汉语“河”词源考

Chinese Etymology for he

This paper is a study of the origin of the Chinese character for river he河. The geographical (distribution) of the names of rivers in China reflects certain patterns. River is called he 河in the northern (areas), and jiang江in the southern parts of China. How do we explain this phenomenon? Both Norman-Mei(1976)and Hashimoto (1978)claim that both jiang 江and he 河are loanwords,which are borrowed from (Austroasiatic) Language and Mongolian,respectively. They argue that he河 in Chinese is borrowed from (Mongolian). This hypothesis is mainly based on the connection between the phonetic form gal of 河 in archaic Chinese and rool in Mongolian. It also depends upon the observation that the distribution of he河 bears (regional) features. I will argue against these leading hypotheses as well as some other speculations on the origins of these words, including those which attempt to show that they originated from Thai or Tibetan. Based on (linguistic) data, ethnological evidence,geographical distribution and historical documents, through the proofs that the etymological evidence from Chinese, the counterevidence from Mongolian, the earliest Chinese (classical) documents (Shi san jing十三经, Guo yu国语, Zhuang zi庄子, Chuci楚辞, Zhanguo ce战国策, etc.) and the fact that according to the records of historical geography, the spreading of he河 in (geographical) distribution is from the Yellow River, where its center lies, to the south and the north (respectively,) I will prove that he 河is in fact Chinese indigenous word. Its etyma is not Mongolian. In my analysis, I will also propose and elaborate on the opposite view that the respective form of he 河in the other languages is most likely loanwords from Chinese.One of the other topics of this paper is to discuss the (principles) used to distinguish Chinese etyma from loanwords: the naming processes of the etyma in a language share certain common ground and take place under an integral cognate system; the word loaning processes do not possess these properties.