Reviews Of Different Books

Page 32

278 REVIEWS In his personal communication of 30th September, 1968, Rona-Tas was kind enough to comment in detail on several points that I had raised in my Language review; and while it will unfortunately not be possible to enter here upon a detailed treatment of all these, I would still like to take the opportunity of the present notice to comment briefly upon a few of these items. Rona-Tas suggests in his letter that my remarks concerning his etymology #199 (cf. my review, p. 163) are somewhat wide of the mark; and at this point, while I still feel that a number of complex early Altaic connections between forms is involved here, I must agree with him that my own etymological suggestions, in my review, actually oversimplified this very difficult problem, and thus tended to obscure rather than to clarify the issue. In the case of Tibetan gur 'tent' and its kin, we are surely in the presence of an ancient Altaic mot voyageur, the peregrinations of which have embraced a range of time and space so vast that they will probably always remain beyond the grasp of our comparative grammar and its methodology. In the case of #222, Rona-Tas agrees that "the preradical of dpar 'form, pattern, printing-block' could be theoretically something similar to bskal-pa or bca-'chin" - in other words, nothing more than an orthographic flourish, and totally without importance for the history of the form in Tibetan. "But", he continues, "in this peculiar case I see in the dialectal reflexes /xyar/ an argument in favour of the dp-initial which gives regularly xy- while p- does not." Again, I am afraid the somewhat oversimplified presentation of my review (p. 162) tended to obscure rather than to clarify the history of this important word. It was an oversimplification to write, as I did, that there is no evidence for the d- of dpar in the Tibetan dialects. The dialects show evidence for an earlier initial consonant cluster in this word. But whether the elements were d and p, as the received orthography would have us believe, is another question. I continue to find it difficult to disassociate this Tibetan form from Middle Chinese *p"an 'id.'. Even if the Chinese form was not borrowed directly into Tibetan (which is still what I believe happened), its shape may very well have influenced the configuration of the Tibetan form, as well as its eventual semantic extension--for I think that we must all agree that there are very few historical facts as well established as the fact that printing is a Chinese invention, not a Tibetan one! The final -r going with Chinese -n has excellent parallels in a number of Chinese loans into Old and late Old Japanese; details would take us too far afield, but the materials noted long ago by S. Yoshitake, BSOS 7 (1935), 940-41, come immediately to mind in this connection. In the case of the initial, of course, it would have been the combination of *p followed by the labial semivowel -- for *pw is as much a consonant cluster as dp or gp or any other sequence of two non-vocalic segments - that was originally borrowed into some early Tibetan dialect; either in this dialect or in some other one closely related to it, the form was shifted to initial x*-; and later still, the orthographic combination dp was employed to write this initial of the Tibetan form, the form that of course directly underlies the Monguor forms xuor and xuar cited and studied by Rona-Tas. The point is worth making again, and I would hope here with more clarity than in my original review, if only to obviate any possibility of survival for Shafer's thesis that the initial dp- of Tibetan dpar is to be taken as an indication that the technique of wood-block printing originated not in China, but in Tibet. And of course the existence of WT dpe 'pattern, model, type, form, custom, example', that is borrowed as Monguor xue 'parable, comparison, story', cannot but have played an important role in the development of the Monguor and other non-Tibetan versions of this word. About #464 (cf. my p. 153), Rona-Tas writes me, "the problem with reGul 'winter' is the final -1, and it seems to me that this is due to a contamination with Mong. egul. If so, then egul has influenced an earlier Monguor *reGun and not a Tibetan rgun. Naturally the Mahavyutpatti form is of the highest importance and shows that the Monguor *reGun goes back to a Tibetan rgun which can be ascertained as early as the Mahavyut