Vietnamese and affected the Sino-Vietnamese layer as well as the native vocabulary: Proto-Vietic *t and *d changed to ɗ, and *s to t, cf. Ferlus 1982.] 25. On this point, we must correctMaspero (1912: 26, 53), who uses doubtful readings of rare characters.In order to explain all of these facts, a deeper study of the various dialects is required. It would involve examining them from the point of view of linguistic geography and conducting a historical study of the various capital cities and administrative centers whose dialects may have had a leading influence on the other dialects. In any case, it is far from obvious that the contrast between voiced affricates and fricatives goes back to the period of Old Chinese; it can hardly serve as serious evidence for the existence of the contrasts *dz vs. *dzh and *dź vs. *dźh in the oldest reconstructible form of the language.26

	[2.1.2 The argument from "zero" initial phonetic elements: comparative
	evidence]
	AA 211ij 810c 787 811 253k 775, 779 夕席 xi ̄ / xi ́ evening; seat zi ̯äk character [gloss] K-MC 祥 xiańg auspicious ˓zi ̯ang 祠 ci ́ temple ˓zi 像 xiaǹg portrait ʿzi ̯ang 寺 si ̀ monastery ziʾ 袖 xiù sleeve zi ̯əuʾ 781 習 xi ́ practice zi ̯əp	[B-MC] Cantonese zjang tshöng [tsʰoeŋ¹¹] zi tshi [tsʰi¹¹] zjangX tsöng [tsoeŋ²²] zijH tsi [tsi²²] zjuwH tsau [tsɐu²²] zjek tsik [tsik²] zip tsap [tsap²]

.

22

21. [Haudricourt gives the pronunciation tʂʰən for this word.] 22.

[Baxter'

s transcriptions of K-MC ź as an affricate and dzh as a fricative in the table reflect the theory, advanced by Lu 1947 and now widely accepted, that the phonetic values of these initial categories were inverted in traditional Chinese historical phonology, as followed by Karlgren and Haudricourt. The error apparently originated in the late Middle Chinese rhyme tables (see

Baxter 1992: 52-53

).] [Table 3. Reflexes in Beijing Mandarin, Cantonese, and Sino-Vietnamese (SV) of MC ź and dźh.] (是 AA 890 [B-MC: dzyeX]) and dzhie̯ (舐 GS867f [B-MC: zyeX]).

[2.1.1.3 Karlgren's MC dental affricates and fricatives] The same author indicates that Southerners confuse dzhie̯ n (錢 AA 1072e [B-MC: dzjen]) and zi ̯än (涎 AA 235d [B-MC: zjen]). This is indeed what happens in Cantonese (Table

4

).

[Table

4

. Karlgren's MC z realized as an affricate in Cantonese.] 23. [Karlgren's MC tone marks were omitted from Table

3 in

the original article; they have been restored here, including the low open hook for pi ́ng tone, which Haudricourt always left unmarked.] 24. [Let us now examine Karlgren's second argument: the "zero" initial consonants of phonetic elements for which Karlgren proposes older initial *b *d *g *z.

The only argument for Karlgren's "gap-filling" hypothesis is the equilibrium of the reconstructed system. If we look for evidence in languages that are genealogically related to Chinese, such as the Tibeto-Burman group, we observe that Karlgren's *gregularly corresponds to w-, swand rw-, and that his *dand *zcorrespond to j-(in Lushai, Tibeto-Burman *y-[j] regularly changes to z-: see

Benedict 1948:205)

.

27

  . Names of the third and tenth characters of the twelve-year cycle.] It is possible that Thai ñ-[ɲ] comes from an older j-, but ris ancient in Thai. An early loanword is apparently found in Vietnamese for 'left-over, extra': Vietnamese thừa [tʰɯə²], from Chinese 餘 yú (AA 1322b ˓iʷo; GS 82l dio; Sino-Vietnamese dư [ðɯ¹]). With a low register tone, Vietnamese tʰ can only come from an earlier *ź It is true that Vietnamese dcan be the reflex of an earlier *j-(Karlgren's i ̯-) as well as of an earlier *ð-[and therefore Karlgren's reconstruction of a

	425bc	浴 yù 欲 yù	to desire bath	i ̯ʷok	yowk	dục [ðuk⁸]
	char. 1265Agh 惟 wéi 維 wéi GS K-OC AA K-MC [B-MC] Sino-Viet. Thai Dioi Khmu Lamet only, sole to bind ˓ʷi ywij duy [ðʷi¹] 寅 yín 450 *di ̯ər 283 ˓ i ̯en yin dần [ðɤn²] ñi ñien ñi 181l 以 yǐ using ʿi yiX dĩ [ði⁶] ñi 酉 yǒu 1096 *zi ̯og 258 ʿi̯ə̯ u yuwX dậu [ðɤw⁴] rau ru rau 259c 遊 yoú to travel ˓i ̯əu yuw du [ðu¹] rau 1327g 愈 yù to heal, to get better ʿi ̯u yuX dũ [ðu⁶]
	247	閻 yań	surname	˓i ̯äm	yem	diêm [ðiəm¹]
	1348c	越 yuè		overstep, get over	ji ̯ʷɒt		hjwot	việt [viət⁸]
	1345b 1345e	園 yuán, 遠 yuǎn	garden far	˓ji ̯ʷɒn ʿji ̯ʷɒn	hjwon, hjwonX	viên [viən¹], viễn [viən⁶]
	118b	域 yù		domain	ji ̯ʷək		hwik	vực [vɯk⁸]
	524y	位 wèi		position	jʷiʾ		hwijH	vị [vi⁴]
	183	矣 yǐ		particle	ʿji		h i X	hĩ [hi⁶]
	249	又 yoù		again	ji ̯əuʾ		hjuwH	hựu [hɯʷ ⁴]
	1267e	郵 yoú		mail	˓ji ̯əu		hjuw	bưu [ɓɯʷ ¹]
	239	炎 yań		burning hot	˓ji ̯äm		hjem	viêm [viəm¹]
	1138de	悅 yuè 閱 yuè		to pass through pleased	i ̯ʷät		ywet	duyệt [ðʷiət⁸]
	232b	沿 yań		along	˓i ̯ʷän		ywen	duyên [ðʷiən¹]
	30. [These are also called the "Twelve Earthly Branches".]

[ʑ]

. [This entails that this word must have had a *ź initial in the donor Chinese dialect, not a stop.] Even Karlgren's reconstruction for the Tang period, which is relatively late, does not seem to be correct, since it is contradicted by evidence from Sino-Vietnamese, which only came into existence in the 10th century. This can be shown by the data in Table

6

.

[Table

6

. Sino-Vietnamese examples contradicting Karlgren's reconstructions.] AA n° character [gloss] K-MC [B-MC] Sino-Vietnamese *j for these items in Table 6 would be acceptable]. On the other hand, Karlgren's ji ̯is obviously incorrect, and one has to reconstruct *ɣ-, following the work of the Chinese scholars Chao (1941) and Lo (1951). 31

  Karlgren interprets the character 剝 baō 'to peel' (AA 574f påk) as an ideogram formed from [the two co-significs] 彔 lù 'to carve' (AA 574 luk) and 刀 daō 'knife' (AA 975 tâu), whereasMaspero (1930:321) interprets 剝 baō 'to peel' as a phonogram [containing AA 574 luk as a phonetic] and

reconstructs *plɔk in Old Chinese by comparison with the Thai word plɯək 'tree bark'. It seems that, in this particular instance, Maspero was mistaken, since 'to peel' is also found as *pɔk in Proto-Tai, and bóc [ɓɔk⁷] in

Table 7 .

