汉语“河”词源考

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 Based on (linguistic) data, ethnological evidence,geographical distribution and historical documents, through the proofs that the etymological evidence from Chinese, the counterevidence from Mongolian, the earliest Chinese (classical) documents (Shi san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.

汉语“江”词源考

中外学者早就注意到 ,中国河流名称的分布具有区域特征 :北方以称“河”为主 ,南方以称“江”为主 ,黄河、长江之间地区则有称“水”的。“北河南江”的现象是如何形成的 ?“江、河”词源又如何 ?这成了汉藏语言学界十分关注的问题。为此 ,罗杰瑞、梅祖麟、桥本万太郎等学者提出了一些重要的假说 ,他们认为 ,“江”、“河”均非汉语本身固有的基本词 ,而是分别借自南亚语和蒙古语。桥本万太郎还进一步假设 ,汉语是南岛语言和阿尔泰语言南北夹击的产物 ,而“江”、“河”名称的来源正是在基本词汇方面反映了这一南北推移过程。然而 ,研究表明 ,这些假设中有关“江、河”词源的部分有违语言历史事实。根据语言学、民族学、历史文献以及地理学等方面的材料 ,可以证明 ,“江”是汉语本身固有的基本词 ,至于其他语言中的相似形式 ,则可能是受汉语的影响而产生。区别外来借词和固有基本词有一个原则 :若某词的得名过程与某语言中的固有基本词的得名过程类似 ,同时 ,它在这个语言中还具有一个完整的同源词系统 ,那么 ,它就应是该语言的固有基本词。至于外来借词 ,则不具备这些特点。考察汉语“江”的得名过程 。