 So first of all, good afternoon slash good evening and welcome everybody and happy New Year. This talk is going to be by Professor Nathan Hill of Trinity College Dublin whose title is The Word for Tiger in Chinese and other Asian languages and as you probably know, this talk is organised as part of the Dublin Lunar New Year Festival. So what's going on? Why is there a Lunar New Year happening? So Lunar years are different from our calendar, which is why the 1st of January is where we start, but Lunar years start slightly differently. And the date of the first Lunar varies from year to year. So it's the first new moon between the 21st of January and the 20th of February. So it's going to be tomorrow, I think, that the Lunar year starts. And Lunar year is an incredible cultural importance across Asia. And traditionally, the years are associated with animals in the Chinese tradition so that we're about to enter in 2022, the year of the tiger. Now this is of great interest for lots of reasons, partly to do with the rich cultural universe of Asia and partly because this throws up related questions such as the meaning of words, which people are always fascinated by. So why is it the year of the tiger? And more importantly, for this talk, where does the word tiger itself come from in the languages of Asia? And this is where we're very lucky to be able to draw on the expertise of Professor Nathan Hill, who did his PhD at Harvard University in 2009, then joined the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he was head of department, leader of an ERC grant, and a prolific publisher on the historical linguistics and related subjects of the languages of Asia. He edited, co-edited this book called The Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages. And you can see here the table of contents that gives you an idea of the breadth of topics which get included in the subject like this. And in 2019, he authored another of his sole authored monographs and I've taken a random shot of the table of contents here or part of it that tells us about tight pre-initials and loose pre-initials. We'll have to ask about that at the end of the talk. He is currently the professor of Chinese studies at Trinity College Dublin and also the director of the Trinity Center for Asian Studies. So I would ask you to join me in welcoming him. And at the end of his talk, there will be an opportunity for questions. Please do not type your questions in the chat, but rather put them in the prescribed Q&A function. Thank you very much to all of you coming. Professor Hill, over to you. Well, thank you very much Martin for this kind introduction. And now I will share my presentation and we hope everything works well. Is this working? Yeah, okay. So yes, so I am going to tell you about the word for tiger. Let me just move this bar here. And this is on the screen in front of you, the character, the Chinese character for tiger in the oldest variety of the Chinese script that we have, the oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty, about 1250 BCE. And you see that it looks rather like a tiger, sort of turned on its side. Yeah. So just a second. Oh, and then here is the character, as you know, today in the traditional script. So that, you know, I don't know if you can see it or not, but that is historically continuous, especially as you write with a brush, then the rather than inscribe in a bone, the image has changed. So that's what the character looks like now about how it was pronounced. So it was, oops, I'm getting ahead of myself here. So in today's Mandarin Chinese, it's who in the third tone. And the first form of Chinese that we have systematically tested is from a dictionary from 602 that gives the pronunciation of thousands of different characters. It gives those pronunciations in other Chinese characters. So it takes some bit of interpreting to figure out what's going on. And I'm not going to describe that in any detail. But there is a way to romanize it where you're capturing exactly that information that's in this dictionary from 602. And I've written here the character, the character's pronunciation in a romanization system by a guy named Bill Baxter. So the capital X was a tone marker. So something like, not very different. That's the point. It's not very different from a standard Mandarin, something like who. But how is it pronounced back in the old days in old Chinese at the time when that first character was used? That's what I'm going to look at now. So the first thing we need to discuss then is just how is it possible to understand how old Chinese was pronounced at all? And so I'm just going to take you through the methodology for reconstructing old Chinese very quickly and in a kind of bird's eye view. So what do we need for a good old Chinese reconstruction? We need whatever pronunciation that the word had in old Chinese to predict in some sense the outcome in middle Chinese. There should be a systematic relationship between the earlier