 7 Four examples where Karlgren mistakenly reconstructed consonant clusters (K-OC column).] Karlgren and Maspero agree on the first example. The second, from Maspero, and the last two, from[START_REF] Fang-Kuei | Some old Chinese loanwords in the Tai languages[END_REF], show how little basis there is for Karlgren's reconstructions. It is probably necessary to distinguish clusters in -lfrom clusters in -r-, since data from Tai languages and from Vietnamese distinguish between r and l in old borrowings of words that have l initial in Modern Chinese or in Sino-Vietnamese 35 (Table8).[Table8. Early Chinese borrowings into Vietnamese and Tai, pointing to the presence of r distinct from l in the donor Chinese dialect.]

	gloss to change bee cyclic character 2/12 ʿplaw Proto-Tai character AA K-MC GS K-OC [B-MC] plienʾ 變 biàn 590j pi ̯ʷänʾ 178o pli ̯an pjenH ʿphrɯng 蜂 fēng 31e ˓phi ̯ʷong 1197s pʰi ̯ung phjowng 丑 chǒu 1242 ʿt'hi ̯əu 1076 tʰni ̯ôg trhjuwX cyclic character 4/12 ʿhmaw 卯 mǎo 602 ʿmaw 1114 mlôg maewX
	number character [gloss] GS 1193 龍 lońg dragon li ̯ung>li ̯wong rồng [roŋ²] K-OC>MC Vietnamese Tai GS 185f 闌 lań enclosure glân>lân ràn [ran²] GS 185i 練 liàn to train glian>lien rèn [rɛn²] AA 552 簾 liań screen gli ̯am>li ̯äm rèm [rɛm²] AA 576 轆 lù pulley (MC) luk rọc [rɔk⁸] rɔk (Thai) luwk [B-MC] ljowng lan lenH ljem GS 1032 六 liù six li ̯ôk>li ̯uk *hrok
	(Proto-Tai)

ljuwk

When *r was preceded by a stop, we find s [ʂ] in Vietnamese. For instance the name of the squirrel, prɔk in Bahnar, Khmu, and Siamese, became soć

[ʂɔk⁷] in Vietnamese. The Chinese etyma had a prefix in the cases shown in

Table 9 .

 9 35. [The forms in Sino-Vietnamese, a later layer of borrowings than the forms in Table8, are long for 'dragon', lan for 'enclosure', luyện for 'to train', liên for 'a blind', and lộc for 'pulley'.] [Table9. Chinese borrowings into Vietnamese, pointing to the presence of a prefix preceding *r in the donor Chinese dialect.]

	number GS 928 AA 550 AA 551	character 力 li ̀ 蠟 là 蓮 lián	[gloss] s t r e n g t h w a x lotus	K-MC li ̯ək lâp lien	[B-MC] lik lap ljen	Vietnamese sức [ʂɯk⁷] sáp [ʂap⁷] sen [ʂɛn¹]

  Maspero analyzed ẅ [ɥ] as a combination 36. [In traditional Chinese phonology, rounded rhymes are referred to as hékǒu 合 口'closed mouth', and unrounded rhymes as kāikǒu 开口 'open mouth'.] 37. [On the four divisions děng 等 of Middle Chinese, see Branner (2006), Ferlus (2009) and references therein.] André-Georges Haudricourt 20 of w plus j whereas Karlgren analyzed it as j plus w. Karlgren distinguished between w and u, and between i ̯ [-j-] and i, depending on whether this phoneme belonged to the rhyme or not. In 1915 Karlgren interpreted one of the děng distinctions as a palatalization contrast: kji ̯ən (AA 384; 巾 ji ̄n [B-MC: kin] 'kerchief') vs. ki ̯ən (AA 385; 斤 ji ̄n [B-MC: kjɨn] 'ax'), whereas in 1923 he interpreted it as a contrast in vowel quality: ki ̯en (AA 384; 巾 ji ̄n) vs. ki ̯ən (AA 385; 斤 ji ̄n). However, he did not pursue this line of thought consistently, and he does not hesitate to reconstruct most of these medial phonemes back to Old Chinese.

	In contrast, Maspero explains the genesis of these medials as diphthongizations, on the evidence of loanwords in Thai, 38 as in the
	following three examples:
	character 兼 jian 'to gather' 天 tian 'sky'	GS no. OC > MC GS 627a kliam>kiem [B-MC: kem] GS 361a thien>thien [B-MC: then]	Proto-Tai *kɛm

*tʰɛn

凡 fań 'all' GS 625a bhi ̯wam>bhi ̯wɒm [B-MC: bjwom] *ʿbrɔm A diphthong *ie existed in Proto-Tai; the first two examples therefore testify to a change *ɛ > ie 39 in Chinese. Loanwords into Vietnamese, although they are more recent, illustrate the same change (cf. Vietnamese rèn 'to train' in Table

[

  -ʷâk, -iʷet, etc. 42 38. Of course, Maspero viewed Thai as genealogically related to Chinese, but if one agrees with[START_REF] Benedict | Semantic differentiation in Indo-Chinese[END_REF] that the words at issue are loanwords, their value as evidence to reconstruct Old Chinese is all the greater. 39. [The direction of this change, reversed ("ɛ < ie") in the original article, was corrected by the author in the 1972 reprint.] 40. [In the framework of traditional Chinese phonology, each initial consonant, and each rhyme (vowel + coda) of Middle Chinese has a specific name If we accepet Maspero's hypothesis [of a diphthongization], Karlgren's distinction between -wand -u-, based on the rhymes, might simply be a distinction between a labial phoneme and a labial feature. Sino-Vietnamese offers an argument. In the version of the rhyme table dated 706, there are two -u-[hékǒu] rhymes : -uậ i and -uən, that are distinguished from their corresponding unrounded rhymes. These became -ôi [-oj] and -ôn [-on] in Sino-Vietnamese while the corresponding unrounded rhymes became Sino-Vietnamese -ơi [-ɤj] and -an [-an]. In contrast, those rhymes in -uthat were distinguished only in later rhyme books, such as -uâ and -i ̯uən, as well as the -wrhymes -ʷa and -ʷai, became rhymes with a full labial phoneme [rather than a labial feature] in Sino-Vietnamese, respectively -oa, -uân,oa, and -oai [-ʷa, -ʷɤn, -ʷa and -ʷaj]. 43 Besides Tai and Sino-Vietnamese, which Maspero had already made use of, we will now turn to early Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese (predating the Sino-Vietnamese layer), which until now have been almost completely ignored. Haudricourt translated this word as cure-oreille 'ear-pick'.] 46. [By itself, 婦 fù simply means 'wife; married woman'. The term 'widow' requires a compound with 寡 guǎ 'scant, few; widowed', as 寡婦 guǎfù. The For the -ia rhyme [iə], there is a good correspondence between the Vietnamese borrowings and Karlgren's reconstruction of a medial *-i-. Likewise for the second rhyme, -ưa [ɯə], if we take into account the fact that Vietnamese ư [ɯ] shares its lip position with i and its tongue position with w. However, the third diphthong, -ua [-uə], is problematic [since Karlgren reconstructs a j-like sound whereas the Vietnamese evidence points to a w-like sound]. The parallelism between these three medials is also found in Sino-Vietnamese, where they appear respectively as -i, -ư, and -u [i, ɯ, u]. It seems that Karlgren made a mistake in chronology, reconstructing in the case of the third rhyme a more recent form than for the first two rhymes. In both Old Chinese and Modern Chinese, 務 wù is associated with two sets of meanings: 'strive, exert oneself, be necessary' and 'task, affair', but not 'to get'. The meaning in Vietnamese is 'to buy'.] 48. [That is, Karlgren correctly reconstructed an older form in Old Chinese for the first two rhymes, but in the case of the third rhyme, he projected back into Old Chinese a form belonging to a later period.

