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

 465  The Pai-lang Songs the Earliest Texts in a Tibeto-burman Language...   Notes on the transcriptions and Pai-lang Phonology 1. Transcriptional open syllables of the type OChi * a > MChi  o > NMan u ~ ü , etc. are evidently unshifted: all Pai-lang examples appear to be * a . 2. The clusters in transcriptional syllables of the OChi type * Cr ( w ) a , * Cr ( w ) i , * Cl / rV , etc., have probably all been reduced to a simple CV, but the exact Pai-lang form is rarely determinable. 2. Transcriptional Old Chinese final *- r is preserved as *- r . 3. Transcriptional final nasals apparently nasalized the vowel and were not clearly articulated. The transcriptional Old and Middle Chinese *- Vm rhyme was pronounced *- Ṽw in Pai-lang; it rhymed with unnasalized *- Vw and with *- ẽw (fromOld Chinese *- ewŋ ). Aclear distinction remains between these syllables with a labial approximant rhyme on the one hand, and those with the non-labial nasal finals *- Vn ~ *- Vŋ on the other. The latter rhyme with each other, so I have reconstructed them as *- Vn . 4. Pai-lang syllables with the transcriptional Chinese stop coda *- k sometimes rhyme with Chinese departing tone syllables; they apparently were not actually articulated with phonemic stop codas, but had a glottal stop or checked tone. 5. Chinese transcriptional * l - (MChi  l -) corresponds to both Pai-lang * l - and Pai-lang * r -. Where a choice has been made in the glossary it has been based on comparative Tibeto-Burman evidence. It is unclear whether Old Chinese transcriptional initial * l -  that became Middle Chinese * y -  had already become * y (i. e., [ j ]) or not, so both forms have been given as alternatives. 6. The Chinese rhymes usually reconstructed *- ij /*- ej /*- əj /*- uj do not contrast in Pai-lang, in which language they rhyme with or as *- i . It is not clear if the rhyme *- aj belongs to the same category. 7. The vowel reconstructed as *- i in the first two songs, and as *- ei in the third song, is undoubtedly the same vowel. Even when * i is the last element in what appears to be a longer syllable nucleus it still apparently is the rhyming element, suggesting that what might be thought to be longer nuclei in some syllables, such as *- ei , were in fact shorter, i. e., *- i (or possibly some other high vowel). On the other hand, this is by no means always clear, and it is quite possible that what I have transcribed as * i , even as an element in a longer nucleus, could have been a diphthong such as * ei , as is true in many cases in the corresponding Middle Chinese forms. Partly for that reason I have transcribed the third song differently. I repeat that this study is a preliminary, exploratory examination of an extremely complex problem. Many of the conclusions drawn here are speculative and I expect that some of them will need to be revised.