상고·중고 한어에 나타난 *N-계 지시사의 기원 고찰 - 트랜스-동아시아 언어 연구의 일례로

Abstract

In Archaic Chinese, there existed demonstratives with an *N- initial such as 爾 *njiai, 乃 *nə, 若 *njiak, and 而 *njiə. The origin of the *N- demonstratives has long been controversial. They were frequently used as second-person pronouns in Archaic Chinese. Their occurrences as second-person pronouns predate those as demonstratives. Therefore, it is commonly assumed that the *N- demonstratives were derived from the second-person pronouns.BR This paper objects to this idea based on the directionality of grammaticalization. A second-person pronoun frequently derives from a demonstrative, but not vice versa. Demonstratives are considered as so-called “primitives of grammaticalization,” i.e., they may give rise to various kinds of grammatical markers, while they cannot be historically derived from other lexemes(Plank 1979, Diessel 1999, Kuteva et. al. 2019).BR The origin of the *N- demonstratives is as follows. They were borrowed from the neighboring Proto-Austroasiatic language(PAA). As pointed out by Norman & Mei(1976: 274), the Austroasiatics inhabited the shores of the middle Yangtze and parts of the southeast coast from 1000 B.C. to 500 B.C. and gave an influenced to Old Chinese. In PAA, the word meaning ‘this’ is reconstructed as *niɁ; *nih or *nɔɁ; *nɔh. Therefore, it is not surprising that the *N- demonstratives are borrowings from the PAA word meaning ‘this.’BR *N- demonstratives must have been broadly spread in southern China in Archaic and Medieval times. For instance, 爾 appears frequently in Six dynasty texts, such as in Shishuo xinyu 『世说新语』. It may well be because, after the Rebellion in the yǒngjiā era(永嘉之乱), the center of koine moved from the north to Nanjing, which was the capital of Eastern Jin 晋 and the following southern dynasties. 爾 is still broadly used as a near or far demonstrative in modern central and southern dialects, such as Wu, Hui, Southern Xiang, Northern Gan, and Min dialects(Zheng 2017).