	22			André-Georges Haudricourt
	more numerous, which allows for the establishment of conclusive correspondences with Chinese. Let us begin by examining loanwords ending in the diphthongs -ia, -ưa and -ua [iə, ɯə and uə] in Vietnamese, comparing them to Karlgren's reconstructions of the corresponding Chinese words (Table 10). -ưa and -ua, and Karlgren's reconstructions of the Chinese words.] [Table 10. Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese ending in one of the diphthongs -ia, [ɓuə⁴] GS 101f 扶 fú bhi ̯wo ˓bhi ̯u bju vùa [vuə²] to support GS 129 主 zhǔ t ̑i ̯u ʿtsí ̯u tsyuX chúa [cuə³] master GS 129d 註 zhù t ̑i ̯u tsí ̯uʾ trjuH chua [cuə¹] to make a note GS 1109j 務 wù mi ̯og mi ̯uʾ mjuH mua [muə¹] to get 47 GS 1028e 繡 xiù si ̯ôg si ̯ə̯ uʾ sjuwH thùa [tʰuə²] to embroider
	number char. GS 23f 離 li ́lia K-OC GS 2ru 義 yi ̀, 儀 yi ́ngia GS 358j 紫 zǐ tsiar AA 890b 匙 chi ́ shi GS 25a 皮 pi ́bhia GS 874d 碑 beī pi ̯eg GS 49s′ 鋸 jù ki ̯o AA 579j 驢 lǘ GS 84g 貯 zhù ti ̯o	K-MC ˓lji ̯e ngjie̯ ʾ ʿtsie̯ ˓ z i ̯e̯ ˓bhjie̯ ˓pjie̯ ki ̯woʾ ˓ l i ̯ʷo ʿt ̑i ̯wo	[B-MC] lje ngjeH ngje tsjeX dzye bje pje kjoH ljo trjoX	Vietnamese [gloss] lìa [liə²] to leave nghĩa [ŋiə⁶] justice tía [tiə³] purple thìa [tʰiə²] spoon chìa [ciə²] key 45 bìa [ɓiə²] cover bia [ɓiə¹] stele cưa [kɯə¹] saw lừa [lɯə²] donkey
	wet]. 43 . [For ease of reference, here is a summary in table form of the rhymes mentioned, with the addition of the names traditionally given to the rhymes in Chinese phonology: a character that exemplifies the rhyme.] source K-MC [B-MC] rhyme name Sino-Vietnamese early rhyme books -uậ i -woj 灰 hui ̄-ôi [-oj] -uən -won 魂 huń -ôn -ậ i -oj 咍 haī -ơi -ən -on 痕 heń -an late rhyme books -uâ -w a 戈 hū (gē) -oa -i ̯uən -jwin 諄 zhun -ʷa -wae 麻 má -oa -ʷai -wɛɨ 佳 jiā -oai [-ʷaj] [-ʷa] -uân [-ʷɤn] [-ʷa] [-an] [-ɤj] [-on] xi ̯o ʿxi ̯wo xjoX hứa [hɯə³] to allow GS 46z 助 zhù dẓ hio dẓ hi ̯woʾ dzrjoH chữa [cɯə⁶] to cure GS 60p 禦 yù ngio ngi ̯woʾ ngjoH ngừa [ŋɯə²] to prevent GS 102h 斧 fǔ pi ̯wo ʿpi ̯u pjuX búa [ɓuə³] hammer, axe GS 136c 府 fǔ pi ̯u ʿpi ̯u pjuX market (chợ) búa [ɓuə³] GS 136m 符 fúbhi ̯u ˓bhi ̯u bju bùa [ɓuə²] amulet GS 1001 婦 fù bhi ̯ug ʿbhi ̯ə̯ u bjuwX (goá) bụa widow 46
	44. Originally, Maspero did not admit that any borrowings from Chinese in Vietnamese were earlier than Sino-Vietnamese. He acknowledges the existence of some in a short article (Maspero 1916), and mentions a few others

44

Although they are less ancient than loanwords into Tai, they are indicated by a single character. The traditional name of the rhyme has been provided in a note or between parentheses in this section for reference.] 41. [This is a very important observation, which was fully exploited only five years later by

Yakhontov (1960a)

. Most reconstruction systems now include a series of labiovelars.] 42. [Respectively: rhyme 齊 qi ́, reconstructed by Baxter as B-MC: -wej, 唐 tańg B-MC: wang, 清 qi ̄ng B-MC: jweng, 鐸 duó B-MC: wak, 屑 xiè B-MC: chứa [cɯə³] to contain GS 82l 餘 yúdi ̯o ˓i ̯wo yo thừa [tʰɯə²] rest, left-over GS 60i 許 xǔ in Maspero (1920: 61, 93n2). Since then no work has been published on this topic. [Haudricourt was apparently unaware of Wang Li's substantive study, published in 1948, which identifies dozens of older Sino-Vietnamese loanwords, including many of the same items as in Haudricourt's article, and relevant phonological patterns. After Haudricourt's article, few studies have been devoted to older borrowings from Chinese into Vietnamese. Michel Ferlus (p.c.) mentions Nguyễn Khắc-Kham (1971) and David Tryon Ray (1979).] 45. 48 I would propose reconstructing *-ie, *-iʷə and *-wu 49 respectively. Karlgren could object that the Chinese words in Vietnamese do not belong to the dialect that he reconstructs, but to Wu, a southern dialect, to which he attributes the oldest Japanese system for reading Chinese characters, the Go-on 吳音 [Pinyin: wuýi ̄n]. 50 It is indeed very likely that this dialect was early Vietnamese loan goá bụa [ɣʷa³ ɓuə⁴] 'widow' has a Sino-Vietnamese (i.e. later) doublet: quả phụ [kʷa⁵ fu⁴], with the same meaning.] 47. [] 49. [The original Word article has wo; the 1972 reprint has wu.]

  said: "Hypothesizing the existence of several Wu dialects to explain the incoherence in the Go-on readings is entirely ad hoc and utterly questionable. It has no support whatsoever in what we know from Japanese sources concerning the historical conditions in which Go-on was formed." different from that of the capital city during the Tang period, but then it is difficult to understand why Karlgren ignored it when he reconstructed Old Chinese and, in the majority of cases, projected the final -i ̯u back into the Another rhyme, whose reflex in Sino-Vietnamese is ô [IPA: o], is found [as Vietnamese o (IPA ɔ)] in many early loanwords, as shown in Table11a.[Table11a. Karlgren's OC *o/â realized as Vietnamese open o in early loans]

	earliest period.
	[3.2 Back vowels]
	GS 74e 51 庫 kù character K-OC K-MC [B-MC] Vietnamese [gloss] kho khuoʾ khuH kho [kʰɔ¹] 52 warehouse 49u 苦 kǔ kho ʿkhuo khuX khó [kʰɔ³] difficult 60 午 wǔ ngo ʿnguo nguX ngọ [ŋɔ⁴] 7th Earthly Branch 63 兔 tù tho thuoʾ thuH thỏ [tʰɔ⁵] hare 801b 渡 dù dhâg dhuoʾ duH đò [ɗɔ²] ferry 53 戶 hù gho ʿɣuo huX họ [hɔ⁴] family 94z 弩 nǔ no ʿnuo nuX nỏ [nɔ⁵] crossbow 792j 訴 sù sâg suoʾ suH tỏ [tɔ⁵] to express 69l 爐 lú lo luo lu lò [lɔ²] oven 766t 露 lòu ʿglâg luoʾ luH lõ [lɔ⁶]

Table 11b .

