Notes for a lexicon of classical Chinese. Volume I

840 Pages·26.963 MB·Chinese-English

by  Cikoski John.

NOTES FOR

A LEXICON OF CLASSICAL CHINESE

volume I
:

occasional jottings on textual evidence
possibly applicable to some questions of
palæo-Sinitic etymology, arranged in
alphabetic order by Archaic Chinese readings

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(cid:38)(cid:29)
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by

John Cikoski

8

THE COPROLITE PRESS SSAAIINNTT MMAARRYY’’SS,, GGEEOORRGGIIAA
This manuscript contains work in progress at an early stage.
Excerpts of reasonable length may be quoted in fair use, but
it is not to be republished, nor to be reproduced by
photocopy or other means without the author’s written
permission. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Copyright © 1994-2011 by John Cikoski All Rights Reserved

Version 14 Draft 7 Tweak 144
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i Alveolar initials 224
The project ii
A note on romanization iv T 224
To the reader over my shoulder v T’ 248
Use with caution vi S 255
What is Classical Chinese? vi D 281
Classical Chinese is not wênyen viii D’ 302
What kind of lexicon? ix N 309

Common sense about Chinese writing x
Apical initials 325
Philology versus sinology xiii

The job and the tools xvi
t 325
Rime books, 反切 spelling & pronunciation xviii
t’ 360
Classical Chinese word-books usable with caution xix
s 380
Etymology is not meaning xxi
ts 424
Reanalysis changes meaning abruptly xxi
ts’ 454
Foreign and dialect loans complicate development xxii
d 470
Graphic variation adds to uncertainty xxv
d’ 488
Textual corruption falsifies evidence xxvi
n 528
Rime and parallelism can correct errors xxvii
l 537
The Chinese exegetic tradition xxviii
z 567
Character dictionaries xxx
dz 578
Graphs are inconsistent evidence xxxi
dz’ 588
Grammata Serica Recensa xxxvi

After GSR xliii
Retroflex initials 609
Comparands xlvi

Comparative reconstruction xlviii f 609
Exceptions to standards of word-order li tf 614
Loose ends in the word-class system lii tf’ 616
Morphological reduplication liii dF’ 618
Separability of binomes lvi
Voiced labials lvii Labial initials 622
Tonogenesis lix
No use waiting for sinology to get better lx p 622
If you are reluctant to utilize linguistics lxi p’ 655
If you are willing to utilize linguistics lxii b 663
It’s all guesswork lxv b’ 665
Structure of entries lxvi m 694

Vocabulary notes 1 Knacklaut initial q 729

Undetermined Archaic initials 762
Velar initials 1

Appendices 763
k 1
k’ 71
I. Abbreviated text names 763
x 92
II. Abbreviations used in definitions 764
g 113
g’ 142 III. Extensions to the GSR system 766
ng 196 IV. Mimetics and comparands 767
PRINCIPLES OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM

1. Don’t never assume nothin.

2. If it don’t make sense, you ain’t got it right.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book might not have been possible without the people and institutions named here.
First and foremost is a peculiar institution to which many scholars my age owe a debt, and yet I have never seen it acknowl-
edged. I mean the Cold War. The Pentagon colonels who decided that training young GI’s to become translators was a wise use of
manpower, the legislators who voted tax money to support language study so that a few Americans would know the language of
any country we decided to make our enemy, the administrators whose paperwork yielded checks for GI Bill recipients, Fulbright
scholars or what not, all were even more basic to my education in Chinese than the actual teachers and schools who taught me. A
US government agency not part of the Cold War complex was the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded one of
my years of research in the far east.
The Institute of Far Eastern Languages (IFEL) at Yale, as wantonly destroyed by the wilfulness of Kingman Brewster as ever was
any ancient statue by a mad mullah, was a marvel of efficient and deeply effective language teaching, thanks mostly to its moving
genius, Robert Tharp, but also to the patience and dedication of the instructors whose lot in life was to make Chinese-speakers of
an endless procession of eighteen-year-old American boys. One of those instructors was Parker Huang, a native Cantonese-speaker
whose Mandarin was more than good enough to qualify him to teach it; he offered an optional course in Cantonese to Air Force
students of whom a dozen or so of us took it. After a few weeks the class had dwindled to me alone, and at that point it somehow
changed from a language course to one in T`ang poetry, on which he was a notable expert. A year at IFEL taught me that studying
Chinese, if properly done, is as hard work as digging ditches, but also that an alert digger can find gold and diamonds.
In operational training I came under the aegis of George Sing, whose idea of training you for a job was to set you to doing it.
While struggling with low-level cryptanalysis under his helpful supervision, I was persuaded against my sceptical inclination that it
is possible to discover and learn the meaning of a word one had never heard of in a cryptic text in which one had not even suspected
its existence. That was the best training I could imagine for textual analysis of dead languages.
After a tour of operational duty overseas, I was assigned to a training center. There it was decided that too little time remained
of my enlistment to justify sending me through instructor training, so it looked as though I would sweep floors and run messages
for those ten months until I met the third of my USAF angels, Charles Semich. He put me to work as curriculum clerk and factotum for
the advanced course he and other experts were teaching. One day I replaced one in the classroom so he could keep a dentist’s ap-
pointment, and from then on I was employed full time in teaching advanced translation to translators more experienced than I
was. The first few weeks of that made ditch-digging seem easy, but by the time I returned to civilian life I had discovered that one
could learn a subject by teaching it.
My dissertation advisors, Hugh Stimson and A.C. Graham, were among the few non-dogmatic sinologists I have met. Graham
in particular I consider second only to Wang Li as premier sinologist of the twentieth century. My students at Berkeley in the 1970’s
taught me a great deal in their Socratic way, things I would not have learned otherwise.
The great textual scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cleared away much of the rubbish and undergrowth that
cluttered the texts that have survived from ancient China; I have tried to repay them by developing my own reading power to the
point where I no longer need follow them blindly. The great translators into English, in particular Legge and Waley, provided models
of subtlety and accuracy that I would not have considered attainable in the days when I churned out translations lickety-split on a
military typewriter. Without the reconstructed Archaic Chinese of Bernhard Karlgren I would have found the Classical Chinese
word-class problem much harder going, and might not have solved it at all.
With this book in particular I benefited from discussions of phonetics and phonology with my wife, Professor Mary Beckman of
the Ohio State University, whose editorial skills also have made my prose less unintelligible. Myriad errors of my own remain. Credit
entropy for them.
ii
THE PROJECT
Earlier drafts of these notes have circulated for the past decade among longtime associates of mine
who knew what I had been doing, how and why. When a former student put the previous edition of
them on his website they became available to the general public, for whom background information
might be helpful.
I call this the Comprehensive Classical Chinese Lexicon Project. It began in 1961 when I started
keeping notes of Classical Chinese words. It moved closer to its present form of a database in 1967,
when I substituted indexed 3 X 5 cards for looseleaf notebooks. That card catalog expanded through
the 1970’s, partly with the help of some of my students at the University of California, Berkeley, until
it became unwieldy.
The advent of the personal computer facilitated the collection of vocabulary into a relational
database. It began on an Apple II in 1979, into which I entered data from those cards. But at 1 MHz
clock speed, 48K memory and 50K floppy disk capacity, that machine could neither hold much data
nor search it very effectively. The software was my own, written partly in BASIC and partly in 6502
assembly language. That was version 1.
Porting version 1 to a CP/M machine with two 8-inch floppies with 1 MB capacity gave version 2,
which also used homemade software. Version 3 used commercial software running under DOS 2.2 on
a PC XT clone with 20 MB hard drive. Version 3 ran faster on a 33 MHz 486 machine under DOS
3.3. Porting to Windows 3.1 on the same machine made version 4, the first in which, thanks to a
program called Fontmonger, I could display and print Chinese graphs, as well as the GSR roman-
ization in its own typeface. Installing the Japanese-language versions of Windows and Paradox made
version 5, the first one that allowed me to display and print thousands of Chinese graphs (using their
Japanese readings as keyboard input). Porting to Access from Paradox made version 6. Version 7
returned to English-language Windows using TwinBridge Chinese Partner, a program that despite its
many shortcomings tripled the number of Chinese graphs I could display and print.
In 1998 I first circulated a printed collection of my notes (I had been printing drafts for my own use
