jerry norman: remembering the man and his perspectives on chinese linguistic history

JERRY NORMAN: REMEMBERING THE MAN AND HIS PERSPECTIVES ON CHINESE LINGUISTIC HISTORY1

W. South Coblin University of Iowa

ABSTRACT In this paper we briefly review the life and career of Professor Jerry L. Norman and then allow him to tell us in his own words his major views and perspectives on the historical development of Chinese, and his hopes for the ways these might be probed and elucidated by future generations of Chinese dialectologists and historical linguists. I. INTRODUCTION

Jerry Norman, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Language and Linguistics at the University of Washington, and one of the most eminent linguists and Chinese dialectologists of our time, passed away on July 7, 2012, in Seattle, at the age of seventy-five. In the present paper we remember him, as colleague and scholar, in Part II in terms of his background, character, and personality, and in Part III from the standpoint of his incisive and ground-breaking views on the broad field of Chinese historical linguistics.

II. JERRY NORMAN THE MAN

Jerry Lee Norman was born on July 16, 1936 in Watsonville, California. His family were migrant farm workers who had fled the Oklahoma Dust Bowl in an odyssey that resembled in many ways the plot of John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath. During his childhood, the family traveled between Watsonville, Salinas, and El Centro, California, finding work where they could in the orchards and fields of those areas. During this period Jerry learned colloquial Spanish from Hispanic playmates. This would be the first of many languages he would acquire in his life, three of which he would teach professionally, i.e., Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian.

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In school he studied both Spanish and French, in which he remained proficient all his life.

In 1954 Jerry entered the University of Chicago, where he majored in Russian for two years, until financial exigencies forced him to withdraw. He then left academia and became, for a brief period, a novice in a Catholic seminary, where he studied classical languages. Shortly thereafter, he joined the army, where he began his life's work in Chinese at the Monterey Defense Language Institute. At the completion of his military service, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he took his B.A. (1961), M.A. (1965), and Ph.D. (1969). At Berkeley he studied with many of the stellar faculty who were there during that period. However, the two individuals who he felt exercised the most fundamental influences on his scholarly and intellectual life were Y. R. Chao and James Bosson. It was Chao who, through his teaching and personal example as a scholar and a man, bequeathed to Jerry what he came to view as his own distinctive role and perspectives in life and letters. Jim Bosson, who as a much younger man than Chao became not only a teacher but also a close friend, opened for Jerry the limitlessly intriguing vistas of Manchu, Mongolian, and Altaic studies that would fascinate him for the rest of his life. The scholarly course of that life crystallized during a period of doctoral study and research in Taiwan; and, by the time he returned to Berkeley to take his degree, it had become clear to him that he would make Chinese dialectology, and in particular the Mǐn dialects, plus the Manchu language, the primary foci of his life's work.

In 1967 Jerry went to Princeton, where he assumed a combined teaching and research position, and subsequently in 1969 an assistant professorship. There he met and married Stella Chen, who became his lifelong companion and closest friend. It was a union legendary for its warmth, love, and happiness. Four children, Justin, Grace, Anne, and Catherine were born to them. In 1972 the Normans moved to Seattle, where Jerry again became assistant professor, this time at the University of Washington. Two years later he was promoted to the rank of associate professor, and in 1980 to full professor, from which rank he retired to emeritus status in 1998.

During his twenty-six years at Washington, Jerry taught many classes in Chinese language. But the greatest impact of his teaching came through his linguistics courses and seminars, where he trained generation after generation of young linguists and dialectologists. In these classes his focus was unfailingly on spoken Chinese of all periods, and it was clear to all who knew him and worked with him that for him it was the nature and history of

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spoken language that should be the primary object of both synchronic and diachronic research in Chinese linguistics. The study of texts purely for their own sake was not what he wanted to do, or wanted his students to do. For him, the object of Sinological linguistics was to describe all forms of spoken Chinese as accurately as possible and then to determine as precisely as possible how they came to be as they were and are. These principles also underlay all of Jerry's own research and writing on Chinese. They emerge clearly and resoundingly in everything he published. Although he was the most tolerant of men regarding the varied and multifarious interests of others, his personal focus never wavered.

Jerry's teaching and research in Manchu and Mongolian will be best assessed by those who are conversant with these fields. Suffice it to say that to all who knew him it was clear that he had the deepest affection for the Manchu language and for the history, literature, and culture of the Manchus and the other Tungusic peoples. Indeed, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that among courses taught and texts read, Manchu, of all types and all periods, was Jerry's favorite subject. In a word, Jerry loved Manchu, in a way that probably very few people truly love a language.

As a man Jerry was a prince among men. He was modest, compassionate, tolerant, and loving, to family, friends, and colleagues. While he immensely enjoyed discussing the field, and could do so for hours in the most entertaining and enlightening of ways, he strongly disliked scholarly disputation and shunned all forms of contention. He said that one's work should speak for itself. One should not need to defend it, or attack that of others in defense of it. He avoided all such imbroglios, and, to whatever extent he could, those who indulged in them. Where he could not escape such strife, he simply remained silent. But as time passed, and his stature and influence in the field grew, his very silence became an argumentum ex silentio.

Though it is perhaps not customary to mention such matters in venues of the present type, the fact is that one cannot understand the sort of man Jerry was without recognizing that he had a deeply spiritual side to his character. He was very private about his faith, and we shall not breach that privacy here. Suffice it to say that he became a convert to the Russian Orthodox Church in approximately 1976, after much contemplation and self-examination; and he remained a devout believer to the end of his life. He once said that he was in a certain sense "schizophrenic". To wit, in matters of intellectual inquiry, especially in our field, he was skeptical and


iconoclastic virtually to a fault. He ceaselessly questioned everything, including his own preconceptions, and took nothing at all on faith. But in matters of religious conviction, he had an innate need for guiding and doctrinally defined orthodoxy, and these things he ultimately found in the Orthodox faith.

Jerry's final illness was a protracted one, in which increasing weakness made it more and more difficult for him to pursue his scholarly and intellectual interests. But pursue them he did, virtually to the last hours of his life. He faced his physical decline with courage and dignity, and, thankfully, with no diminution at all in his intellectual powers. As the end approached, he felt that there were many things he still would have liked to do. Most of all he would have liked to remain here with us, and to join us in our common exploration of the mysteries and beauties of Chinese. But fate ordained that this was not to be. And so he has parted from us, in the certain hope that we, to whom he has bequeathed his legacy, will continue our labors in the great endeavor to which he devoted his own life. His last hours were calm and peaceful, and from that all who mourn his loss now may perhaps derive our own small measure of personal peace. III. PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

In the preceding account we have touched only briefly on Jerry's stance and demeanor as a scholar of language and linguistics. But it is of course these aspects of his character and personality that are most germane to all our interests as linguists and historians of Chinese. Consequently, we shall now probe these matters in greater depth, allowing Jerry himself to speak to us regarding them.

