護城山碑文に見る字喃について

Abstract

This paper aims to introduce one piece of chu nom material, which Henri Maspero mentioned in his article of 1912 as one of the oldest chu nom materials, and the existence of which remained for a long time unconfirmed. This paper also aims to analyze the chu nom characters contained in it from the historical phonological point of view. This material was rediscovered and introduced by Le Thi Lien in her 1989 B. A. thesis. It is an inscription erected in 1343 on the Ho Thanh mountain (nui Non Nuoc) in the present Ninh Binh province, Vietnam. It concerns donations made by local inhabitants for the construction of a temple on the mountain. Before analyzing the chu nom characters in the inscription, we first review the traditional method of analyzing chu nom characters as proposed by Henri Maspero in 1912, for the purpose of demonstrating the limitations of his method in the analysis of our material. We then refer to recent Viet-Muong phonological studies based on the newly discovered and described groups of the Viet-Muong branch such as Arem. Chu't. Ma Lieng. Aheu, and Pong, most of which were not known when Maspero wrote his paper. One of the main phonological features that differentiate them from the Mu'o'ng dialects described by Maspero is the existence of the disyllabic structure : (C_0)vC_1V(C_2)/T. We also utilize newly discovered chu nom materials such as the Sino-Vietnamese text of Phat thuyet a ai bao phu mau an trong kinh, compiled in the 15th century, which also throws light on our analysis. The material contains 11 common words and 18 person or place names written in chu nom characters. The latter 18 proper nouns are the object of discussion. Their common characteristics are the use of two characters for the transcription of one proper noun and occurrence of the vowel /a/ as the first element. We claim for these examples to show (1) certain patterns of the initial consonantal cluster, and (2) the trace of the disyllabic morphemes still preserved in the 14th century Vietnamese. Concerning the former point, we can reconstruct such patterns as /^* bl-/, /^* ml-/, and /^* k'r-/ from our material. The latter point is of special importance. Nguyen Tai Can (1995) reconstructed the major members of the minor syllable ((C_0)v) in the disyllabic structure of Proto Viet-Muong as /^* pə/, /^* tə/, /^* cə/, /^* kə/, /^* sə/, /^* a/, and we can recognize four of them in our matelial : /^* pə/, /^* tə/, /^* kə/, /^* a/. The chu nom characters contained in the Sino-Vietnamese text of Phat thuyet d ai bao phu mau an trong kinh mentioned above, in turn, show all six of them, and the characters transcribing each of these minor syllables coincide with each other between these two materials, a fact that may reinforce the credibility of our analysis. In conclusion, the insertion of a non-distinctive schwa vowel/ə/ between each of the initial consonantal clusters seems to have been common in Vietnamese during the 14th-15th centuries, but not in all cases. And the disyllabic strucure of Vietnamese, or at least the trace of it, is recognized to have existed until as late as 15th century.