Reviews Of Different Books

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REVIEWS 279 patti." This is in response to my citing the form rgun from Mhy. 9282, a form that seemed to me to render unnecessary the hypothetical form *reGun that Rona-Tas reconstructed to account for the shape of the initial in the Monguor form. To be sure, the final -1 of the Monguor form does present a problem in associating the form with its Tibetan etymology, but I did not comment upon it because the problem seemed to me to be completely dealt with in Rona-Tas' footnote 65 to his p. 77, where he helpfully reported that in response to his inquiry to ascertain whether or not the form in question might simply be a misprint (it can be cited from only a single passage in a single text, at least from among published materials), Professor Schroder had replied that this and all other examples of this word in his still unpublished materials "are in the genitive: regunni". From this I concluded that the Monguor form to be considered here is not actually reGul but reGun, and that the form reGul was nothing more than an ad hoc creation of an artificial isolation form by Schroder's informant(s), either made up ad lib, or with the final -1 indeed due to contamination with Mongol egul, but at any rate not appearing in the texts and hence not meriting further consideration. In the meantime, it is interesting to note that another citation of WT rgun 'winter' has now come to light, and that from an unexpected quarter. It is to be found in the Paris - Societe asiatique Ms. (of K'ang-hsi date) of the Hsi-fan-kuan i-yu, now edited, published, and studied in detail by Nishida Tatsuo.5 The form is item #100 as numbered by Nishida, and appears on p. 85 of his publication; the Paris Ms. has rgyun in Tibetan script, but the transcription of the Tibetan pronunciation into Chinese characters makes it clear that a form [rgun) was intended, and as Nishida suggests, the -y- in the writing rgyun is surely nothing but an example of dittography, anticipated from WT rgyun-du'always', which is #121 (on the same p. 85 in Nishida's edition). Nishida, who certainly now knows more about these Ming-Ch'ing interpreters' and translators' vocabularies than any other scholar in the field, claims that the Paris Ms. represents a "15th century Literary Tibetan from the Amdo region", the language that he calls his "Seibango A [i.e., Hsi-fan-yu A]". The appearance of the form rgun in this source, where its pronunciation is attested by a (for once) unambiguous Chinese transcription, represents a valuable falling-together of several diverse sources of data. In #560, my review questioned the proposed pattern of semantic development; Rona-Tas writes, "the semantic development to make dry, lean, meagre' > 'to lose weight, to be meagre' remains clear for me; to be meagre, thin is e.g. in the case of meat synonymous with dry, at least in some languages, among them in Hungarian." His remark is valuable, but it shows again in rather sharp relief the insecure areas we all tread when we become involved in 'patterns of semantic development', for what will seem perfectly obvious to one person (most usually because of some relationship, actual or supposed, between forms in his own language) will never occur to another (whose own language may not have any parallel related forms). It is an area of linguistic speculation in which, most unfortunately, almost anything is equally possible, and almost anything becomes equally probable, if we think about it longer. This is what I intended to point out in my original review, nothing more; but I still think the point is worth stressing. And much the same still holds true for #772, which etymology RonaTas was also good enough to mention in his letter. 5 Nishida Tatsuo, Seibankan yakugo no kenkyu, Chibetto gengogaku josetsu (= Kaiyakugo kenkyu sosho, I) (Kyoto, 1970). This publication represents a continuation of Professor Nishida's work with these materials, begun with the publication of his paper "Juroku seiki ni okeru Seikosho Chibettogo Tenzen hogen ni tsuite -- Kango-Chibettogo tangoshu iwayuru Heishubon 'Seibankan yakugo' no kenkyu", Kyoto Daigaku Bungakubu Kenkyu Kiyo, 7 (1963), 85-174. As late as my 1968 review of the Rona-Tas monograph, I was still misreading "Seibankan' as 'Saibankan', as for example on p. 167 of that review, a long-standing error of mine that was finally pointed out to me by Professor Nishida when I last saw him in Kyoto, in the summer of 1969.