西暦1882年に報告されたリュズ語の語彙

Abstract

An English orientalist named Edward Colborne Baber (1843-1890) worked at the British embassy in Beijing after 1867. During his tenure he made three journeys to the interior of China, the second one was to the Sichuan highlands in 1877. His travels and discoveries were described and published from the Royal Geographical Society in 1882. Baber recorded a word list of Lee-saw (i.e. Luzu) and Lolo languages in his report, which consists of 276 items of basic word and phrases. Luzu belongs to the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages, in this report I tried to identify the items in the word list described by Baber (1882), referring to field data collected by myself and another dialect data collected in A Tibeto-Burman Lexicon (1992) by Huang Bufan. We found the features of the word data in Baber (1882) are very close to the Luzu dialects. Up to 43％ of the words corresponded exactly to each other, and some additional cognates to Ersu Language were found, which collected in Zang-Mianyu yuyin he Cihui (1991) by Sun Hongkai. As a result we can recognize the word data in Baber (1882) indicates once exist a dialect which links between Luzu and Ersu language.