In the experience of the present writer, Jerry was the most original thinker in the field of Chinese linguistics encountered in nearly fifty years spent in the field. Simply put, he changed forever the way we perceive and think about Chinese. One sees this both in his writings for general readers, such as his landmark book Chinese (1988), and in numerous detailed studies, such as his justly famous article on lexical layering in Mǐn (1979). But, by the same token, a significant portion of his work was either misunderstood, or not understood at all, at the time it was written, for the simple reason that his thinking was decades ahead of its time. One example is his pharyngealization theory (1994), which was generally ignored when it appeared but is now garnering adherents, seemingly almost daily, and


promises to become the generally held view during the next decade. Another is his reconstructed initial system for Proto-Mǐn (1973; 1974), based on sound comparative methodology and unassailably accurate field data, which elicited howls of protest from various quarters when it appeared, but which, again, is now rapidly gaining acceptance and being incorporated into the new work of others. The fact is that Jerry was a veritable wellspring of brilliant, original, and incisive ideas, many of which will certainly continue to influence our thinking for years to come. In the remaining pages of this essay, we shall examine some representative unpublished examples of such ideas, taken from extensive correspondence received between 2008 and 2012. The passages are minimally edited, with a few proper names removed. Original romanizations are mainly in GR [see Chao 1968], which Jerry preferred in private correspondence. Editorially inserted romanizations are in Pinyin. Second person pronouns address the present writer. Each passage is dated at the end. Editorial insertions are in square brackets. 1. The Origins and Nature of Mǐn, and its Position in Early Sinitic Last night I reread the Garrett article on convergence [i.e., Garrett 2006]. His thesis, boiled down to the essentials, is that subgroupings like Greek, Indo-Aryan, etc. may not be all that old but are rather the result of convergence in a relatively later period. His ideas got me to thinking about Min (note: Min really should be a yangpyng word).2 Rather than being an old grouping, might it not be the result of convergence at a relatively late date? The fact that the dialects of SW Jehjiang have some obvious Min-like features, but phonologically are quite Wu-like, would strengthen such a view. In SE Jehjiang there are the so-called Man dialects which appear to be a sort of "Wu-ized" Min. I am beginning to think that lexicon may indeed be a better indicator of old divisions than phonology is. I will need to think about this more. 10/13/09 The last time I was on leave before I retired, my intention was to write a monograph on Common Min. I actually composed sections on the initials, tones and finals. A third part was to be a glossary of Min forms that deviate in one respect or another from the ChY [i.e., Chiehyunn; Pinyin: Qièyùn 切韻] tradition and CDC ["Common Dialectal Chinese"; cf. Norman (2006)]. Will I go back to that project and finish it? I suppose it depends on how much time I have left for such things. If I had things to do all over again, I think I would treat Coastal and Inland Min separately -- two different


common systems; but it's too late for that now. 11/3/09 Proto-Min was most likely a group of closely related dialects that at some point ended up in S. Jehjiang and Fwujiann; there they most likely underwent local influences (substratum and the like) and began to diversify. Perhaps quite early on countervailing forces came into play which tended to iron out the original differences and the substratum influences as well. Such a scenario fits well with [developments in] other parts of China. In many cases these later influences pretty well obliterated the earlier situation, with only a few relic forms remaining. Our reconstructive methodology cannot recover the whole complex process, and we tend to homogenize the data. 3/8/10 If one were boldly to draw a Stammbaum for Chinese, I think there is a certain amount of justification for setting Min off as the first dialect group to branch off. I wouldn't try to look for a literal historical point at which this happened but interpret it to mean that the variety of Chinese to which Min owes its earliest ancestry is something separate from the rest of Chinese. If I were really bold (and I'm not), I might say that Min is a separate language altogether and that the other Chinese dialects with just a few exceptions are dialects of a single widely spread language. 6/24/10 Going further, it seems that there is a sharp boundary between Minbeei and Mindong. I suspect that Minbeei has a different history from that of the other Min regions. Nonetheless it still exhibits the most important Min classificatory features. Similar problems in Romance have never really been solved. Maybe this is what happens when related languages remain in contact even after some early split. As far as I know, there are no hybrid Chinese-Miao-Yao languages even though these groups have been in contact for centuries and have copied a great deal from one another. I side with those who say there are no truly mixed languages; once you admit mixed languages, that is languages with no clear family tree, then the whole comparative method collapses, it seems to me. This is clearly what Meillet thought. Creoles present special problems, but I would tend to think that Haitian Creole, for example, is an aberrant form of French, not a language without a clear ancestor. 6/24/10


Back to the situation of Minnan dialects. It seems likely that if the Minnan area was settled relatively late, the non-elite population even now may be of aboriginal origin. This is speaking genetically, not linguistically. Of course such a statement is probably true of great swaths of S. China. If the aborigines of the Minnan area were related to the forebears of the present-day She[ 畬 ], then the question arises about whether they had already adopted some ancestral form of Hakka. My guess would be that at that time they still spoke some variety of Sheyeu [畬語] (the non-Sinitic version). Perhaps Minnanyeu and Chaurjouyeu have a She substratum. I wonder if geneticists have anything to say about these things. 7/14/10 We have talked about several waves of N. Chinese moving south beginning in the E. Jinn and continuing through Tarng. At almost the same time there was apparently another wave of what we might call Old Southern Chinese spreading south from Fwujiann and perhaps in Jiangshi as well. The Minnan area was settled relatively late, during the Tarng. The language [spoken] there was a variety of Min. I now wonder whether the Min dialects of the Chaurjou region and of other areas in Goangdong (Leijou, Haenan) weren't due to even later migrations. So, while a sort of Northern Chinese was invading Jiangshi, Min was also spreading southward. The later migrations to SE Asia might also be seen as a part of this Min migration. 9/28/10 In the case of Min, we can use Greenberg's principle that the center of diffusion is where you find the most dialectal variety. That puts the Min center in Northern Fwujian. Moreover, the dialects most closely related to Min seem to be the SW Jehjiang Wu dialects which border on Minbeei. Minbeei and Mindong are very different and they may well be the result of different settlement patterns; their solid Min features could possibly be due to convergence, something I need to think about more. Minnan spread (probably from the Pwutyan area) in the Tarng era; hence the internal variation in Minnan is less than what one finds in Mindong and Minbeei. If Min was spreading southward at about the same time that the Central Zone was being overrun by some type of northern dialect, then it seems to me that there is even more reason to say that Min is basically a different language from the rest of Chinese. 10/10/10


