畬語中的漢字音層次初探

Abstract

The She 畬 ethnic group is scattered throughout Guangdong 廣東, Fujian 福建, Zhejiang 浙江, Jiangxi 江西, and Anhui 安徽 provinces in China. Among these She people, only those exclusively living in Haifeng 海豐, Huidong 惠東, Boluo 博羅 and Zengcheng 增城 counties in Guangdong speak the She language that belongs to the Miao-Yao 苗瑤 family. The primary linguistic data exploited in this paper come from the Haifeng variant of the She language, on which the author conducted field research in years of 2000 - 2003. Past scholarship, based on tone correspondence, used to classify the Sinitic loans in the She language into two strata: (A) an old stratum dating back to ancient Chinese; and (B) another (newer) stratum coming from contemporary Hakka 客家 dialects. This classification, however, has not yet been fully demonstrated with enough evidence to be convincing. Given the linguistic data recently available, the author argues that such taxonomy suffers from excessive simplification. This paper examines such linguistic features as initials, finals, and tones of particular syllables, which could have been entered into the She language from Chinese dialects. The author's conclusion includes the following three points: (1) the main body of the Hakka dialect stratum, probably having its roots in that of the surrounding area, can be distinguished in the She language according to its tone correspondence; (2) the rest of the stratum, even though its initials and finals bear a resemblance to the Hakka dialects, does not have clear tone correspondence with them; (3) some syllables in Sinitic loans sound like either Minnan 閩南 or other dialects. We need further research to detect the linguistic origins of the syllable groups of Sinitic loans (2) and (3). Completed research on all other variants of the She language, along with comparisons with other Chinese dialects, would elucidate this question. The paper includes a list of syllables in Sinitic loans in the Haifeng variant.