Re: Ancient Chinese?

At 15:42 on 25.12.1998, Steg Belsky wrote:

> Hi,
> i was looking up something in my dictionary (it happened to be "judea",
> to see if it was originally spelled with an {ae} ligature instead of the
> E), and i passed by the word "jujitsu".
> The dictionary said at the end, for the etymology:
>
> [Japanese /ju-jitsu/ : /ju-/, soft, yielding, from Ancient Chinese
> /n'z'i@u/ (Mandarin /jou2/) + /jitsu/, art, from Ancient Chinese
> /dz'`iu@t/ (Mandarin /shu4/).]
>
> ' = rising accent over previous letter
> - = macron over previous letter
> ` = opening single-quote apostraphe, like the kind used a lot for Semitic
> _`ay(i)n_.
> / / = italics
>
> So, does anyone know anything about this?  What are these Ns and Zs with
> accentmarks?  And what's a `ayin doing there?
It's Karlgrens transcription system.  Accents over letters are supposed to
indicate palatalization.  The "ayin" is a Greek spiritus asper* (rough
breathing in English, IIANM) and indicates what K. called aspiration, but
we now would call breathy voice when talking about voiced sounds.  K's
reconstructions are much called into question -- not in general, but in
details, like what the phonetic nature of his reconstructed sound-entities
really was.  The only thing everyone seems to agree about is that he
reconstructed more sounds than there were phonemes in the language.  Being
trained in the Swedish dialectologists' tradition, where it was a virtue to
distinguish the most minute shades of sounds he didn't have a lot of
understanding for phonemic theories!

*Semiticists also borrowed these Greek signs, but for other purposes, as
you see.  Greek ' was probably alif/glottal stop, but Greek ` was
*certainly* an ordinary [h].  These signs should properly look different
from quotes (namely like semi-circles).

> Thanks,
>
>
> -Stephen (Steg)
Your welcome (and I may need correction...)

/BP


    B.Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
    ----------------------------------------------------

        Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                            (Tacitus)