Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 449  Christopher I. Beckwith The Pai-lang Songs the Earliest Texts in a Tibeto-burman Language and Their Late Old Chinese Transcriptions The earliest known texts in a Tibeto-Burman language are three songs preserved in Chinese transcription from the first century of the present era 1 . They are odes praising the Chinese government, and have been argued by [Coblin 1974], Tung Tso-pin, and other scholars, to have been translated from Chinese into the language of the Pai-lang 白狼 (Báiláng), who pre- sented them to the Chinese emperor in Loyang. It has also been noted that Pai-lang appears to belong to the Lolo-Burmese branch of Tibeto-Burman 2 . Coblin’s paper is a model analytical and comparative study of Chinese- area bilingual material. Nevertheless, more than thirty years have passed since it was published, and the reconstruction of the transcriptional language, Chinese, has undergone revolutionary changes 3 . In this study I propose to 1 Specifically, from the Yung-p’ing era, 58–75 ad [Coblin 1974: 181]. 2 Coblin argues that the language often seems closer to Proto-Tibeto-Burman than to Proto-Lolo-Burmese. He suggests that perhaps “Pai-lang is rather a closely related sister language of Lolo-Burmese within the T[ibeto]B[urman] family” [Coblin 1974: 203–204]. As shown below, the present study does not support this view. 3 In particular, Coblin relied essentially on a reconstruction of Old Chinese in [Karlgren 1962], which has been shown to be fundamentally erroneous in very many respects. A new reconstruction based on [Pulleyblank 1962] and [Yakhontov 1965] came to be widely accepted a decade and a half ago [Starostin 1989; Baxter 1992; Sagart 1999], though it too has been criticized and substantial revisions have been proposed [Beckwith 2002, 2004, 2006, and in this volume]. Much work has been done on the reconstruction of Middle Chinese [Pulleyblank 1984, 1991; Baxter 1992] as well, including the archaic pronunciation in some border regions [Beckwith 2005, 2007] and the Middle Chinese