The terminations of the Archaic Chinese pronouns

Abstract

Since Chinese is the crucial example of a purely isolating language, linguists have long been interested in any phenomena which suggest that some classes of Chinese words may once have been infected. A point which has attracted especial attention is the existence of a pair of 1st person pronouns, wu/*ngo- and wo/*ngấ , of which the latter has free distribution but the former is generally subject or possessive down to the second century B.C. Half a century ago Karlgren pointed out the same terminations in a pair of 2nd person pronouns, ju/*ńo' and erh/* , and suggested that proto-Chinese had pronoun declension, with -o marking the nominative and genitive and -a the accusative (but his evidence of restricted distribution was inconclusive except in the case of wu). Later Kennedy preferred to explain the distribution of wu by classing it with various other pronouns and particles in which the level tone is associated with uncompleted utterance (so that either, like wu, they are never phrase-final, or they are phrase-final but interrogative, as with hu/*g'o- and the other interrogative particles). A further important contribution is Chou Fa-kao's discovery of a possessive termination -ǝg, which he ascribes to fusion with the possessive particle chih/*ǝg- . In 1969 I myself proposed a classification of the pronouns into two systems, the pre-Classical and the Classical.