2. The Origins and History of Early North Chinese I often think of the big picture in Chinese dialect development. It is clear that the major event in this history was the development of the dialect type that we call Mandarin. I believe the roots of this development are deeper than most people think. One important development, EC *on > *uan, is already there in the ChY. As I have said before, I suspect that the whole string of Mandarin developments began up in the North during the non-Han dynasties. At the moment I wouldn't know how to go about demonstrating this. It seems likely that at the time of the ChY the proto-Mandarin developments were limited to the north and that (for example) the Hwai river valley was still outside the Mandarin area..... Here are some very preliminary notes on Mandarin: It probably originated in the Northern Dynasties period. At the end of the Nanbeeichaur it was probably viewed as a "hick" language by learned Southerners. It took about a century for it to become accepted as a viable learned variant. This makes me think of how Beeijing or Northern Guanhuah was initially considered inelegant by the Jiang-Hwai people [of Míng and early Qīng times]. 4/21/08 What do we really know about the evolution of Mandarin? Was there ever a proto-Mandarin? If so, where was it [spoken] and when did it come into being? Or is Mandarin perhaps due to a protracted convergence cycle? I propose that there are four quintessential Mandarin features: 1) use of 他

for third person, 2) use of 不 for general negative, 3) use of 的 (底) as subordinative particle, 4) 全濁上變去 [quánzhuó shăng biànqù "the shăng tone in voiced initial syllables becomes qù tone"]. 1, 3, and 4 would be innovations. For a dialect having these features we could predict certain other accompanying features: the Mandarin vocalic pattern proposed by Norman [1999], the loss of final -p, -t, -k, and certain other lexical items. The four proposed features appear to have come together by the late Tarng or Wuuday period. Beginning in Liao times, there begins to be evidence of another type of dialect from the NE; this dialect gradually moved south and west and eventually became the basis of Standard Chinese.


By Sonq the political center of China had moved to the East, never again to relocate farther to the West. This move may have had a major impact on the development of Mandarin: more eastern varieties may have prevailed and weakened and then finally annihilated the more conservative NW dialects. In Jin the sort of dialect represented by Biannluoh may have been pushed farther south, across the Hwai River. It is possible that the original dialects between the Hwai and Jiang were more Wu-like than they are now. Jin was probably when the old NE variety of Mandarin spread across the North China Plain from what is now Manchuria. At the end of Yuan a Jiang-Hwai dialect reasserts itself and becomes the basis of [standard Míng] Guanhuah. Obviously, most of this is speculative, but it seems to make sense to me. We are hampered by a lack of evidence for much of this period; what we do have are the contemporary dialects, and from this we might be able to reconstruct a scenario that would make sense. 3/18/11 3. The Origins of the Yuè Dialects I took Y.R. Chao's course on Cantonese the first semester I was at Berkeley. Impressionistically, it looks to me as if it developed from a variety of Chinese of Tarng vintage. It still preserves (as a group) all the old final consonants and has a yangshanq tone. The fact that its ruhsheng has developed in a way uncannily similar to Tai, has made me think that perhaps Common Yueh developed somewhere where Tai languages were common. If so, then the Yueh speakers in the Canton/Hong Kong region may be later immigrants. I'll bet you somewhere in migration history this question could be addressed. If my suspicion is correct, then when and from where did the base dialect from which Common Yueh developed come? Perhaps late waves of SW Mandarin have obscured the history. There are dialects that mainland linguists refer to as [Pynghuah] 平話 which are very Yueh-like but are sufficiently different for them to be given a different designation. CDC seems to work pretty well for the Central Zone; it also works pretty well for Yueh and somewhat less well for Hakka. Yueh continues to puzzle me. Where and how was proto-Yueh formed? Unfortunately I do not know a lot about Yueh. You know my suspicion that it may be a latecomer to the


Pearl River Delta and that its homeland is somewhere farther inland; there clearly seems to be evidence for a Tai substratum. 10/10/10 4. Tŭhuà, Wăxiāng, Xiānghuà, Pínghuà etc. If Southern Hwunan was not settled until quite late, where do these weird Tuu dialects [土話] come from? I am sometimes a bit skeptical about what settlement history says; don't the sources generally reflect the entry of Chinese administrative structures into an area? There could have been centuries of gradual population movement preceding any sort of official presence. Syhchuan seems to be extremely uniform linguistically; this is apparently the result of rather late migration from Hwubeei. I have wondered what happened to the earlier Hann dialects of that area. Perhaps the Tuu dialects are remnants of such old SW (non-Mandarin) dialects. One might speculate that such dialects were once spoken widely in Syhchuan and Hwunan; in the latter case perhaps they were driven farther south by later migrations from the North. .... I suspect that there is a lot of substratum influence in Hwunan. Could it be that our Central Shiang dialects [cf. Coblin 2011] have a substratum of some earlier variety of Sinitic? In other words the notion of seriation might be very relevant to the developments here. 4/21/08 After I sent my remarks on Tuu dialects, it occurred to me that no one has demonstrated that there really is such a dialect group. So far as I can see, the term Tuu is used to refer to various dialects in Hwunan, Northern Goangdong, and Gueylin that do not seem to fit into any of the conventional groups. They present a nice problem for someone interested in sorting them out. 4/29/08 I wonder if Shianghuah [鄉話 ] isn't a kind of analogue to Min. Both seemingly hark back to what we might call Archaic Southern, one variety in the Southeast and another in the Southwest. I don't think that they form a genetic group, but historically they have some similarities. If I were a young man with my interests, I would find it very tempting to try to figure these things out. How the Tuu dialects fit in I don't know, but I wonder if there might not be some efficient way to make some sense out of this problem. ... One thing I've noticed is that in these SW forms generally the yangshanq goes to inshanq. I think I'll look into that a bit more. 1/24/10


