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

 451  The Pai-lang Songs the Earliest Texts in a Tibeto-burman Language...   certainly do contain numerous Chinese words and present a Chinese cultural perspective and political point of view, all this is to be expected considering the historical context, and especially the reason the poems were written. Secondly, the Pai-lang songs themselves do in fact rhyme, and they do so in extremely intricate, artistic ways. This is actually the most significant linguistic point about the texts. The information available from a study of their rhymes is of the first importance for reconstructing the Pai-lang lan- guage of the songs. The information gleaned can be used in turn to correct the reconstruction of the transcriptional language, which could hardly have been the Central dialect of Later Han period Chinese, as assumed by Coblin. The account of the Pai-lang specifically says that the man who is credited with actually doing the translation and transcription of the songs was a lo- cal Chinese from Szechuan, T’ian Kung 田恭 , who was “on intimate terms with them” and “knew their language rather well” 1 . It is known from studies of Chinese transcriptions of foreign names and other linguistic material that Chinese dialects spoken in frontier areas were much more conservative in many respects than the central dialects [Beckwith 2004, 2005], but in any case, whether conservative or not, Chinese speakers from western Szechuan, the southwesternmost part of the Han Dynasty empire, obviously did not speak the same dialect as those from Loyang far to the northeast. The conclusion by Tung and Coblin is called into question additionally by the remarkable artfulness of the Pai-lang songs, which contrast sharply in this respect with the clumsy, cliché-filled Chinese versions. It is clear that at least the first two songs were either composed in Pai-lang and then revised by T’ien Kung during his transcription of the texts, giving them their Chinese content, or they were composed in both languages more or less simultaneous- ly. The second possibility would seem to be more likely. This might suggest that one person may have composed the songs in both languages, but both internal and external evidence suggests that two or more people had a hand in their composition. In particular, it is difficult to imagine a bilingual poet being brilliant in one language but a total dunce in the other. The two writers thus probably included an unknown but highly skilled Pai-lang poet and the above-mentioned Chinese offiical, T’ien Kung. In view of the non-Chinese poetic style of the Pai-lang texts, it seems likely that the heavy Chinese influence in the songs is due partly to heavy traditional translations of foreign rhyming poetry into English (and other languages where rhyming is not easy) have frequently been rhymed nevertheless. 1 Hou Han shu (86: 2856-2857); the text says « 頗曉其言 ». Cf. [Coblin 1974: 181], who translates the entire entry on the Pai-lang.