form of the language and the later form of the language. And also we want our reconstruction, our hypothesis of how the Chinese word was pronounced in the old days to explain the use of poetry. So if that doesn't happen, right? If we have a hypothesized pronunciation that doesn't lead to the rhymes coming out correctly, then that's an indication that there's something wrong with our hypothesis. And then also the Chinese characters themselves have phonetic information in them. And I will get to that in a minute. But you want your reconstruction to be consistent with the information that's in Chinese characters themselves. So I'm just going to sort of walk us through these three steps with the word for tiger. So first the development of old Chinese ah in middle Chinese. So we can distinguish two types of syllables in old Chinese. I won't be going into any detail about this. But we have type A syllables which are marked with this little symbol in the Baxter and Cigar reconstruction. And those in middle Chinese are not marked in any orthographic way. And there are type B syllables which are unmarked in old Chinese but have either start with a Y or have a J in them somewhere in middle Chinese. So here's are the developments. Our type A in old Chinese becomes O in middle Chinese. And here are some evidence of that, some early transcriptions. So the word Buddha in middle Chinese is something like Biu Du. And now we have a good reason to think that this Du actually was a Da in the old days. So in old Chinese it was probably Biu Da we think, which was a pretty good transcription for Buddha. But by middle Chinese it's Biu Du. Okay so that's the A to U change. And then we also have evidence and I should say this this Buddhist evidence is a little late. Yeah it's from the early Han dynasty. So it's kind of very late for old Chinese. But then we also have Sino-Tibet incognites which are super super old. You know even before old Chinese. And here we have evidence like the word for I, me in Chinese is in middle Chinese, Mu. But we think it's something like Nga in old Chinese. Why? Because Tibetan is Nga and in Burmese is Nga etc. So I hope I've proven to you that A in old Chinese changes to U. And this also helps explain rhymes in poems. So for instance here we have this poem Ode 234 stands at three. We are not rhinoceroses. We are not tigers. But we go along those wilds alas for us men on war service morning and evening. We have no leisure. So here we have a poem that uses the word tiger in a rhyme position. And we see it's Hu. And we say what does it rhyme with? And it rhymes with Ya and Pu and Ha. So I'm claiming that these all go back to A in old Chinese. And now that's it for the vowel. So how about this initial Hu? Where does it come from in old Chinese? So middle Chinese has many origins in old Chinese. And these include. And there's the last four I should say are in a western dialect of old Chinese. So I will go into some of this detail. This is where we need the structure of the Chinese script itself. So we're looking now at eight characters that use the word tiger as an indication of their pronunciation. And yet you see that in middle Chinese there are quite a few different pronunciations here. So if you're looking at it in this way you say I can't understand why they write all of these with the same phonetic. But we hopefully in a few minutes we'll understand. And I start with the easy ones. So basically I've already covered the vowels. And more or less I'm just back projecting the more simple initials. So for instance the initial K-H was a K-H. And then puh, paddolize to cha that you're seeing on the fourth one on the left. So this is our first pass at cleaning up the middle Chinese to make sense of this stuff in old Chinese. And then let's see. So now we're going to slightly forget about the ones on the right. They've done what they're going to do for us. And then I'll just point out that the real challenge here is this fourth one on the left. Because you have this tuh that seems totally unconnected. Everything else has some kind of ra in it. So how do we deal with that? And Baxter and Cigar's proposal is that you had a little prefix T in this word and then followed by shra. So I'm not claiming that's the gospel truth. But that's one solution. And now one thing you're seeing is just how we people who work on old Chinese phonology sort of lead our lives. Where you identify a problem like this and then you're coming up with proposed solutions. And then you play around and see how good those solutions are. So now it starts to look like the pronunciation in old Chinese of the word for tiger is shah. And that it came to middle Chinese via a Western dialect. And basically, you know, what I'm doing there is I'm choosing from among the many options that X could have been in old Chinese. Because I'm seeing that all of these characters that use tiger as a phonetic seem to have ra in them. And the only way to have a sound like ra and pronunciation