There is clearly something weird going on in Hwunan, and it might be important to an understanding of how Chinese spread to the South. It seems pretty clear that Chinese came to the South early, probably in Chyn and Hann times. Here and there we find dialects that preserve something of these early Sinitic varieties. I almost suspect in some cases that some of these southern languages eroded away slowly over centuries, sometimes leaving no more than a handful of original items. 1/30/10 Since the Southwest was brought under Chinese control quite early, what happened to the early dialects that were spoken there? It seems probable that the Shuu/Ba area was mainly inhabited by various sorts of aboriginal people, with Sinitic islands here and there. The present dialectal configuration is thought to be of a relatively recent origin, as late as the Ming dynasty. Now I am wondering if things like Woashiang [瓦鄉] aren't survivals of much older Sinitic languages spoken in the SW in early times. Certainly some of the Tuu dialects look like they must have deep roots in the South. ...[Recently published] descriptions make the possibility of Bair [白語] being a Sinitic language more plausible, I think. Actually quite a few people have thought that it is Sinitic, and I tend to agree. After working out CDC it certainly occurred to me that what we might have is a Sinitic language family rather than a monolithic "Chinese". The weird SW things like Shianghuah only confirm [such a] view. What this means is that we have misconceptualized the whole problem. One can hardly blame Karlgren for viewing Chinese as he did; he was after all a pioneer. But I think we have to move on. Things as different as Fwujou, Jiannyang, Chaurjou, Woashiang, and Bair certainly make one think of distinct languages. But then we're confronted with the old problem: how do you distinguish a dialect from a language? I think the conventional view of Chinese as a monolithic whole is a cultural idea, not a linguistic one. The generally late overlay of literary and Guanhuah elements in many dialects only blinds us to the reality of the situation. 8/16/10 Another idea that is forming in my mind concerns Hwunan and SW China. Unless the various Tuu and Pynghuah dialects can be shown to have some common innovations (which I rather doubt), then it would look like in Hwunan there may have been clusters of only loosely related Sinitic islands. From these linguistic islands we get things like Shianghuah, some Tuuhuah


dialects, and possibly even Bair. This is in strong contrast to SE China where Min seems to form a solid block of dialects that can be shown to be pretty cohesive and was capable of spreading into new, previously unsinicized areas of S. Fwujiann and Goangdong. Of course at present this is only an embryo of an idea, some of which we've touched on before. 9/28/10 Sagart [2002] in his article on Gann and Hakka suggests that at the earliest period Hann dialects existed in isolated pockets in S China; at that time Chinese dialects were spoken in proximity to non-Hann languages. This is what I suggested not long ago for the Southwest, resulting in such things as Woashiang, Tuuhuah, and Bair. It's interesting that in the SW, including Hwunan, there are still lots of minority languages whereas in the SE there are practically none until you get fairly far south. Do you know of any evidence of non-Hann languages in Jiangshi? They might be mentioned in historical records. I think there are none in Fwujiann. 10/16/1 5. On the Ethnicity of the Ho-ne and the History of the She and the Hakka-speaking Peoples

[The Ho-ne (Chinese Huóniè 活聶) are a Hmong-Mien-speaking people, about 1000-1500 in number, who live in nine closely associated village complexes in the mountains east of Guangzhou. Official Chinese government policy promulgated in the 1950's assigns them to the Shē nationality, though they themselves were unaware of any such connection. They refer to themselves simply as [ho33 nte42] "mountain people". They currently constitute 1% of the total population of the "official" Shē group. The remaining 99% speak a set of very closely related Hakka-like Hàn-Chinese dialects. Jerry doubted the official ethnic classification of the Ho-ne as She, not because he objected to it in principle, but because he felt it had not been adequately demonstrated on the basis of linguistic or ethnographic evidence.3]

The She in Fwujiann speak a special variety of Hakka. I am not even sure that the She in Goangdong who speak a MY [Miáo-Yáo 苗瑤; also called Hmong-Mien] language are even linked to the She farther north. "She" after all is a name given to these people by outsiders; at least I think so. 4/21/08 I am not sure that the Miao-Yao [....] She groups in Goangdong province really have much to do with the She who now mainly live in northeastern


Fwujiann and southern Jehjiang. I think there may even be some farther north, but this seems mostly to be due to fairly recent settlement. Sagart [2002] seems to think those MY languages in Goangdong represent the original aboriginal language of the She when they still lived in the Hakka heartland. Quite a number of people have argued that the She have a Yao connection, but I don't know what to make of that. 5/13/10 I am not sure what to say about the 1% She population in Goangdong. What is the basis for calling them She at all? I haven't found an answer to that. One possibility is that the local [Hàn-Chinese] population call them something like Shemin [畬民] and so it has just been assumed that they belong to the same ethnic group as the Hakka-speaking She in Fwujiann and elsewhere. There is considerable confusion about the term Yau. If you look at the Yauyeu jeanjyh [瑤語簡志; Wáng (1985)], you will see that there are three Yau languages there. Only one of them is Yau in the usual sense. Buhnuu [布努], which is Hmong-Mien, is also considered Yau in an ethnic sense. The third "Yau" language is, if I recall correctly, a sort of Tai-Kadai language [cf. Ratliff 2010: 3-4]. There are some words in She Hakka which may be substratum words traceable to HM [Hmong-Mien]. At the moment I am not firmly convinced that the 1% She are really the same ethnic group as the She Hakka. I also noticed how similar the She Hakka dialects are to one another and I think you are correct in assuming that they left their "homeland" not so long ago. They are generally said to have migrated from the area where Jiangshi, Fwujiann, and Goangdong meet, a sort of "Three Corners Area".4 Of course, all this means is that they came from the core Hakka region. The migrations are dated generally to late Ming or early Ching. I have always suspected that they were in origin a poverty-stricken minority among a more typically Hann Hakka majority. It would be interesting to know something about their genetics. The She I saw in Luoyuan seemed smaller and darker than the surrounding [Hàn-]Chinese, but that may not mean much. They could have been an older population pushed into the mountains by the more sinified Hakkas. If any remained behind, they seem to have been assimilated by the Hakkas. 12/2/11