 11b Karlgren's OC *o/â realized as a in early loans in Vietnamese and other languages. ] Tibetan comparison shows that this rhyme comes from an older *-a.53 It seems that this rhyme was pronounced as -a in Old Chinese and into the Han dynasty [2nd century B.C. -2nd century A.D] (the crossbow seems to have been invented and diffused at this period), and that this a was gradually raised to a mid-open ɔ in the 6th to 7th centuries (early loans into Vietnamese), then through mid-close o in the 9th century (Sino-Vietnamese), finally becoming -u in Modern Chinese. This brings into question the entire reconstructed vowel system of Old Chinese. For instance, basing themselves on the fact that 馬 mǎ [B-MC: maeX] 'horse' rhymes with -o words in the Book of Odes,Maspero and Karlgren concluded that this word should be reconstructed with an open -ɔ or an -å [ɒ]; however, since at the stage of Old Chinese the alleged rhyme -o was in fact -a, there is no reason not to reconstruct an -a vowel for 'horse'. Additional support for this reconstruction may be found in Japanese uma and Korean mal 'horse'. The final consonant, preserved in Korean, explains why the -a was maintained in this word [in Chinese], and did not become raised.54 Sino-Tibetan comparisons show that some vowels must have become more open, such as 三 san 'three': Tibetan gsum, GS 648 *səm>sâm.55 Karlgren reconstructs the rhyme -ək for both Middle and Old Chinese. However, the reflexes of this rhyme are different in Sino-Vietnamese (first example in Table12) and in earlier loans.

	How to reconstruct Old Chinese (1954)	25
	Sino-
	GS char. 802f 墓 mù mâg K-OC K-MC [B-MC] Viet. muoʾ muH mả [ma⁵] 58 五 wǔ ngo ʿnguo nguX 94z 弩 nǔ no ʿnuo nuX ná [na³] *ʿhna Proto-Tai *ʿhŋa (cf. Khmer ស្ន ា sna) 60 午 wǔ ngo ʿnguo nguX *saŋa (cf. Khmu sŋa)	[gloss] tomb five crossbow 7th Earthly Branch
	51. [Corrected in translation from GS75e.] 52. [In present-day Vietnamese, orthographic kh is pronounced x.]

56

53. For instance, Tibetan lnga 'five', Burmese nga. 54.

[Haudricourt'

s ideas about *-a have been widely accepted, except for this last sentence. It is now generally accepted that 馬 'horse' [B-MC: maeX] should be reconstructed with a medial *-r-in Old Chinese; it is the presence of this medial which prevented the rhyme from changing to -u.]

  Table 12, as compared to the pronunciation of early loanwords. In Sino-Vietnamese, the character 特 tè reads đặc [ɗak⁸] (and has the meaning 'special', not 'male'; see next footnote), and 墨 mò 'ink' reads mặc [mak⁸], both with the vowel a. The word đức [ɗɯk⁷] 'virtue' (德 dé) is considered by Haudricourt as an early loanword, on the basis of its ɯ vowel; if it belonged to the Sino-Vietnamese layer, one would expect the vowel a. Interestingly, đức [ɗɯk⁷] serves as the [Table 12. Correspondences between words reconstructed by Karlgren with the rhyme *-ək and words with two different rhymes in two different layers of Vietnamese borrowings. SV=Sino-Vietnamese.] The preceding observations help to improve the symmetry of the vowel system that is reconstructed for Old Chinese; Karlgren had reconstructed five back vowels, *u, *o, *ɔ, *ɒ, *ɑ 58 and no front vowel in open syllables.

	GS 905 919k 961hʹ 904c	char. 得 dé 德 dé 特 tè 墨 mò	K-OC K-MC [B-MC] Vietnamese tək tək tok SV đắc [ɗak⁷] tək tək tok đức [ɗɯk⁷] dhək dhək dok đực [ɗɯk⁸] mək mək mok mực [mɯk⁸]	[gloss] to obtain virtue male (animal) 57 ink
	This could support the hypothesis of the following evolution: *u>*ɯ>*ə>a.

[3.3 Central and front vowels in open syllables]

  In Baxter's system, the reconstruction for the 之 zhi ̄ rhyme is OC *-ɨ.] 60. The correspondence Tai *sfor Chinese zis expected, as Proto-Tai lacked z-, which appeared later from the cluster *dr-. Another case in point is GS 686 [*d ȋ ̯əp>zí ̯əp], Proto-Tai *sip 'ten'. 61. [In Baxter's system, the reconstruction for the 脂 zhi ̄ rhyme is OC *-ij.] It is possible that this final -j represents the trace of a final *-l or -r which Karlgren did not reconstruct. 64 [3.4 Karlgren's codas in *-g] A more complex problem arises with the codas in *-g which Karlgren sprinkled throughout his Old Chinese reconstructions. Karlgren and 62. Vietnamese -ây [ɤj] represents an earlier diphthong *-ei. For instance AA 776 siei becomes tây [tɤj] 'West'. 63. [This early loanword is written as cỡi cữi by Haudricourt ([kɤ⁶] and [kɯj⁶]); both forms are now rare, the usual form being cưỡi [kɯəj⁶]. The Sino-Vietnamese form for this word is kị [ki⁴].] 64. [The rhyme 歌 gē is now universally reconstructed as *-aj for the Old Chinese stage, in keeping with Haudricourt's insight.]