with the X in middle Chinese is to reconstruct a voiceless ra. Okay, so so far so good. Yeah. But this is what Baxter and Cigar actually reconstruct. So this is sort of to put it one way at the end of you know, a class that I taught on Chinese historical linguistics. This is what I would expect students to do in their homework. But this is what the professionals actually do. And they've got lots of cues in there. And Martin will will he'll be very familiar with these cues. They're their uvular constants, like, like you get in in the word for the country. So why did they do this? That's the question that, you know, I asked myself. And the answer is because of min dialects. So the min dialects are spoken in the south, like Hokkien, which is spoken in Shaman, and also in Taiwan. And the min dialects are very conservative. Most Chinese dialects come directly from middle Chinese. But the min dialects come directly from old Chinese. So Baxter and Cigar have looked at the min dialects and the min dialects have Ks. Yeah, so so John Chen dialect pronounces Tiger as cool. And following a suggestion of Jerry Norman, they think that the way to reconcile these Ks in in the min dialect with the evidence of of what we've seen so far in terms of development to to an X in middle Chinese is to reconstruct this uvular consonant, the Q. Okay. But I'll just point out that this is not the only option. You can get Ks other ways. So here's a proposal. And I'm not saying I believe this, but maybe the root of all these words has the shah. And then you had a tight pre-initial in in the third word. So you have this K prefix in front of the shah. And then in the fourth word, you have the T prefix. And then you have a loose pre-initial. This is using machinery that Baxter and Cigar give us this loose versus tight pre-initial. So that by this account, the word for Tiger would be something like yeah. So, so just to, you know, make sure we're all on the same page here. What Baxter and Cigar actually propose is actually that's aspirated. I can't I'm not a phonetician. I'm not so great at these things. Yeah. But what I'm saying is even in their system, I think as far as I can tell, you could also reconstruct with the min forms descending from the version with the tight pre-initial. And it's very, very normal. I mean, I'm worried that some of you will try and you know, catch me out on a methodological area here, but it's very normal for some forms of Chinese to descend from the tight pre-initial form and some from the loose pre-initial form. So here what I'm saying is middle Chinese had a loose pre-initial and then min had a tight pre-initial. That's, you know, and again, I'm not necessarily trying to convince you of this, but I'm saying this is another option that as far as I can tell also works. And then it gives you a sense of maybe why or sort of how we go about reconstructing old Chinese. But let's look at what Axel Schussler says. So he's in the kind of same broad camp as Baxter and Cigar, but he doesn't agree with them about many things. And he reconstructs Tiger with an L-initial. So he says, is the word for Tiger. And he points to ancient dialect forms. Those of you who care, these are from the Fanyan, this early sort of book about different dialect pronunciations. So in this book, they say, okay, here they say Tiger this way, here they say Tiger this way. And it seems that, you know, I'll point out that Tiger was always a two-syllable word and that the evidence is at least consistent with a reconstruction with an L-initial. So that points to, let's all just pronounce them, you know, and Coloc as a different dialect pronunciations of Tiger. Let's say in the late war and states period, early Han, something like that. Okay. And Schussler points out that these, that his version can help explain connections with words for Tiger in other languages. For example, in Angkorian Khmer, the word for Tiger is Khla. And in Old Burmese, it's Khla. So you see that, you know, these forms have some kind of Khha and some kind of La. So they kind of look like these other Southeast Asian forms. Oops. Okay. So now let's look at George Starrsten's opinion. And soon you'll just think, you know, in Old Chinese, anything goes. So he says there is no obvious connection between the regular Old Chinese form for Tiger, Khla, and the above dialect words. This is in a book review of Schussler's dictionary, which could easily have been from a duck instead of a hluck. Yeah. So Starrsten is basically saying that Schussler is too fast to connect these ancient dialect pronunciations to the attested, you know, word for Tiger that we have today. Maybe those dialects just have a different word for Tiger. And that that word started with a D rather than with an L. L's in the history of Chinese change into D. So this is a possible interpretation. Okay. So now you've seen the different schools of thought on how the word for Tiger was pronounced in Old Chinese. And now I just want to look at some we're