John E. Hill
September 2002
Following Edwin
Pulleyblank’s Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle
Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin (1991), I have used the
abbreviation ‘EMC’ in these notes to indicate the reconstructed pronunciations
of words in ‘Early Middle Chinese.’
As Pulleyblank makes clear ibid,
p. 20, he believes it is not “possible at present to offer any complete
reconstruction for stages of the language earlier than the Qieyun, first
published in 601 CE.”
The reader should, therefore, take into consideration that, while these reconstructions often provide valuable clues to original place names, the language had obviously changed considerably between the time of Gan Ying’s report to the Emperor in 125 CE and the time of the Qieyun. Furthermore, the reconstructions do not indicate possible dialectical differences between the language as spoken in Central China and the usage amongst soldiers and settlers on the northwestern frontiers.
I should add here that I have not relied on Pulleyblank’s reconstructions alone
but have also made use of those in Bernhard Karlgren’s Grammata Serica
(1940) and the new encyclopaedic dictionary, Le Grand dictionnaire Ricci de
la langue chinoise (2001).
Preface
1. For the domestication of the horse see: “First to Ride” by William
Speed Weed in Discover Magazine (March, 2002), pp. 54-61. For a
thought-provoking, up-to-date discussion of the early development of the land
routes see: “Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History” by
David Christian, Journal of World History 11.1 (2000), pp. 1-26; or download
from the Journal of World History website at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jwh/.
2. See Sarianidi (1971), pp. 13-14.