Re: lend/borrow

LEE Sau Dan wrote:
"Mike" == Mike Wright <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Mike> Then there is a pair of characters, both pronounced <shou4>,
Mike> one meaning "receive; accept", and the other "give;
Mike> confer". The second of these is written with the first as
Mike> the phonetic element. I suspect that they started out as a
Mike> single morpheme, like <jie4>, in the spoken language, but
Mike> came to be perceived as being different, so they needed
Mike> separate characters.

Didn't the 2 <shou4>s starte out differing only by tones (like present
<mai3> and <mai4>), and later one changed the tone to clash with the
other, making them indistinguishable in speech?

Somehow that doesn't seem like a likely direction of change.

Mike> I'm not sure that there's anything to indicate that they
Mike> would ever have been pronounced differently. Pulleyblank
Mike> shows different tones for them in Early Middle Chinese, but
Mike> Karlgren considered them the "same word".

I remember having read somewhere something like that. :)

I don't know why Pulleyblank shows rising tone 上聲 for 受 and departing tone 去聲 for 授.

All the languages shown in Hanyu Fangyin Zihui have departing tone for both, except for Chaozhou and Wenzhou, which have rising tone for both.

廈門音新字典 (1913) shows departing tone for the literary (Tang Min 唐 閩) readings for both. For colloquial readings, it shows level tone 平聲 for 受 and departing tone (with nasalization!) for 授.

So, the only possible differentiation among modern languages seems to be in colloquial Hokkien, and I'm not sure how reliable the source is, since it does contain some very obvious incorrect readings, such as <tng2> for 返 when it's really 轉. At any rate, the level tone for 受 doesn't match Pulleyblank's rising tone in EMC.

Sino-Vietnamese also has the same tone for both.

This doesn't mean that there was not originally some difference that has disappeared in the modern languages. You're probably familiar with Pulleyblank's idea (based on Haudricourt's studies of Vietnamese tones) that the rising tone came from words that ended in [?] and that the departing tone came from words that ended in [s], with both [?] and [s] having disappeared by the time of Early Middle Chinese. Who can say that there weren't other final consonants that have disappeared without leaving any identifiable tonal "residue"?

Of course, it's hard for a uniformitarian causative theory to account for Chaozhou and Wenzhou not having the departing tone for those particular characters. If the theory is basically correct, then there must be some missing data. Min and Wu languages do tend to preserve certain archaic features that have been lost in other language families.

Do either Cantonese or Hakka have readings of 受 and 授 with different tones?

--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.

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