since 1994). By then I had enough words to begin the second stage of the project, in which I looked
for plausible sets of comparands. I found several hundred sets, enough to convince me that the
classical historical-comparative method of philology could be applied to old Chinese despite the
phonetic opacity of its script. Conversion to Unicode and addition of Konjaku Mojikyo led to more
new versions, and the word-collection of the first stage continued through that in parallel with the
word-collation of the second stage.
The third stage of the project is now under way; it requires that the texts themselves be entered in a
database, divided into utterances within which each word is identified both by lexical identity and by
local function. I have begun by providing a translation for each text, done to a uniform standard. But
I avoid the usual approach of translating one text at a time. Instead I move around from text to text,
concentrating on a particular word or idiom or turn of phrase as I find it in any text. The result will be
that I will not have a finished translation of any one text for years to come. (Some texts on which I
have been working for decades, such as 國語, 呂氏春秋, 論衡, 淮南子, and 戰國策 are well along
by now, but I see no reason to rush any of them. The integrity of the project’s method requires that
the entire corpus be treated as a single body of data, which means that technically speaking no text
will have been properly translated until all have been.)
Stage one, the collection of vocabulary, and stage two, the collation of vocabulary into sets of
comparands, now go much more slowly, since advances in them depend on feedback from stage three.
That has reduced the addition of new vocabulary to these notes to a trickle. The philological work
goes slowly (as of course it must if conducted with due caution) while the lexicographic work
attendant on translating texts proceeds apace. I had thought to issue addenda and corrigenda to the
iii
previous edition as separate files because in the layout of previous drafts the formatting made it
laborious to fit a new entry in without uglifying the page beyond my tolerance. I have since come across
a few tricks of formatting and layout that reduce white space and allow insertion of new entries
quickly with little or no disruption.
This edition adumbrates my first major step toward a fundamental reworking of Karlgren’s Archaic
Chinese, namely the elimination of initial clusters. Also, the dictionary portion of volume I is now
more than half again as large as in the previous edition. This expansion comes less from new words
than from addition of citations from CC texts showing usage of the words. Most citations are entered
more than once, but if each is counted only once, ignoring duplications, the quantity of translated CC
cited here approaches a hundred thousand words. That may be only of the order of one percent of the
total extant text from the period, but since it consists of utterances taken from many texts to illustrate a
wide variety of words it should be enough to give aspirant readers a fair choice of windows through
which to examine the corpus. Even those hopelessly mired in the nineteenth-century mode of “reading
characters” might be able to benefit from these examples.
In addition to the brief excerpts I favored in previous editions, in this one I have added longer
excerpts, as well as a few self-contained anecdotes and medium-length poems each entered under the
name of a person with whom it is associated. I divide the anecdotes into manageable chunks, and
further subdivide those chunks as illustrative citations redundantly entered under noteworthy words
they contain. This allows scope for learners to practice the reading of connected CC text with the aid
of this type of dictionary while letting them cross-check their own work. I also give, in appendix 4 to
volume I, an example of the practical use of comparands in resolving the apparent vagueness of
mimetic binomes into something more specific than what can be had from most commentators. I have
made changes and additions to the tables of comparands and phonetic elements, corrected a few errors
and omissions in the 反切 tables, and entirely rewritten the introduction to show my materials and
methods and their factual and procedural justifications in more detail.
Two things have gradually impressed themselves on me as this work has progressed. One is the
surprising power of the seemingly very simple method of cross-comparison in search of regularities as
applied to a database of a textual corpus of a dead language. Others wiser than I will no doubt have
recognized this all along, but I have found that being able to ask not just What does this word mean?
but other questions like What other words mean something like this one? and What other words sound
similar to this one? and What other words show syntactic behavior like this one? and even vaguer
inquiries like What other words remind you of this one? amounts, in practice, to being able to address
queries to a native speaker–or rather in this case an early draft of a primitive mockup of a crude
approximation of a virtual native speaker. Other linguists may be able to go much farther in this
direction in Classical Chinese.
The other thing that impresses me is the growing validation, emerging like a fossil under chisel and
brush, of the traditional view of old Chinese as severely monosyllabic and uninflected. I approached this
investigation not just willing but eager to find inflection, derivation, affixes, ablaut, agglutination,
teratogenic hyperpolysynthesis–any device reported to have been used in any language at any time or
place will find welcome in my picture of CC so long as I see good evidence for it. I see no more
evidence for any of them now than I did forty years ago, and on one tenet for which I was firmly in the
anti-traditionalist camp, that of the existence of polysyllabic roots in proto-Chinese, wave upon wave of
evidence has forced me back until now it seems that even George Kennedy’s classic examples, words
like butterfly and bat, are compounded of monosyllables. (I hasten to add that they are not synonym-
compounds, and I remain unconvinced that there are no polysyllabic roots whatever.)
This work is no less “in-progress” now than it has been. If the previous edition might be regarded as
twenty percent advanced toward its goal, this edition would still be less than twenty-five percent.
iv
Little progress has been made on the sorting-out of dialects that must be done before etymologies can
even be attempted. Work on comparands of mimetics, promising as it seems, is just beginning. Species
and artifacts are still mostly ill-identified. Some assignments of comparands that were made early in
the second phase of the project should since then have been altered in the light of further evidence,
but have not been. Add to that that indozens of cases it appears an errant mouse-click must have

