乣音义新探

A New Exploration into the Pronunciation and the Meaning of the Kitan Large Script “乣”

文章认为契丹大字乣为表音字,有两种读音,一为*tiu,一为*iu,前者或为共同阿尔泰语*dγ-的名词形式*diu之发音,其基本含义为"队列、集团",而*iu可能为其音变形式。辽代的乣可特指从部族中选集的军户组织及其军兵。

Reexploring the pronunciation and the meaning of the Kitan large script 乣, this article attributes two pronunciations to it: * tiu and * iu. While the former represents the pronunciation of* diu,which,as the Common Altaic noun derived from the verb stem * d? γ-,means 'group'and 'queue',the latter is possibly the mutation of the former. As the name of a certain military organization in the Liao dynasty,this word referred to the organization of military families collected from tribes and its troop.