Your comparison of the She to the Mulungeons5 is very interesting. Are they [i.e., the Shē] simply a population that genetically has rather complex origins? Linguistically speaking, they speak what is very clearly a Hakka dialect. Here and there there is some odd vocabulary, like pi3 for 'meat' and un6 for 'buy/sell'. They also use the more Minlike 解 for 'know how, be able'. I think this is rare in "mainline" Hakka dialects; of course it might simply be Min influence. I have not seen a discussion of how they actually differ from other Hakkas. In China I think they are considered a non-Hann minority; since this is official policy, maybe it's not too politic [there] to discuss such matters. It reminds me a bit of the official position that Sibe is a separate language from Manchu (including those moribund spoken forms in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia). Or saying that the Yau minority contains peoples speaking languages from what are probably three unrelated language groups. Could it be also that the 1% She are considered to be She based on some official pronouncement and so no one really dares raise the question of whether they are related or not? If the Hakka-speaking She could migrate all over the place, why couldn't the "one percenters" also be migrants from somewhere else? It's a question I'd like to see someone address seriously but I don't think this is too likely to happen, in China at least. Another question I have is how different the Hakkas are culturally when compared to surrounding populations. All I know is that they didn't practice foot-binding and the women do most of the fieldwork; and they also sing Shan'ge [山歌 ]. I have a feeling that in China these are all sensitive topics. 12/4/11 She is an exonym, given to these people by the Chinese who surround them. So the mere fact that two groups are called She doesn't prove much about their origin as far as I can see. The two She men I interviewed in Luoyuan said they called themselves 山客 [shānkè, lit. "mountain stranger; mountain outsider"]. Actually that also sounds to me like an exonym; like so many other groups they really don't have a specific name for themselves. I think it is possible that the non-Han speaking She are somehow related to the She in Fwujiann, but I don't think we should too easily assume that this is so. It is something to be demonstrated yet. One striking thing about the She is their surnames; there are only two or three common surnames, one of which is Lan [lán 藍 ]. It is interesting that they formerly were associated with growing indigo [cf. láncăo 藍草 "the indigo plant (as a


cultivar)"; lándiàn 藍靛 "indigo dye"]. The other very interesting question is, what is the relationship of the She to the Hakka? Is the relationship only a matter of degree? I'm hoping your research will clarify some of these puzzles. 7/2/126 6. The Stammbaum Model, Comparative Reconstruction, and Dialect Classification The insistence on shared phonological innovations so frequently invoked in classification has always seemed to me to be fraught with problems. .... Rather than depending on shared innovations, I have asked "are there both necessary and sufficient conditions (features) present in a valid dialect grouping?" Perhaps this is simply another way of talking about innovations and retention; I'll have to think about that more. Do we need, for example, a protolanguage reconstruction before we can talk about innovations? That seems to me to be a very serious question. If so, what is the protolanguage for Chinese? Would my CDC suffice for non-Miin dialects? It has often been assumed that the ChY System can serve as a sort of Proto-Chinese but that is highly doubtful; at the very least it cannot encompass Miin, as even Karlgren recognized. 4/21/08 Is the notion that related languages are the descendants of a single mother language really very credible? I think it is more a methodological necessity if one is going to do comparative work. Are methodologies true or false? 5/29/08 The shared innovation requirement seems to fail in an embarrassing number of cases. What do we have in Chinese? Certainly Miin can be defined unambiguously; but this is not the same thing as using shared innovations since we do not have a reconstruction of whatever both Miin and the other Chinese dialects descend from. So it is hard to say what is an innovation and what isn't. Nonetheless, Miin is so different from other dialect groups that it must stand to one side. Within Miin I think one can apply the shared innovation criterion to divide the major subgroups: Miinnan, Miindong, Miinbeei. 7/5/08 I pretty much came to the conclusion that we should not try to apply Stammbaum notions to Chinese dialects. It has never been clear to me whether the Stammbaum and Wave theories were exclusive of one another or overlapping. The trend nowadays seems to be to view the two processes


as overlapping. But clearly we want to say something about the interrelations among Chinese dialects. At some time in the future, people will almost surely get interested in such a project. 12/11/08 Why do we bother classifying things like Chinese dialects? It's basically because we want to understand them better. How did they get to be as they are? Classification is basic to any scientific enquiry. Physicists classify particles and stars. Biologists classify animals and plants. Textual critics identify families of manuscripts. One could go on and on. But what sort of classification is most useful? One could, after all, make a purely utilitarian breakdown (and this is often done); e.g., one can speak of the dialects of Hwunan or Jiangshi, but for our purposes, such a classification wouldn't be very interesting because we are interested in how dialect groups came to be and how they are interrelated. Basically I suppose we have a sort of historical interest. Now for this do we need a Stammbaum classification? That might be nice if we could do it, but time and time again our good intentions are foiled and we are unable to find shared innovations. What about not worrying about the innovations stuff so much and trying to identify dialects that share common features, even if they cannot be shown to be shared innovations? 1/12/10 I often think about the big problem of comparative linguistics. In every textbook it says that genetically related languages have a common ancestor. At first sight that seems to make a lot of sense, and certainly a great many famous linguists have held such a view. Ideally the Muttersprache [i.e., Ursprache] should have been a perfectly unitary language, but I think hardly anyone would hold that view. Almost any reconstruction of a protolanguage will build in a certain amount of variation, which must in fact reflect variation in the protolanguage. The larger the area where the protolanguage was spoken, I suppose, the greater the internal variation. As Meillet indicated, there are probably many cognates that we assign to the protolanguage that were actually due to early borrowing. He thought that only the most basic morphemes like pronouns were immune from borrowing. One could develop this idea into an elaborate skeptical view of reconstruction in that, in the case of very early borrowings, [they] cannot really be distinguished from genetic material. Yet a whole lot of people seem to think that we can always distinguish loans from Urverwandtschaft ["genetic relatedness"]. Let's say we posit something we call Proto-Min;