	How to reconstruct Old Chinese (1954)
	Tai * ʿgəɯ * ʿcəɯ * ʿsəɯ 60 The other rhyme in -i [the Middle Chinese rhyme 脂 zhi ̄]61 was probably a [gloss] 937 亥 hài ghəg ʿɣâi hojX 12th Earthly Branch 964 子 zǐ tsi̯əg ʿtsi tsiX 1st Earthly Branch 967 巳 sì dzi ̯əg ʿzi ziX 6th Earthly Branch front vowel, contrary to what is reconstructed by Karlgren (see Table 15). [Table 15. Examples of probable Old Chinese front vowels.] character GS n° K-OC K-MC [B-MC] Vietnamese gloss 几 ji ̄ 602 ki ̯ɛr kji kijX ghế [ɣe³] chair 眉 méi 567 mi ̯ər ʿmjʷi Mij mầy [mɤj²] 62 eyebrow 561 sí ̯ər sí S y i j thây [tʰɤj¹] corpse Karlgren reconstructs an *-r when an open syllable in Middle Chinese is written using a phonetic element which is also used to write words with a final -*n. Vietnamese does not provide any evidence on this aspect of the reconstruction, because Proto-Austroasiatic *-r and *-l both became -j or zero in Vietnamese. In some cases, the Chinese loanword had a final -j [not found in Middle Chinese], as in the examples in Table 16. [Table 16. Examples of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese providing evidence of a final -j in the donor dialect.] 59. [屍 shi ̄ char. [gloss] GS n° K-OC K-MC [B-MC] Vietnamese 蛾 é moth 2q ngâ ˓ngâ nga ngài [ŋaj²] 摩 mó to grind 17e mwâ ˓muâ ma mài [maj²] 瓦 wǎ tile 20 ngwa ʿngʷa ngwaeX ngói [ŋɔj³] 移 yi ́ to change 3q dia ˓ie̯ ye dời [ðɤj²] 騎 qi ́ to ride lu ghia ˓ghji ̯e̯ gje cưỡi [kɯəj⁶] 63 寄 ji ̀ to send, to give lx kia kji ̯e̯ ʾ kjeH gởi [ɣɤj⁵], gửi [ɣɯj⁵]

  . Examples of qù tone words whose phonetic element is a rù tone character.] Karlgren and Maspero agree that in these cases the words with qù tone must have had a final stop in Old Chinese, and they reconstruct a final voiced stop; the three words in Table17are reconstructed as *iug, *iag and *ˀid.

	example	char. used as phonetic
	char. [gloss] 裕 yù wealth, opulence 夜 yè night 懿 yi ̀ beautiful, exemplary 201 AA n° K-MC [B-MC] 425 i ̯uʾ yuH 187 i ̯aʾ yaeH ˀiʾ ʔijH	K-MC 谷 kuk 亦 i ̯äk 壹 ˀi ̯et	[B-MC] kuwk yek ʔjit

  . Examples illustrating the correspondence between the Chinese qù tone and the Vietnamese hỏi and ngã tones [tones

			5 and 6; etymological C1
	and C2].]
	char. 寄 ji ̀ 義 yi ̀ 露 lù 訴 sù 墓 mù grave, tomb 802f [gloss] GS n° K-OC to send, give 1x kia justice 2ru ngia dew 766tʹ glâg to express 792j sâg mâg	K-MC kji ̯e̯ ʾ ngji ̯e̯ ʾ luoʾ suoʾ muoʾ	[B-MC] kjeH ngjeH luH suH muH	Vietnamese gởi [ɣɤj⁵] nghĩa [ŋiə⁶] lõ [lɔ⁶] tỏ [tɔ⁵] mả [ma⁵]

Table 19 .

 19 Reconstructed OC word-pairs showing basic (underived) and *s-Karlgren omitted tone marks from his MC and Mandarin transcriptions, on the grounds that he had not used the MC tones in reconstructing OC(Karlgren 1940:15). MC reconstructions of the words cited appear with tone marks in AA[START_REF] Karlgren | Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese[END_REF]). Karlgren's transcriptions of these words are listed in the following table.Karlgren restored the tonal notation of MC and Mandarin in the revised edition of GS[START_REF] Karlgren | Grammata Serica Recensa: Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese[END_REF] but did not use them in reconstructing OC. He was convinced that OC had had tones, but believed that they could not be reconstructed on existing evidence. See Comment.]CommentsThis article is one of the most important of Haudricourt's contributions to linguistic science. Together with his article on the origin of tones in Vietnamese, also published in 1954 ("The origin of tones in Vietnamese", this volume), it provides the foundation for the theory of tonogenesis in East Asia. The application of this theory to Chinese not only explains the origin of tones, but clarifies several rhyming patterns found in the Book of Odes (the oldest rhymed text in Chinese), where words having a final stop rhyme with words in departing tone, (去聲 qùsheng) according to their Middle Chinese pronunciation. Haudricourt's theory that the departing tone comes from *-s (see "The origin of tones in Vietnamese", this volume) explains this phenomenon: the words with departing tone rhyming with words in final stop should be reconstructed with a final cluster *-ks, *-ts or *-ps. Besides, Haudricourt's theory of tonogenesis allows for the reconstruction of several *-s suffixes (in particular a nominalizing suffix) which can be shown to be cognate with those found in conservative languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, such as Tibetan. This theory has been accepted by nearly all specialists in Chinese historical phonology, apart from some scholars in China who hold fast to the traditional views of Chinese philology.

	suffixed forms]
	basic *âk *xâu *dâk *ṣi	bad, evil good to measure to send	with suffixed *-s to hate *âks to love *xâus a measure *daks *ṣis envoy
	Karlgren's pair 'evil/to hate' is thus parallel to the pair 'good/to love', and
	his pair 'to measure/a measure' parallel to 'send/envoy'. By not taking
	[Middle Chinese] tones into account in his reconstruction [of Old Chinese],
	he fails to distinguish 'good' from 'to love' (GS 1044 OC *xôg) or 'to send' from 'envoy' (GS 975n OC *ṣli ̯əg), proposing a single Old Chinese reconstruction for each of these pairs. character gloss GS K-OC>K-MC AA K-MC B-MC 惡 è bad 805h ˑâk > ˑâk 209 ˑaʾ<*ˑag ak

67

66. [B-MC: -ajH (rhyme category: 泰 tài), -wajH (夬 guài), -jejH (祭 ji ̀), and -jojH (廢 fèi).]

67. [In GS,

Zhengzhang Shangfang 郑张尚芳. 2003. 上古音系 Sha ̀nggǔ yı̄nxı ̀ [The sound system of Old Chinese]. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaoyu Chubanshe 上海教 育出版社.

Appendix: Transcriptions used in the translation

Haudricourt's general practice is to cite forms as they appear in his sources, but a few exceptions, some motivated by typographical constraints, are mentioned below. In his own reconstructions, unlike Karlgren, he uses y for yod [IPA j]. We have systematically revised Haudricourt's y to j in his own reconstructions and in a few citations. However, y does appear with the value of IPA j in Pinyin transcriptions of Mandarin and in Baxter's reconstructions (see below). In transcriptions in this translation, j is never used for IPA ʤ, ʣ (etc.), and the IPA front rounded vowel y does not appear. Haudricourt's phonetic transcription δ has been replaced by its IPA equivalent ð.

Karlgren's transcriptions

Haudricourt cites character numbers and their reconstructed pronunciations from Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary (AA, 1923) and Grammata Serica (GS, 1940 68 ) (two separate numberings). Each of these dictionaries gives three pronunciations for each character: AA: modern Mandarin/Cantonese/Ancient Chinese GS: Archaic Chinese/Ancient Chinese/modern Mandarin. Note that in the translation, "Old Chinese" (OC) is used for "Archaic Chinese" and "Middle Chinese" (MC) for "Ancient Chinese". Haudricourt cites OC and MC forms using Karlgren's transcriptions, except that he replaces the apostrophes used to indicate aspiration of stops by h, thus: kh, gh, tsh… instead of k', g', t's… (AA) or k', g', ts'… (GS) (IPA: kʰ, gʱ, ʦʰ…). We have followed him in this, and in writing x for Karlgren's χ (AA only) (IPA: x). Karlgren's half-circle notations (see below) for the tones pi ́ng, shaňg, and qù have been restored; Haudricourt used opening and closing single quotation marks for the latter two, and left the pi ́ng tone unmarked. Haudricourt or his typesetters made a few other minor changes 68. Present-day readers are more likely to be familiar with the revised edition of this work (GSR, [START_REF] Karlgren | Grammata Serica Recensa: Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese[END_REF], which has the same character numbering but slightly different transcription conventions.