looking now outside of China to the West and to the East. So in Japanese, the word for Tiger first attested in 702, which is kind of late, but that doesn't mean that the word is not old. You have Torah. Yeah. And then in Tibetan, the word is stuck. Now, maybe Torah and stuck don't look that similar to you, but they both have a T in them. And it's very normal for G's and R's to have a certain relationship is also very normal for us to change the O's. So the the you could imagine that the Japanese comes from something like Taga or duck. So if Japanese and Tibetan had similar words for Tiger, this must be somehow because they both got them from Chinese because, you know, Japanese and Tibetan were not in direct contact. And also, as far as I know, both countries don't have Tigers. So China had Tigers, China had a word for Tiger, China had a big cultural influence on both of these languages. So we expect then the word for Tiger in Chinese to look more like these words. Yeah. And that's something that Beckwith and Kiyosei point out. So they reconstruct as as the word for Tiger in old Chinese, which in Baxter and Cigar system, if you just kind of, you know, mutates, mutandis replace all the symbols, you would get sit up. And I should just mention that Beckwith and Kiyosei are kind of out on a limb in terms of their, you know, everything I presented so far is kind of the orthodox school. So sort of the differences of opinion. Yes, there are differences of opinion, but within a certain range, whereas Beckwith and Kiyosei are seen as going way out on a limb. So a Chinese form such as ta from la could more or less account for the Tibetan or Japanese forms. If you see the Tibetan S as reflecting some kind of pre initial, but we would then need more secure understanding of the relative chronology of the loss of view viewers. What I'm trying to do here is kind of make them all fit together. So like, can we explain Beckwith and Kiyosei's view if we start from Baxter and Cigar? So we can almost do it, but there's a lot of loose ends. It's basically what I would say. And those involve the relative chronology of the loss of view viewers. We need to know when that happened. We need to know when the loss of voices resins, which are things like and also when we're the when we're the pre initials lost. So about the pre initial in Tibetan, which is S, right? If if Tibetans wanted to adapt a lone word, and so if we imagined that Chinese had a word like they could have borrowed as that's a perfectly legitimate Tibetan word, but they didn't. They have borrowed it as stuck. So that suggests that probably the Chinese word wasn't okay. So in other words, the Tibetan word suggests some kind of fricative fricatives or things like fun fun show, which make turbulent noise while you speak. So some kind of fricative in the donor. So let's say if we just go if we assume Tibetan comes from Chinese, we are looking for something like as the form in Chinese, but more research is needed. So the reason I chose this topic was of course, because it's the year of the tiger. But also in my 2019 book, when I came across this issue of how to reconstruct the word for tiger, I couldn't do it. So I am using this opportunity to familiarize you with how we go about reconstructing words in all Chinese. And then you see, you know, what kind of materials we have to work with, what kind of methods we use, what kind of hypotheses contend. But the truth is that when it comes to the word for tiger, at this point, I just have to throw up my hands. And thank you for listening. And hopefully, you know, one of you will say, well, you know, it's obvious that that of those different solutions, this is the one that you should use. So please, you know, tell me how how should I reconstruct the word for tiger in all Chinese. Okay. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Please join me in thanking Professor Hill. I'm sure that we'll have some questions in the Q&A. Could I just remind people, if you've put your question in the chat, please put it in the Q&A instead. While people are thinking, Professor Hill, can I just ask you, you've mentioned several different stages of Chinese, old Chinese, middle Chinese, modern Chinese, I guess. So in the world of the ancient Near East, when you go from one stage of a language to another stage of the language, it's very often because in the middle, you have sort of a gap or political turbulence, you know, you have the Middle Kingdom that speaks Middle Egyptian in Egypt, and then you have the intermediate period, and then you have the New Kingdom that speaks New Egyptian. What happens with Chinese? How sharp are these lines of demarcation? That's a good question. So, you know, it's old Chinese, let's say if we have to assign a date to it, we're aiming for 1250 BC. And then middle Chinese is 602. And that we can put a sharp, you know, 602, let's call it CE, and that we can put a sharp date on. So as you can imagine, a lot of politics and famine and population