what forms can we actually attribute to proto-Min? Everything that follows our rules of correspondence? Doubtful, I think. Some elements may have been borrowed very early and so do not reveal their loan status clearly. Are then reconstructions sorts of formal systems that we shouldn't be too hasty to reify? Does it really make sense to talk about an I-E homeland when in fact we have no direct evidence for any such thing? 3/8/10 Your notion of a primeval galaxy [i.e., of related lects making up a proto-language] is something that I have thought about (although the metaphor is entirely yours). For a long time I have thought that our notion of a "proto-language" is chiefly a methodological fiction. I suspect that what you say about Macro-Sinitic [also constituting a primeval galaxy] largely holds true for Indo-European as well. I also think a lot of historical linguists are aware of this but don't like to talk about it. The present-day picture of IE is not very inspiring. If I follow you, you are saying that convergence has played a much larger role in linguistic evolution than we have thought. But doesn't this endanger the very idea of genetic relationship? Both Trubetzkoy and Uhlenbeck thought along these lines, but their ideas have not met with much enthusiasm. Van Driem seems to have some similar ideas about Sino-Tibetan (what he calls Tibeto-Burman). Recently I have speculated about the origins of Altaic and wondered if each group did not bring its own patrimony to an early convergence sphere (another galaxy?). This whole idea deserves a lot more thinking. Having concrete examples like Macro-Sinitic may play an important role in such conceptualizations. 5/28/11 Of late it seems that more than one person has been calling into question the criterion of shared innovations. This is because what appear to be shared innovations in some cases turn out to be due to convergence. Perhaps the old Stammbaum model just doesn't work well for big dialect continua like Chinese. Anyway, the whole thing is very tricky. 11/19/11 7. A Model for Chinese Dialect History I believe the construction of a model of how Chinese dialects developed will be a major task of the next generation of Chinese dialectologists. Perhaps here and there we can lay some groundwork. 10/26/07 Before I depart this earth, I would like to have a clearer idea of what the major events of Chinese linguistic history were. Almost everything up until


now has been based on written records but I feel such records tell us little about dialectal development. I still think that, dialectally speaking, we have three important groups of dialects: Northern (Mandarin), Central, and Old Southern. These are not elements in a Stammbaum scheme obviously. Both Northern and Old Southern (whose main witness is Miin) can be defined fairly well. The Central dialects (Wu, Shiang, Gann) seem [to be] a big mess. Hakka and Yueh seem generally more closely related to Central than to Old Southern (Miin). Historically speaking, the ancestor(s) of Northern dialects seem to have formed in a period just before the Tarng dynasty, perhaps under the influence of various Inner Asian languages. I am hoping your work on Shiang (hitherto the least well-known of the Central dialects) may help us to say more about the formation of Central dialects. In addition to the three groups, there are also an undetermined number of "weird dialects" like Woashiang and some of the Tuu dialects and possibly even the Bair language. At some point don't we have to face this general problem? This seems to me like a book waiting to be written. Obviously, I won't be writing it, but I hope I might be able to contribute to a conceptualization of the problem. You always seem resistant to taking on such large issues; your attitude, I suspect, grows out of your desire to be able to document everything in the greatest detail possible.7 But with all your experience in historical linguistics (going back to Hann times) and your more recent work in Huei and Shiang, it seems to me that you almost have to be involved in any such undertaking. Just something to think about. 6/27/09 What we now call Mandarin was beginning to develop in those areas of North China where non-Hann rule had persisted for almost three centuries. The interesting question here is, where was the southern boundary of such N. Chinese dialects? I'll guess that it was north of the Hwaiher. In the area south of this area a kind of transitional dialect was used which had a number of features found in the modern dialects of Jiangshi and Hwunan. Wu-like dialects were already well established in southern Jiangsu and the province of Jehjiang; Min-like dialects were in S. Jehjiang and N. Fwujian. Wu-like dialects may also have been spoken north of the Yangtze. Jiangshi and parts of W. Fwujiann were home to a sort of archaic dialect with some interesting links to Min.


At some point in the Tarng the old dialects of the region north of the Yangtze and south of the Hwai moved into what are modern Jiangshi and Hwunan, displacing the older, more archaic southern dialects, driving them farther south. Here and there, particularly in the SW, there were islands of Sinitic language surrounded by non-Hann languages; some of their descendants give us languages like Woashiang, Bair, and perhaps some of the Tuu dialects. If there were such islands in the SE (as Sagart suggests) then they have by and large been submerged by Min and Hakka. In short, the dialectal picture of Chinese that we are familiar with emerges in the Middle Ages. The rimebooks that survive are all archaizing and are unrepresentative of actual vernacular speech. 10/21/10 I have been thinking. Suppose we go back to the very beginning of recorded Chinese; that would be by most accounts sometime in the middle of the second millennium. Is there any way to be sure that the language reflected in the OB texts are ancestral to later Chinese? Over the years I have toyed with the idea that those texts might not even be in Chinese, but Axel feels otherwise because of the phonological use of graphs. For example, why would those early scribes have used a word for a winnowing basket for the grammatical word 其 [qí] unless the two words were similar in sound as they are in later Chinese and even in modern Chinese dialects? However, even if it is true that the OB represent a sort of early Sinitic, it doesn't have to be directly ancestral to later Chinese, either to the later written language or to various vernacular developments. The Chyn-Hann period was a great watershed. At about that time (more or less two millennia ago) the written language was in a sense standardized; this influenced the form in which the so-called transmitted texts were edited. It seems also to be the time to which we must trace the vernacular developments that we know in modern dialects. Now Jou Tzuumo [周祖謨] thought that the tongyeu [通語 "koine"] of Hann times was based on the Chyn-Jinn [秦晉 ] dialect. Early on, the written language began to depart from the vernacular in a multitude of ways; compare this to what happened to Latin after the Imperial period. There is no good reason to think that something like the Chiehyunn represents any sort of actual spoken language of the period in which it was compiled. It rather embodies a tradition of glossing the written language and is almost certainly


a mixture of archaic faanchieh and faanchieh based on two or more regional norms. I think such considerations are behind my work on Early Chinese and Common Dialectal Chinese. Both Min and Hakka have evidence that the protolanguage from which they descend had two series of sonorants, probably one voiced and the other voiceless. This is nowhere evident from the written record. None of the pre-Coblin theories of DL [dentilabialization] make much sense. Eventually things like the Tuu dialects, Woashiang, and probably Bair have to be brought into the account of Chinese language history. I think there will be a vigorous attempt to explain away such things in light of the current version of Old/Middle Chinese reconstructions and that other views will have a very hard time getting a hearing. Alas, here I am at the end of my career and lack the energy (and probably the time) to launch a campaign about such things. Our old article in JAOS [Norman and Coblin 1995] was a start, but there need to be some follow-ups. I know I am repeating myself, but reformulating these ideas helps me to think. I hope I don't bore you too much. 3/31/12 8. Early Chinese.

[After publishing his Common Dialectal Chinese system (2006), Jerry began projecting it back to an older system which he called "Early Chinese". Materials on this system have circulated in manuscript but have not been formally published as of this writing.]