Alexis Michaud

niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

The facts

In recent years, G. Dumézil and H. Vogt have provided descriptions of Ubykh, a Caucasian language which is probably the language with the largest inventory of consonants in the whole world: 78 (see [START_REF] Vogt | The Phonetic of the Ubykh Language[END_REF][START_REF] Dumézil | Les gutturales de l'oubykh [Guttural consonants in Ubykh][END_REF][START_REF] Dumézil | Contes et Légendes des Oubykhs [Tales and legends of the Ubykh[END_REF][START_REF] Dumézil | Le système des sons de l'oubykh [The sound system of Ubykh][END_REF]. Ubykh only has three vowels, which nonetheless brings the number of phonemes to a total André-Georges Haudricourt 2 of 81. 1 This West-Caucasian language is now only spoken by a few elderly speakers and is about to become extinct. Is there a relationship between the considerable number of phonemes in Ubykh and the fact that this language only has few speakers left?

The decrease in the number of people speaking this language results from a sequence of historical events. When the Russians conquered the Caucasus in 1864, all the Ubykh left their homeland and resettled in Turkey, where they became scattered across different villages among other Caucasians; they are currently abandoning their language and switching to Cherkes or Turkish. However, the reason these historical circumstances have inevitably led to the impending demise of Ubykh is that, before the Russian conquest, Ubykh was already spoken by fewer speakers over a much more restricted territory than neighbouring Caucasian languages. Interestingly, the neighbouring languages, while they have the same vocalic system as Ubykh, have fewer consonants: 57 in the Temirgoi-Abadzekh dialect of Cherkes-Adyge; 66 in the Bjedough-Chapsough dialect; 48 in Kabardian; 65 in Abazine; 49 in Abkhaz-Bzyb (Jakovlev and Ashkhamaf 1941: 424;[START_REF] Jakovlev | Grammatika literaturnogo kabardinocherkesskogo jazyka [Grammar of the literary Kabardino-Circassian language]. Moscow: Izdatel[END_REF][START_REF] Jakovlev | Izuchenie jafeticheskikh jazykov severnogo Kavkasa za sovetskii period [Studies on Japhetic languages of northern Caucasus during the Soviet period[END_REF][START_REF] Vodozhdokov | Russkoadygeiskii slovar[END_REF][START_REF] Genko | Abazinskij jazyk. Grammaticheskij ocherk narechija Tapanta [The Abaza language. Grammatical sketch about adverbs in the Tapanta dialect[END_REF]Zhirov et al. (1956: 597); 2 Khashba 1934).

In the East Caucasus, similar differences are found between Khinaloug, with its 59 consonants (and 18 vowels), which at present is spoken by fewer than 2,000 people, and the languages of the same group spoken in Daghestan, which have 33 to 40 consonants and 6 to 16 vowels (Desheriev 1959: 12-15;[START_REF] Bokarev | Ocherk Grammatiki chamalinskogo jazyka [Essay on the Grammar of the Chamalal language]. Moscow: Izdatel[END_REF][START_REF] Bokarev | Cezskie (didoiskie) jazyki Dagestana [The Tsez (Didoj) languages of Dagestan]. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo[END_REF][START_REF] Zhirkov | Lakskii jazyk [The Lak language], Moscow: Izdatel[END_REF]. Modern Georgian can serve as another term of comparison: it only has 28 consonants (and 5 vowels); Classical Georgian only had two or three more consonants (Marr and Brière 1931: 3-14;Rudenko 1940: 19-27). Now examining another region, North America, great discrepancies are observed in terms of number of consonants as one goes from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In the Atlantic region, languages have under 20 consonants. We can mention, among Algonquian languages, Delaware (14 consonants), and among Iroquoian languages, Oneida (10 consonants). It is only as one draws close to the Rocky mountains that one comes across languages with 1. In general there are more consonants than vowels in a language's phonological system, and languages that are rich in vowels are not good competitors in terms of their total number of phonemes. Thus, Khmer, whose thirty vowels make it one of the richest languages in this respect, only has eighteen consonants, yielding a total of forty-eight phonemes. [START_REF] Meillet | Les langues du monde [The world's languages[END_REF]: 1164, 1180;Lounsbury 1953: 28-32;Hoijer 1946: 58;Reichard 1951: 16-20;Sapir 1909: XV;Boas 1911aBoas : 565, 1911b: 289-291;: 289-291;Barbeau 1951: 108-109).

[Cited by

The historical turmoil involving the indigenous populations of these areas has been greater than in the Caucasus, making it difficult to assess the original numbers of speakers for each language. Looking at language maps, one can nonetheless notice that there are far more languages in Oregon and British Columbia than in the regions of the Mississippi and Saint Laurence rivers [START_REF] Voegelin | Map of North American Indian Languages[END_REF]; a geography of phonemes was attempted by [START_REF] Milewski | Phonological typology of American languages[END_REF].

In the Caucasian area, we drew comparisons across languages that are generally considered to have a common origin, whereas in America the comparison ranged across different linguistic groups. However, the same degree of richness in phonemes is found along the Pacific coast across the most diverse language groups: among the languages mentioned above, some belong to the Athabaskan family, others to Salish, Wakash, or (in the case of Tsimchian and Chinook) North-Penutian.

A historico-geographical explanation: archaism and degree of isolation

Comparative linguists who have worked on Indo-European and Semitic languages commonly believe that rich phonemic inventories go back to the most distant past, that it is a primitive, original trait. Thus, the 28 consonants of Classical Arabic correspond to the proto-Semitic system, which simplified to yield the 22 consonants found in the Phoenician alphabet. The 31 consonants of Sanskrit have long been considered to reflect directly the proto-Indo-European consonant system, whereas only 15 consonants are found in Greek, and 13 in Latin. In this perspective, one could consider a language's richness in consonants as reflecting the archaism which naturally characterizes the relatively isolated populations of mountain areas such as the Caucasus, the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Range.

However, we now know for a fact that the evolution of languages does not consist of a gradual decay, as the romantically-inclined founders of linguistics believed. Phonetic evolution can lead to the appearance of new phonemes, including new consonants. Thus, in modern Arabic dialects, emphatic b, r, l have appeared; these were not present in the classical language (Cantineau 1951: 67). Modern languages of India, such as Sindhi, have acquired preglottalized, implosive 'b, 'd and 'j [IPA: ɓ, ɗ, and ʄ] which were absent in Sanskrit [START_REF] Bahl | Étude de phonétique historique et expérimentale des consonnes injectives en Multani [A historical and experimental phonetic study of implosive consonants in Multani[END_REF], though in the end, these additions were compensated by the loss of other consonants. Romance languages provide better examples: Classical Latin (13 consonants) evolved into French (16 or 17) and Spanish ( 19) [START_REF] Llorach | Fonologia Española[END_REF]. Here again, dialects are richer than national languages: there are 26 consonants in the Vinzelle dialect of French (Auvergne -another mountain area), and, in the Alps, 23 in Hauteville and 28 in Ollon (Haudricourt and Juilland 1949: 128;[START_REF] Martinet | La description phonologique avec application au parler franco-provençal d'Hauteville (Savoie) [Phonological description, with an application to the Franco-Provençal dialect of Hauteville[END_REF]). Among Neo-Greek dialects, Tsakonian, spoken in the mountains of the Peloponnese, has 28 consonants (Trubetzkoy 1949: 173). This suggests that the presence of a great number of consonants can result from an increase in the inventory [and not necessarily from the preservation of a consonant-rich system inherited from the distant past]. In his research on the Salish languages, Swadesh showed that proto-Salish, with its 32 consonants, evolved into 23-consonant Tillamook (on the coast), on the one hand, and into 39-consonant Coeur d'Alène (in the Rocky Mountains), on the other. He also showed how neighbouring languages played a role in this evolution [START_REF] Swadesh | Salish Phonologic Geography[END_REF].

