Notes
to
The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu
Second Edition
(Extensively Revised and Expanded)
©
John E. Hill
July 2003
As a guide to the identification of ancient names in Chinese I have
usually given the reconstructed pronunciations of them as proposed by various
scholars.
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 Ban Yong’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.
Although the reconstructions
go back to the late 6th century, and are frequently useful in helping to
identify place names, it must be kept in mind that there have been phonetic
changes over the intervening centuries that we can only guess at.
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).
I
have generally included the reconstructions of “Archaic Chinese” according to
Karlgren’s earlier Grammata Serica in
which he attempts to reconstruct pronunciations back to the Chou period (up to
circa 220 BCE).
These reconstructions of “Archaic Chinese” are indicated by the use of a
preceding asterisk *. These are sometimes followed by Karlgren’s “Ancient
Chinese” which are his reconstructions for the period equivalent to
Pulleyblank’s EMC. Also, as entries are often difficult to find in Karlgren’s
book, I have included his numbering system preceded by “K.”, so a typical entry
from his work will look like this: K. 139s *g’ân / ɣân.
I have not indicated the
modern spoken tones of Pinyin as they do not apply to ancient written Chinese.
While I have avoided using
Chinese characters and diacritics in the Text itself, the other sections of
this document will require the enabling of “Unicode” Chinese characters. Most
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Many characters with diacritics
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reason I have had to use a different font than the standard “Times New Roman”
which I have used in the Text. It is called “Georgia Ref” and is used in these
Notes, the Bibliography and Appendices. This has allowed me accurately
represent most diacritics employed in the quotes with the exception of the “d”
and “t” with a curved accents over them, which I have indicated by a “ đ
”, and a “ ť ” respectively.
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