I was also thinking about whether Sinitic is a valid subgroup of ST [Sino-Tibetan]. Certainly there are some peculiarly Sinitic innovations: the whole yod (or pharyngeal) system is not found in TB [Tibeto-Burman]. I also rather suspect that the tonal system developed quite independently in Chinese. There is the question of how Chinese came to have three series of stops if TB had only two. And lexically Chinese seems to stand apart from TB. But I've come to think that subgrouping is difficult in the best of circumstances. It seems to me that the Handlist [Coblin 1986] depends rather too heavily on Tibetan. Of course, I understand why that is. That is where most of the work has been done. Add to that the fact that Tibetan is the best


documented of all the TB languages. It would be interesting to select, say, the 100 best etymologies and then try to find more cognates for them throughout TB. Since you wrote your book in the 80s a lot of new material has appeared. Perhaps this would require another Handlist, but it is something I often wished I had. I think until someone does that, ST is going to remain a bit murky, even though almost everyone agrees that it is a valid concept. 3/8/10 You mentioned writing something on my ideas concerning Early Chinese. Earlier, in working on the F [i.e., dentilabialization] theory, I did sketch out a vowel system which I have in a couple of notebooks. When I did that, several things came to mind. 1) Why does every ChYS [Chiehyunn System] final have to have a corresponding OC [Old Chinese] final, even if only one or two rare words are involved? 2) Why is all of the evidence treated as equally valid; e.g., why are rare words and even words that appear in texts only once given equal weight with the most common words? 3) Why is it assumed that there was a perfectly regular development from OC to the ChYS? Simplicity is generally considered a virtue in science, but it never seems to have been the case in Chinese historical phonology. Karlgren's ideas seem never to die. He was the one who established the three assumptions questioned above. The OC system as conceptualized by the Ching scholars and later by Westerners is built on three pillars: ancient rimed texts, shyesheng characters, and the ChYS. It seems to me that there are problems with all three bodies of evidence. We chiefly know rimed texts from versions produced after extensive editing several centuries after they were composed; moreover, nobody left us a treatise on the canons of rime at that early period. Shyesheng characters are based almost entirely on the Shuowen, another late, standardizing text. The ChY itself has all sorts of problems -- what was it actually based on? To what degree was it archaizing? There are lots of reasons for doubting the whole OC project. This is why I have had the idea of producing a later and more modest reconstruction: Early Chinese [EC]. One feature of EC should be that it can be used directly to derive dialectal forms of Chinese, including, of course, CDC and proto-Min. [Cf., for example,] EC 飛 *puy, which will directly produce [Proto-]Min *pui and CDC *fui by means of a simple rule. I really [don't] know to what extent such a study could be carried out,


but it is worth thinking about. I wonder also if such a system wouldn't be a better starting point for comparing Sinitic to TB. One thing I would like to do is to claim that the 微部 [Wéi Rime Category of Old Chinese] had only rounded vowels. Almost everyone working on OC has supposed that it had both kaikoou and herkoou words. Many of the traditional kaikoou words are actually herkoou in Min. Almost everyone admits that the boundary between [the Wéi] 微 and [Zhī] 脂 [Rime Categories of Old Chinese] is unclear in the Shyjing and other rimed texts. And there is considerable overlap between how different people assign words to one or the other group. This suggests to me that the confusion began very early and that some early dialects had no such distinction: *iy = *uy. I don't know if it is really worthwhile (or feasible) for me to write any of this up. The conventional OC project has its own rules and in general follows a theoretical model laid down by Karlgren. Doong Torngher points out that Karlgren was really more interested in Chinese characters than in phonology per se. 5/2/10 What I set out to do [in producing the EC system] was to limit the amount of relative evidence, using as far as possible the words in Fangyan diawchartzyhbeau [方言調查字表]. This seems to work surprisingly well for the great majority of cases. The Tzyhbeau represents about 3700 characters that a moderately educated person might recognize. The list includes lots of literary words that probably never survived into the popular language. But such words are common in early texts and one may reasonably hope that there was a continuous oral tradition of how such words were pronounced in some sort of literary standard. Karlgren was apparently interested in all characters that occurred in the Shuowen or could be found in pre-Chyn texts. Doong's Shanqguu'inyunn beaugao [上古音韻表稿] has around 9000 characters, which is probably close to what K had in his GS [Grammata Serica]. One of my goals was to produce an EC system that was simpler than the usual OC schemes, one that could be written in a simple transcription and perhaps even used in textbooks of various kinds. I think, for example, of giving EC readings in a text on Classical Chinese, not because they represent some sort of Jou pronunciation but because they are probably as far back as we can project what we know on the basis of dictionary data and dialectal


data. One could also use EC in tracing the development of popular Chinese, especially Min dialects. It would relevant in a discussion of dentilabialization, for example. 5/6/10 Although I think there is good evidence that laimuu [來母] was earlier an *r-, is this the same *-r- we use for retroflection and 2nd Div? For the time being, I am putting these questions aside while I work on the finals [of EC]. I need to look at your Hann Sound Glosses [Coblin 1983] again. 5/12/10 The question of whether I should accept [the widely held] theory about OC [initial] *r and*l bothers me. There is certainly evidence in the early loans that we find in SEA [i.e., Southeast Asian] languages that Chinese laimuu was probably earlier an *r and evidence (somewhat less convincing) that yuhsyh [喻四] and dinqmuu [定母] come from *l. One of my big problems is what to do about ChY ś-; [certain scholars] derive it from *lhj. Min popular words have affricates both aspirated and unaspirated for this initial, which doesn't seem to jive with the *lh idea. We discussed this some years ago, and you suggested using something neutral, like θ-. I wanted to distance myself from conventional OC projects, except maybe for Axel's minimal OC [Schuessler 2007; 2009]. I have long felt that the most solid part of the OC project is the finals; the rime evidence seems basically to confirm what we find in the shyesheng system. However, I have problems with the claim that OC represents a very old (Western Jou) phonological system; after all, all the evidence comes via Hann philology. I've never gone along with all the speculation about morphology, even while admitting that some of the reasoning is clever. For example, why do we think that all chiuh tone words came from final -s? If I had to guess, I'd say that EC has some traits of Hann official Chinese. Also, I wanted something that could be connected in a more direct way with later developments in Chinese, the main issue being DL [dentilabialization], I suppose. Another factor, to tell the truth, was that I didn't wish to be associated with the OC project going back to Karlgren. I tend to think it was conceptualized wrongly from the very beginning. Its core is philological rather than linguistic. Karlgren wanted to tell you how ancient texts were pronounced and he seemed really to believe that he knew. To me the chief questions are 1) what is this beast that we call the Chiehyunn? For example, does the ChYS really represent a state of Chinese in late Nanbeeichaur times? 2) Do


