八百館雜字ならびに來文の解讀

Abstract

It is only natural that, along with the great advances made in the scientific study of the Oriental languages since the 19th century the keenest attention should have been paid to the Hoa-i-i-yu (華夷譯語) because of its special interest to linguists. We have hitherto had a number of studies which altogether, however, could not hope to cover all the languages contained in it; indeed, even a study of a single one of them could rarely exhaust all the material it offers. The same was the case with the Po-i and the Pa-po languages of the Hoa-i-i-yu, of which the former was previously studied by the present writer and was published in 1948 ("Etudes comparatives des langues du Sud", Sogensha, Tokyo, 1949, p. 191--). The present writer, who had carried out researches into the Tai languages in High Tonkin for a fairly long period, intended to follow them up with a thorough study of the Pa-po langue as he had done with the Po-i language. Taking as his texts the Pa-po manuscript of the Toyo Bunko (The Oriental Library in Tokyo) which is one of the most complete, and that of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, he applied to the them most rigorous method of decipherment and linguistic comparison. His decipherment and the comparative study of the findings have proved definetely the Pa-po language to be a member of the Tai group, especially akin to the western Laotian in the Chieng-Mai area which belongs to the South-east sub-group. He brought to light also some of the linguistic peculiarities of the Tai languages which had disappeared in the Pa-po language in its course of evolution, revealed only through its comparative method.