movement and all sorts of things happen in those almost 2000 years. So it's, so why do we call that the one old Chinese and the other middle Chinese? It's basically for epistemological reasons, yeah, which is that old Chinese, sorry, middle Chinese, 602, that is the first form of Chinese that we can kind of phonologically really sink our teeth into with a sense of security, because we have a dictionary that gives us, I don't know, six, seven thousand words and tells us how to pronounce all six or seven thousand. So that gives us one kind of epistemological firm point to stand on. And then you would say, well, okay, well, then why don't you just work slowly backwards from there? And I can't offer anything other than a sociological explanation, which is that the oldest form of a language is the most exciting form and the most culturally prestigious form. And in particular, the Book of Odes, which is about 350 poems and is from the Joe dynasty, so kind of not as far back as 1250 BC, but in that ballpark, gives us another not as firm, but fairly firm piece of phonological information in terms of these Orion poems. And then as I pointed out, the other third leg of old Chinese reconstruction is the phonetics implied by the structure of the characters themselves. Now, actually different characters were coined at different times, and that's a whole philological enterprise, but they were coined many of them as long ago as 1250 BC. So there's good reason to think that if you triangulate these three pieces of data, so the phonology implied by the script, the poems, the rhymes in the odes, and what you get where you really know you're on firm footing in 602, we presume that the object reconstructed with those three pieces of information is the Chinese of the Joe dynasty, if not the Shang dynasty, so kind of you may well say like, well, you shouldn't just jump over 1500 years and systematically look at, for example, how poetry rhymes during that period. And there has been some work in that area, but not nearly as much as there has been on the odes. I think because it's just less prestigious, less exciting, but actually there is a project at SOAS now that I'm involved in that's looking at Han dynasty rhyme behavior. So I do think that something that the field needs to do to advance is to kind of clean up that sort of, let's call it 1500 year place in between and another thing that's I think really important that is these early Buddhist transcriptions because those are as old as the second century AD. So we can cut sort of 400 years off and have something that we can fairly firmly stand on. I can't hear you. Oh, yes. One of the few things that most people know about the languages of Asia and Chinese especially is that many of them have tones. Is it known when in this story the tones come into being? Yeah. So I sort of, you know, didn't I sort of brushed over this, but the so six or two, they're definitely tones. And in Baxter's system, the hope I get this right, the high tone is written with a capital H and the and the other salient tone, the Chu Xiang is written with a capital X at the end of the word, right? And then and then the Ping Xiang, which is the sort of level tone is unmarked. And then the Ruxiang, which is the entering tone is is is is, you know, we linguists wouldn't see as a tone. We would just say it's a stop final syllable. So those are the four tones of Middle Chinese and and and it would be a sensible thing to ask, like, well, how are they pronounced or something like that? But we should just understand this is the book itself, the book that we rely on in 602 says there are four tones. These are the four tones. I'm marking the four tones. Yeah. Now, it's clear that the capital H tone was still an S in the early Buddhist transcriptions. So the so we can date very precisely that between 200 and 600 is when the tones were born. And also in that period, I think in the third century is the first time we have people actually discuss the fact that Chinese is tonal. And, you know, it could be, you know, random that they had had tones since Kingdom Come, but it just happens that this is when they were first discussed. But I do think that it's, you know, people, we have a lot of texts from China. So if the first time people discuss tones is in the third century, then it's probably when there were tones was the third century. Thank you. We have a question from Isabella Jackson, who says, thank you very much. And do we have more information about animals of the zodiac like tigers or other culturally significant items? More like, like, are they do they have less problematic pronunciations? That's a good question. I haven't systematically gone through the animals of the zodiac. Because in my book, I was paying attention to words that existed in Tibetan Burmese and Chinese and tiger, a word that we think is related exists in Tibetan Burmese and Chinese. Whereas for many of the zodiac signs, the words don't seem to be related. And actually, in many