契丹文基数词“一”音值考

An Interpretation of the Phonetic Value of Cardinal Number“One”in Khitan

契丹文字研究始于上世纪二十年代,经过国内外学者们的共同努力,现已构拟约300多个契丹小字原字的字音,解读3100多条契丹小字词语,还识别出标记静词“性、数、格”和“领属”等语法范畴以及副动词、陈述式和形动词形态变化的一些契丹字。已释读语词虽有数千条,但其中汉语借词居多,而契丹语固有词较少。在现已解读的固有词中,音义均在契丹语亲属语言中得到印证者不足200条。其中契丹语“一”至“十”基数词的读音经过多年的研究,陆续得到构拟,但基数词“一”的语音构拟却是长期以来困扰学界的一大难题,同时也是确定契丹语和蒙古语亲疏关系的要素之一。本文在对前贤研究进行整理总结的基础上,通过对新老资料的综合分析,运用历史比较语言学及语言统计等方法,对契丹文“一”的音值进行考辨,认为契丹小字阳性基数词“一”的语音更接近蒙古语的nige“一”,而不是之前推测的更接近满-通古斯语族语言的*?mu“一”。

The study of the Khitan scripts has begun in the 1920s With the joint efforts of scholars from home and abroad,some 300 glyphs of Khitan small script have been reconstructed,more than 3,00 words and phrases in Khitan small script have been interpreted,and the Khitan scripts encoding markers for nominal grammatical categories of gender,number,case and possessives as well as those indicating the morphological paradigmatic forms of converbs,declaratives and adjectival verbs.Although morethan three thousand words have been interpreted,mostof themare Chinese loanwords,whereas native Khitan words account for only asmall number.Less than two hundred of already interpreted native Khitan words currently have confirmed counterparts which are correspondent in both sound and meaning in related languages of the Khitan language.Among them,the pronunciations of Khitan cardinal numbers from“one”to“ten”have been reconstructed after years of research.However,the phonetic reconstruction of cardinal number“one”has been a major difficulty plaguing the academic circle for a long time And the form of cardinal number“one”is also one of the factors vital to the determination of how closely Khitan is related to Mongolian On the basis of collating and summarizing previous research results and after a comprehensive analysis of the new and old data,this paper examines and interprets the phonetic value of the Khitan script encoding“one”by applying the approaches of historical comparative linguistics and linguistic statistics,and concludes that the pronunciation of the masculine form of Khitan cardinal number“one”is*nδ,which is closer to that of Mongolian nige“one”,instead of *δmu,which is closer to that of Manchu-Tungusic“one”.