内陆闽语非南朝吴语直系后代说

Abstract

The hypothesis that “modern Wu, Min dialects are both derived from Wu dialect of the Southern dynasties or Jiangdong Fangyan” has received wide acceptance since it was proposed by Norman (1983) and Ding (1988). However, the hypothesis is largely based on evidences of shared retention rather than shared innovation. While the previous evidence can demonstrate that modern Wu, Min dialects are closely related to Wu dialect of the Southern dynasties, they are not sufficient to portray the exact genetic relationship among them. In this paper, we reexamined the hypothesis according to some linguistic innovations attested in Wu dialect of the Southern dynasties, namely the lexical replacement in the pronoun system involving ‘he/she’, ‘Plural for Personal Pronoun’, ‘That’, ‘How (heavy)’, and ‘What’. It is found that while the innovative pronoun forms are attested in modern Wu dialect as well as in the Coastal subgroup of Min dialect (Coastal Min), they are totally absent in the Inland subgroup of Min dialect (Inland Min). Furthermore, the unique forms attested in Inland Min can be traced to a very early stage and cannot be explained by later influence from its linguistic neighbor, namely Gan dialect. Based on the new evidence, we propose a new model on the genetic relationship among modern Wu, Min dialects and Wu dialect of Southern dynasties. While modern Wu and Coastal Min are derived from Wu dialect of the Southern dynasties, Inland Min is rather a sister branch of Wu dialect of the Southern dynasties which has diverged at an earlier stage. Also, the new hypothesis is supported by the following migration patterns in Fujian: 1) The coastal and inland areas of Fujian have developed separately before the Tang dynasty. 2) The inland area of Fujian has developed much earlier than the coastal area (see Bielenstein 1959, Wu 2009 among others).