cases, the Chinese word was just borrowed into other languages. But I would say that the word for sheep is pretty securely reconstructed and is young in all Chinese. The other ones I would have to check. Can I ask, how do you imagine people in Japan and people in Tibet borrowing a word for an animal that doesn't exist in their country and that they've probably never seen? No YouTube, no internet. So when people in Tibetan Japan were using this Chinese word for tiger, what was happening on the cultural level? Did they talk about them a lot? Did they visualize them? Did they have illustrations? What happened? I think it was probably something like they adopted the zodiac in order to count years. That's the first stab at it I would make. But I would say that the same thing happens in the West. Europeans are super into lions and they didn't have them. Not to mention things like dragons, which it's not really clear that anyone had. I've been thinking a lot, this is a whole other talk, but I've been thinking a lot about is the European dragon and the Chinese dragon, are they the same animal? I don't mean to dismiss the question, but I'm saying the processes we have for exploring these things methodologically are the same in the West as they would be in the East. And we can also see animals change over time, like the lion on its way from India to Japan turned into a dog. Oh, maybe you didn't know that, I guess. Another similar example is there's a male goddess, Avalokiteshvara, who on his way from India to China, I mean in China he changed into a woman at some point. So these things happen. Thank you. And this idea of having the traditional Chinese animals associated with the zodiac, how old is that? In China I have no idea, actually there are people on this call who could say better than I do. Let's say what I do know is the 10 days of the traditional Chinese week goes right back to the beginning, right back, like the very oldest things. And actually this is something we can be very proud of. You may have gotten to writing before us Martin, but the calendar has been in continuous use since 1250 BC until today in terms of sequence of days. Now I don't think they were using the, I think they use renal titles, actually like I even saw this just yesterday in English documents they did the same thing they said, you know, Henry the seventh year, five or something like that. So that's how they dated years in the Shang dynasty. I don't know when they switched to the zodiac, but I would say that the Tibetans had the zodiac basically, they also used this kind of renal year system, but they had the zodiac year system basically from the beginning, but from the beginning for them is 650 AD. Yeah. Thank you. There's also a question from Anna Bebrankova, which is thank you. In Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, how early on in chronological terms, do we expect that languages or dialects of this family were experiencing any influence from other language families? Oh, that's a good question. I'm going to, let's say I have a whole another talk about the word for horse and actually that one is maybe better because I actually know how the word for horse was pronounced in all Chinese. And I think and my co-authors think that the word for horse is a borrowing from Indo-Aryan, from proto-Indo-Aryan. And we know that the for our unarchaeological grounds, for instance the technology of the chariot is a characteristically Indo-European technology that hit China around the time that they got the alphabet. And actually, I mean, I'll be really scandalous here because I can get away with it since it's, you know, because of the format. I think that they got writing from the the ancient Near East via the Indo-Aryans and along with the whole horse and chariot complex. So that's the earliest loan I know of into Chinese. Now, the thing that's hard is like as you know, the Chinese speaking population sort of expanded from, you know, from where it was in Yinshu to where it is now and displaced lots of other languages in on that journey, especially Hmong Nian languages and Austro-Aziatic languages. So it seems extremely likely that there are ancient Hmong Nian and Austro-Aziatic words in Chinese. But the state of Hmong Nian and Austro-Aziatic linguistics is not super advanced. And there are a lot of borrowings in the other direction as well. So sort of weeding apart, you know, who loaned what, who went for things like rice, very difficult. But actually, rice actually tea is a good candidate. We know tea is from a Tibetan word for leaf. But it's quite a late loan. Yeah. So I think horse is, I'm going to say horse is as old as I'm willing to go. And it was already there in 1250 BC. Thank you very much. I don't see any more questions in the Q&A. So shall we thank our speaker and draw to a close? Okay. Well, thank you everyone for, you know, putting up with what is always technical, you know, linguistics is a kind of technical business. So I hope it wasn't too bad.