A socio-demographic explanation: equal bilingualism

The above developments show that the historico-geographical accountthat archaic characteristics are preserved due to isolation-is not the whole story. This is especially clear in the case of Oceanic populations: despite their insular isolation, they display great discrepancies in terms of number of phonemes, although they all belong to the Austronesian family (more commonly called Malayo-Polynesian). 3 Some of them are the most impoverished in the world: the languages of Hawaii and Tahiti, with 9 consonants, and of Samoa, with 10 consonants. These happen to be the most important languages of Polynesia: Hawaii, Tahiti and Samoa are the largest islands, and the most populated, leaving aside New Zealand which 3. I raised this issue in an article published in 1946, but made errors in linguistic classification.

was settled more recently [START_REF] Klieneberger | Bibliography of Oceanic Linguistics[END_REF]. On the other hand, in New Caledonia, we find at least seven languages in the Northern part alone, and a total of some twenty dialects. Their consonant inventories range from 30 to 40: voiced spirants, which in the far north of the island (Balade) are only variants, have phonemic status in the centre (Temala, Hienghène); in the south, they are accompanied by corresponding voiceless spirants (Voh, Kone) (see [START_REF] Leenhardt | Langues et dialectes de l'Austromélanésie [Languages and dialects of Austro-Melanesia[END_REF]my own -unpublished -1959 fieldwork notes). It is clear in this case that the richness of consonant inventories is favoured, not by isolation, but rather by the presence of a neighbouring language. This leads us to the topic of bilingualism, since it is through bilingualism that the influence of a neighbouring language exerts itself.

It has long been known that bilingualism can have a great influence on a language. Large numbers of borrowings can lead to the introduction of new phonemes, e.g. the introduction of Germanic h in Gallo-Roman of the Frankish period. The superposition of the phonological systems of two languages can lead to the phonologization of a variant, modifying the evolution of the consonant system. Thus, in Old English, the phoneme f had an intervocalic variant v. The introduction of v-initial Anglo-Norman words created a v phoneme, distinct from f and b, with the result that w preserved its original pronunciation instead of changing to v as it did in the other Germanic languages. The bilingualism of Anglo-Norman times blocked the evolution of w by adding a new phoneme to the system; as a consequence, English is one of the very few Indo-European languages that have retained the prehistorical value of the phoneme represented by w.

Let us first clarify the kind of bilingualism that is involved here. In Europe, most bilinguals exemplify what one could call unequal bilingualism: their mother tongue is a patois, or a local dialect, whereas their second language is a national language -a language of communication or of culture. The two languages of the bilingual person differ in terms of functions, spheres of use and concepts; they are almost untranslatable into each other. This situation is unstable due to the inequality in prestige between the two languages. For instance, in the case of present-day patois, it is common for speakers to abandon them deliberately, with bilingual peasants systematically avoiding speaking to their children in patois. In the case of the Germanic dialect of the Franks, or of Anglo-Norman in England, the prestige language did not take root and the indigenous language -now enriched by borrowings -supplanted it in all its functions. However, there exists another type of bilingualism, equal bilingualism, between neighbouring populations that are in contact and have longstanding ties through exchanges and marriages. In this case, the two languages match each other closely in their use and functions; in their concepts and grammatical categories, they often mirror each other. This is the type of bilingualism that dominates among small language communities (in which there are only a few hundred speakers of a language). Leenhardt has pointed out that in New Caledonia, "possessing several languages is one of the essential components of culture for a traditional Kanak" (Leenhardt 1946: XVII); festivals and marriages always bring together speakers of neighbouring languages. Taking these Oceanic languages as an example, we can try to understand how they have become richer in terms of number of consonants. Eastern Austronesian taken as a whole suggests that the proto-system of consonants had 15 phonemes -a figure close to the 14 found in present-day Fijian-and that there were consonantal losses in Polynesia due to mergers (merger of l with r and of nd with t) and to the loss of ʔ (and the change from k to ʔ) in Samoa, as in Hawaii (where ŋ merged with n) and in Tahiti (where ŋ changed to ʔ). Contrarily, the Polynesian dialect of Ellis and Greenwich has a series of aspirated consonants which constitute a recent development: they originate in the contraction of reduplicated forms (kakalo>kʰalo; popoko>pʰoko; etc) [START_REF] Milner | Aspiration in two Polynesian Languages[END_REF]. In New Caledonia (in the northernmost third of the island), the same phenomenon took place, yielding aspirated consonants; then, under different prosodic conditions, spirants appeared, aspirated consonants yielded unvoiced spirants and unaspirated consonants voiced spirants (p>v, pʰ>vʰ or f, etc). These variants became independent phonemes with the disappearance of the prosodic conditioning which had given birth to them. This is how *puci-cek 'snare, noose' became puye-cek in Hienghène and vuci-yeʔ in Voh; *kape 'place' became kave (variant: kae) in Hienghène and ape in Voh.

This type of bilingualism thus plays several roles: it can contribute to the preservation of the existing system; it can expand the system slowly (through the acquisition of new phonemes from neighbouring languages) or rapidly in cases where phonemic status is granted to an entire series of variants through levelling of prosodic contexts. The latter process is widespread because prosodic features (stress or tones) constitute the most change-prone aspect of the system of a language. And indeed, prosodic features are the first to be modified by bilingualism (and they figure prominently among signs of "foreign-accentedness" 4 ).

We can now contrast this "phonemic-expansion-prone" state of affairs with a "phonemic-reduction-prone" state of affairs. The latter situation is that of populations that are monolingual because they outnumber their neighbours, or because they are completely isolated, or, most importantly, because of the superiority that they have (or believe that they have) over their neighbours, who will have to take the trouble to learn their language. Indeed, they believe their superiority to be so obvious that they need not even bother to articulate properly in order to be understood: they can afford to merge two different phonemes, or to drop a phoneme, without any risk of becoming the laughing-stock of others. This is why the lowest number of consonants is found in the language of the Iroquois, agriculturalist-warriors who terrorized their Algonquian neighbors, or of the people of Tahiti and Hawaii, who combine insular isolation with a degree of demographic development that is considerably greater than in the other archipelagos, which are less well endowed.