terms like EMC [Early Middle Chinese] and LMC [Late Middle Chinese] really make any sense? They are purely philological terms and tend to obscure the actual evolution of Chinese. Hence, CDC may be a first step in going back to an earlier state of Sinitic. I don't agree with [the] view .... that OC is an interpretation of written records; I think only syllabaries and alphabets are open to such interpretation. On the other hand, I think .... [it] is right to say that OC is not properly speaking a reconstruction and certainly it is not a comparative reconstruction; it is based on a unique (and probably faulty) methodology that can only be used in the case of Chinese. (And most probably is misguided.) I keep wondering, actually, what is the status of Min? That it represents a sort of archaic southern dialect, I have no doubt. Following Garret's train of thought, could primitive Min simply have been proto-Chinese and the present subgroups (which are fairly clear) be due to convergence? Of course this would not be a welcome claim to those who are involved in OC reconstruction; I think conventional OC reconstructions have very little to do with it. I think that explains my general apathy toward what [some scholars] are doing. 11/13/11 You and I have entertained the fantasy of what would happen if suddenly a great cache of Chinese documents were found that were written in an Indic alphabet, say dating to the early Hann. I think we both think that we would all be in for a lot of surprises. I think many people working in Old Chinese hope this never happens. 2/16/12 I think there is a real sense in which the reconstruction of earlier stages of Chinese reached a dead-end. Although people continue to reconstruct OC schemes, these become ever more speculative and divorced from actual history. I suspect that even these endeavors will die out in time. So where do we go from here? Let's go back to the study of dialects before they all die out. Compared to Karlgren's time, we now have an immense wealth of new data on dialects, yet without a new method to study [them], [they] mostly remain unexploited for historical study. Major questions like "how did the present configuration of the Chinese dialect map come about?" are not really addressed. So Karlgren's ghost remains hovering over the whole field. 6/18/12


IV. CONCLUSION In the various passages cited in the preceding section, we see Jerry

Norman at work in his study, pondering the questions that fascinated him throughout his scholarly life. Often, he indulges in what he liked to call "counter-thinking". He was wont to say, "Suppose that everything we believe about something is wrong." This accounts for certain seeming contradictions among the passages cited above. The ability to "counter-think" may in the end have been what actually lay at the root of his brilliance and prescience as a linguist and historian of Chinese.

What has been reproduced above was not written for general consumption, and it is published here at the risk of invading the privacy of a friend and colleague who is no longer able to exercise control over what has been released. However, in our view, the benefits outweigh the risks in this case, for the ideas broached here may be viewed as a legacy, bequeathed by Jerry to all those, but especially to the young, who will carry on the great enterprise to which he devoted his life.

NOTES

1. I am deeply grateful to Stella Norman and Grace Norman for providing certain biographical information used in this article. 2. Beginning in the fall of 2009, Jerry changed his pronunciation of the dialect family name Miin 閩 (Pinyin: Mǐn) to Min (Pinyin: Mín), on the ground that the latter is the historically more correct reading, current spoken practice notwithstanding. This divergence in usage is reflected here in earlier and later passages, where Jerry's original spellings have been retained in all cases. 3. In fact, unbeknownst to us during our discussions, a view rather similar to Jerry's had already been broached in print in Dèng (2006). 4. This is a word play on the expression "Four Corners Area", an expression which denotes the geographical point where the four US states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado abut on each other. 5. A tri-racial isolate group of the southern Appalachian mountains in the southeastern United States, whose ethnic and racial origins have been disputed. Recent DNA studies show them to be primarily of combined Northern European and sub-Saharan African descent.


6. It will be noted that this was written five days before Jerry died. Our discussions of the problem continued by telephone until the late afternoon of July 6. 7 . Jerry enjoyed teasing the present writer for, as he put it, obstinately remaining a living embodiment of the 1950's Jack Webb television character, Sgt. Joe Friday, a laconic, deadpan police detective who was wont to say, "Just the facts, Ma'am."

REFERENCES CHAO, Yuen Ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley:

University of California Press. COBLIN, W. South. 1983. A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses.

Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

_____. 1986. A Sinologist's Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Correspondences, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, no. XVIII. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag.

_____. 2011. Comparative Phonology of the Central Xiāng Dialects. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series Number 45. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.

DÈNG, Xiăohuá 鄧曉華. 2006. Lùn Kèjiāhuà de láiyuán — jiānluùn Kè-Shē guānxì 論客家話的來源—兼論客畬關係. Yúnnán Mínzú Dàxué xuébào 雲南大學學報 4:143-146.

GARRETT, Andrew. 2006. Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology. In Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, 139-151. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

NORMAN, Jerry L. 1973. Tonal development in Min. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1(2):22-38.

_____. 1974. The initials of Proto-Min. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 2:27-36. _____. 1979. Chronological strata in the Min dialects. Fāngyán 方言

1979(4):268-274. _____. 1988. Chinese. (Cambridge Language Surveys). Cambridge:

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_____. 1999. Vocalism in Chinese dialect classification". In Issues in Chinese Dialect Description and Classification. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph no.15, ed. Richard Simmons, 193-203. Berkeley, CA.: Project on Linguistic Analysis

_____. 2006. Common Dialectal Chinese. In The Chinese Rime Tables — Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology, ed. David P. Branner, 233-254. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

NORMAN, Jerry L. and W. South Coblin. 1995. A new approach to Chinese historical linguistics. JAOS 115: 576-584.

RATLIFF, Martha. 2010. Hmong-Mien Language History. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

SAGART, Laurent. 2002. Gan, Hakka, and the formation of Chinese dialects. Papers from the Third International conference on Sinology, Linguistics Section, Dialect Variation in Chinese, ed. Dah-an Ho, 129-153. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Preparatory Office, Academia Sinica.

SCHUESSLER, Axel. 2007. ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

_____. 2009. Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

WÁNG, Fŭshì 王輔世 ed. 1985. Yáoyŭ jiănzhì 瑤語簡志. Beijing: Minzu chubanshe.

語言學家及漢學家，羅杰瑞先生

生平, 學術成就,及對漢語歷史語言學的展望

柯蔚南

俄亥俄大学

题要

本文將簡單地介紹名語言學和漢學家羅杰瑞先生的生平與學術成就。並依

羅氏書信來闡述其對漢語史的看法，以及其對漢語歷史語言學的展望。

jerry norman: remembering the man and his perspectives on chinese linguistic history

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