113
Comptes rendus /CLAO 33(2004) 105-121
GONG Hwang-cherng (2002). Han-Zang yu yanjiu lun wenji [Collected papers on Sino-Tibetan linguistics]. Taipei : Institute of Linguistics (Preparatory Office), Academia Sinica. (Language and Linguistics Monograph Series Number C2-2).
Hwang-cherng Gong is one of the few researchers in the Sino-Tibetan field who has seriously tackled the four ancient literary languages of the family: Old Chinese (ОС), Classical Tibetan, Old Burmese, and Tangut. His Collected papers on Sino- Tibetan linguistics is a showcase of his rare versatility and depth. Its fifteen chapters are saturated with data that constitute the book's greatest strength. In historical linguistics, reconstructions come and go, but data are here to stay. As a source of Sino-Tibetan comparisons, the book has few competitors. My first regret is that there is no index. Fortunately, the data are neatly arranged and often numbered, so specific comparisons are not hard to find if one knows what article to look in.
I also regret the lack of articles focusing on Tangut. I was surprised since the author is a world authority on Tangut, and to the best of my knowledge, his articles on Tangut have not been compiled into monograph form elsewhere. This is unfortunate because the yod of his Tangut reconstruction is the key to his argument for reconstructing yod in Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST). If readers unacquainted with his earlier work on the language do not know how he reconstructed yod for Tangut, how can they be certain that yod should be projected back into PST? Gong's Tangut reconstruction has a unique simple six-vowel system. Its underlying logic cannot be easily understood by referring to another reconstruction, unlike his ОС reconstruction which is based on Li Fang-kuei's (1971). Gong's earlier articles use Sofronov's (1968)
Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale 33(1): 113-121 (2004) © CRLAO-EHESS 54, Bd Raspail 75006 Paris 0153-3320/2004/033-113
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4