Conclusion

The increase or decrease in the number of phonemes in a language thus appears to depend on the proportion of bilingual speakers, which itself depends on the type of relationships established with neighbouring societies, relationships of reciprocity being conducive to mutual enrichment from a linguistic point of view, as well as on the absolute size of the group at issue. In the case of a small group, the entire population inhabits a frontier zone; the larger the group, the lower the proportion of the population living close to the borders. 5

4. [The passage within brackets was added at translation: the original only contains the mention "(accent étranger, etc.)", i.e. "foreign accent, etc."] 5. In this article, the phoneme was considered as an objective, scientifically observable reality, following the general opinion of the linguists of the old continent. It must be pointed out that in the United States some authors, following Chao Yuen-ren (1934), consider the phoneme as an arbitrary construct made by the linguist. In this perspective, it would be necessary to operate with distinctive features instead (i.e. the components of the phonemes). Numerical differences between languages would then be less considerable, or at any rate much more difficult to bring out. I believe this to be an error of

Comments, by Alexis Michaud

Discussion of this article is divided into a brief review of more recent studies about equal multilingualism ( §1), a caveat about the title of the paper ( §2), and a thought about how to test Haudricourt's hypotheses about the mechanism of phoneme loss in dominant languages ( §3).

Equal vs. unequal forms of contact between languages

The importance of bilingualism as a source of linguistic change was stressed by Antoine Meillet, whose works constituted Haudricourt's first introduction to linguistics (Haudricourt and Dibie 1987: 19, 22). But Meillet only discussed a type of bilingualism involving a stigmatized local variety spoken as first language and a prestigious national language spoken as a second language: "There are bilingual people wherever a major language of civilization sets in alongside an earlier, local idiom" [START_REF] Meillet | Sur le bilinguisme [On bilingualism[END_REF]. Haudricourt, on the basis of his observations in Oceania, broadens the typology to include not only unequal bilingualism but also equal bilingualism in neighbouring populations that are in contact and have longstanding ties through exchanges and marriages. 6 The distinction made by Haudricourt between symmetrical and asymmetrical forms of language contact can be said to have become an uncontroversial part of the linguist's toolbox. Research into types of exchanges between languages of Oceania confirms the strong link between method on the part of these authors; however, discussing this issue would take us too far from the topic of this article. [Editors' note: it would be a misinterpretation to read Chao's article as claiming that the phoneme is an arbitrary construct. The main point of Chao's article is the following: "We may desire to have (a) phonetic accuracy, or smallness of range of phonemes, (b) simplicity or symmetry of phonetic pattern for the whole language, (c) parsimony in the total number of phonemes, (d) regard for the feeling of the native speaker, (e) regard for etymology, (f) mutual exclusiveness between phonemes, (g) symbol reversibility, and these motives are often conflicting" [START_REF] Yuen-Ren | The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems[END_REF][START_REF] Yuen-Ren | The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems[END_REF]: 28).] 6. Haudricourt's terms are "bilinguisme non égalitaire" and "bilinguisme égalitaire"; this could be translated in English as "non-egalitarian bilingualism" and "egalitarian bilinguism" (the choice of terms in François 2012). The terms chosen here, distinguishing "unequal bilingualism" from "equal bilingualism", are used e.g. by [START_REF] Winford | An introduction to contact linguistics[END_REF].

social situations and types of linguistic convergence and divergence, and the great difference that exists between equal and unequal bilingualism. Beyond phonemic inventories, recent studies shed light on the effects of contact on lexicon and syntax. "While word forms are perceived as emblematic of place and diffuse to smaller social circles, linguistic structures are left free to diffuse across much broader networks. Ultimately, the effects of divergence and convergence are the end result, over time, of these two distinct forms of horizontal diffusion" (François 2011, 175 and references therein).

Haudricourt points out that situations of equal bilingualism are uncommon in the societies most commonly studied by linguists. Today, such situations are becoming ever scarcer: there remain few small-scale societies that "are economically self-sufficient, and proudly form the center of their own social universe without needing to defer unduly to more powerful outside groups" [START_REF] Evans | Dying Words: Endangered Languages and what they have to Tell us[END_REF]. The Melanesian societies observed by Haudricourt have seen much change in the half-century since the publication of his paper, in particular community mergers, expansion of pidgin (Bislama in Vanuatu), and a rise of asymmetrical bilingualism in the context of modern formal education.

"A long lasting bias toward cultural differentiation of local communities has led historically to the linguistic mosaic observable today. This traditional fostering of diversity was correlated with a principle of egalitarian multilingualism. But while these ancient social attitudes have survived to this day, the linguistic diversity of northernVanuatu has already begun to erode, due to various recent social changes. These changes have reshaped the language ecology of the region and already resulted in the partial loss of earlier linguistic diversity. While northern Vanuatu is still linguistically diverse today, the increased imbalance of power among languages potentially makes the weaker varieties vulnerable in the decades to come." (François 2012, 85)

Number of phonemes and number of speakers

The title of Haudricourt's article is highly provocative. In a sense, it is a private joke between Haudricourt and Lévi-Strauss: the article was written at the sollicitation of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was launching the anthropology journal L'Homme, and Haudricourt facetiously wrote his contribution à la Lévi-Strauss. He confesses that he would never have dared submit it to a linguistics journal (Haudricourt and Dibie 1987: 55). The title, which relates demography to phonological structure, is a pastiche of Lévi-Strauss's titles that bring together distant concepts: "Socialism and Colonization" (1933), "Reciprocity and Hierarchy" (1944), " Structure andDialectic" (1956), or Race andHistory (1952). In detail, Haudricourt's article does not propose a simple relationship of inverse correlation between the number of phonemes in a language and the number of its speakers: the real factor is not the number of speakers by itself, but the type of sociopolitical relationships between users of languages in contact. The two types of factors brought out by Haudricourt are "historicogeographical" and "socio-demographic"; this is by no means a matter of demography alone. It is important to clarify that Haudricourt does not hold the untenable view that the sizes of speaker populations, in and of themselves, determine rates of language change. Linguistic facts are of such a degree of social complexity, and have such historical depth, that their reduction to two figures -number of phonemes, and number of speakers -cannot yield insights into the great diversity of phonemic inventories in the world's languages (as emphasized e.g. by Trudgill 2011:156).

A detailed critical review of statistical searches for a correlation between number of speakers and number of phonemes is proposed by [START_REF] Moran | Revisiting population size phoneme inventory size[END_REF]

Decrease in phonemic inventories in dominant languages

One of Haudricourt's suggestions in this article is that speakers of dominant languages feel so confident of being understood that they hypoarticulate to an extent that leads to some confusions between phonemes, gradually decreasing the phonemic inventories of dominant languages. [START_REF] Trudgill | Linguistic and social typology[END_REF] expresses reservations about this proposal. The next step appears to lie in experimental verification.

" [F]orming hypotheses from case-based observations is a reasonable first step in investigating these kinds of questions, but the crucial next step in a scientific approach to language study is careful empirical analysis of as much data as can be gathered that bears on the question at hand. Without this further step, the claims of Haudricourt, Trudgill, and others can be no more than hypotheses-albeit thoughtful, refined, and educated hypotheses." (Moran et al. 2012: 878) This appears as a highly interesting topic for phonetic studies, and a great challenge, as it requires both (i) a degree of technical precision that is best obtained in a phonetics laboratory, with specialized exploratory techniques, and (ii) the successful elicitation of specific sociolinguistic attitudes that are difficult to reproduce in the unnatural setting of a recording booth.