sent a word to a destination other than what I had meant it for, and you have, if not an utter jumble, at
least a few sets of comparands whose labeling must be taken with caution. If I had time to sort them
out, it would not surprise me to find hundreds of words assigned to blatantly unsuitable comparand-sets.
My proofreading is no better than it was, so be alert for mipsrints.
These are still, as they have always been, my own private notes addressed to myself for my own use.
Nonetheless, the additions I have made are substantial enough to justify my suggesting that, despite
their errors and omissions, these notes have advanced to a point at which they can be the reference of
first resort for readers of Classical Chinese who know English. Rough and gappy as they still are, they
are for the most part a better source of lexical information than the dictionaries we have been using.
A claim of that sort ought to be subject to critical review, and accordingly I now open these notes to
citation and public criticism. The stipulation that this work is not to be cited without permission has
been removed from the copyright notice of this edition.

John Cikoski, Saint Mary’s October 2008

[June 2009] Draft seven of version fourteen is the last edition of these notes that will be issued in the
form of a book. Traditional books are inefficient at conveying the mass and variety of information a
modern reader of CC needs; it is past time to enter the hyperlink era. This edition differs little from
the one of October 2008: some errors, egregious or subtle, have been rectified, loose ends of discussion
have been tied up, and a few hundred words and a few dozen pages of examples have been added. Only
volume one has been updated; the comparands in volume two and English index in volume three are
obsolete beyond the power of addenda and corrigenda to repair.

[December 2009] Layout & proofreading redone, 21 pages of notes & citations added.

[August 2010] Same version, 14.7. No new philology. 77 pages of newly added citations.

[March 2011] Same version, 14.7. Errors, omissions & infelicities corrected. Many new citations,
including long excerpts sliced & diced for cross-reference.

A note on romanization

I romanize modern standard Chinese in pinyin with tone marks thus: First tone is #, second tone is @,
third tone &, fourth tone $. To refer to sinologists’ readings of Classical Chinese in Mandarin I follow
their current custom of using pinyin without tone marks; for that limited purpose I use sans serif type.
My own use of Mandarin readings of Classical Chinese words is limited to proper names and technical
terms that casual readers might encounter in sinological works for the general public. Since most such
have used the Wade-Giles without tone marks that was standard for a century, I followthatconvention,

so present-day sinologists’ Xunzi is my Hsün-tzû; their Chunqiu is my Ch`un-ch`iu. For such names and
terms I give romanization followed by Chinese graphs on their first occurrence; for subsequent
occurrences I give only the Chinese graphs.

To romanize Classical Chinese I use the idiosyncratic quasi-phonetic alphabet of Bernhard Karlgren
(see below p. xxxvi). For phonetic representation of other languages I use the International Phonetic
Alphabet.