Some Chŭ 楚 words in early Chinese literature

Abstract:

The ancient state of Chǔ, although traceable to the Zhōuyuán 周原 oracle bone inscriptions and formally enfeoffed already in 837 b.c., is safely known from archaeological contexts only since the early 6th c. b.c. Its language has long been assumed to reflect lexical bor­ro­wings and syntactic interferences from a non-Sinitc “substrate”, en­coun­te­red by the conquering Chǔ elites of northern provenance during their early bronze age south­ward expansion into what is to­day Húběi and Húnán province. This language has been tentatively iden­tified as Austroa­sia­tic by some scholars [1, 2], and as (para-) Hmong-Mienic by others [3, 4, 5] on the strength of le­xical and hi­storical arguments. Abundantly available bronze in­scrip­tions from the ancient state of Chŭ, how­ever, show little linguistic [6, 7] or rhetorical dif­fer­ences [8] from the nor­thern Chinese “ele­gant speech” (yăyán 雅言) standard during the Eastern Zhōu period.
Re­cently discovered epigraphic materials from the three centuries before the de­struc­tion of Chŭ by the state of Qín 秦 in 223 b.c., apart from including some southern dialectal fea­tures such as pervasive nasal prefix preemption visible in phonetic borrowings [9, 10] and the crea­tion of unique dialect characters [11, 12, 13], have been demonstrated to con­tain a peculiar way of wri­ting the numeral/verb ‘one/to unify’ as 仨, thus using a character which includes a pho­no­pho­ric that was pronounced virtually identical (OC *nnəŋ) with the early Tai word of the same mea­ning (cf. PTai *hnïŋ > Thai 22nɯŋ, Dai 33nɯŋ, Lungchow Anəəŋ etc.) [14]. 
Against this background this paper will review those 67 lexical glosses associated exclusively with the territory of Chŭ [15, 16] in China’s first work on dialect geography, the Fāngyán 方言, (as­signed to Yáng Xióng 揚雄, 53 b.c. – 18 c.e.), and a few words which have been claimed to be of non-Sinitic provenance in the divinatory slips from Bāoshān 包山 tomb #2 (burial 316 b.c.), to test whether the War­ring States language of Chŭ was non-sinitic, and, if so, whether the Tai-Kadaic hypothesis of its ori­gin can be lexically substantiated. 

References:
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