Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (76 page)
98
I am guilty of having translated
NMan
lŭ
as “barbarians” in some instances in my first book (Beckwith 1987a/1993: 153) and perhaps elsewhere. My enlightenment on this issue (Beckwith 1987c) seems to have come after that book was already in press (by 1986). I did not notice the error when the paperback edition was being prepared. On the application of
lŭ
and other pejorative terms equally as much to Chinese (especially rebels) as to foreigners, and the semantic neutrality of most words for foreigners, see now Drompp (2005: 172–175).
99
James (2001: 19). Note also that in the purely European context the word
barbarian
does not usually have significant “racist” meaning (though it does in some older works focusing on Central Eurasia). However, in the European-language literature on the premodern and early modern East Asian context—that is, in the overwhelming majority of all literature about East Asia—the European word
barbarian
is frequently used explicitly and more or less exclusively as a pejorative term for Caucasian-race Europeans. That makes it literally a racist term.
APPENDIX A
The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Diaspora
There is a huge literature devoted to the Indo-European migrations and development of the Indo-European daughter languages, all of which is based ultimately on the reconstruction of the ancestral language, Proto-Indo-European.
1
Because the traditional reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European phonological system embodies a fundamental mistake—first recognized implicitly in a brilliant article by Hermann Grassmann published in 1863—scholars attempting to draw conclusions about the nature of the protolanguage and the course of its development into the attested daughter languages (i.e., the daughter families, such as Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Indic, and so on), all of which work depends on historical phonology above all, have in many cases drawn wrong conclusions. Despite Grassmann’s contribution,
2
he was not able to solve the fundamental problem with the reconstruction of Indo-European, mainly because he wrote before the discovery or invention of the phoneme.
3
The problem, as now acknowledged by all Indo-Europeanists, is that the traditional reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop consonants has an unvoiced unaspirated series (e.g., *p, *t, *k), a voiced unaspirated series ([*b,] *d, *g), and a voiced aspirated series (*bh, *dh, *gh). When it became generally recognized that this is a typologically unlikely, if not impossible, phonological system that has other significant problems—most importantly, initial *b cannot be reconstructed in this theory of Proto-Indo-European—it was agreed that correction of the reconstruction was necessary. Several attempts have been made to solve the problem, and in fact they are a major topic of Indo-European linguistics—for example, in addition to Szemerényi’s attempt, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov published a monumental work on the glottalic theory.
4
None of the proposals have worked, however, and none have achieved general acceptance, because they do not actually solve the problem. Although some prominent linguists have accepted Gamkrelidze and Ivanov’s proposal, it not only does not solve the problem at hand, it actually makes it worse.
The solution to the problem
5
is that the traditional three-way opposition of stops is an incorrect reconstruction from the point of view of the phonemic status of the phones involved. It has been known for most of a century, if not longer,
6
that the putative phonemes in question do not occur freely in all positions. Analysis of the accepted constraints shows that the two voiced series ([*b]: *bh, *d : *dh, *g : *gh) occur in complementary distribution and are thus allophones of a unitary voiced phoneme series (*b, *d, *g). They reflect the history of a temporary allophonic distinction that later became phonemic in some of the daughter languages, though in all attested languages that unnatural system has been changed to a natural two-way or four-way opposition of stops. The distinctions therefore can be reconstructed only for a temporary, convergent group consisting of languages that share the characteristic of having a reconstructible three-way opposition in the stops. A three-way system thus cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Indo-European, which had only a two-way phonemic opposition of stops—that is, *p : *b, *t : *d, *k : *g—and no missing *b. Because the other Indo-European daughter languages have either a two-way series in the stops, or a one-way series system (i.e., phonemic *p, *t, *k only) with residual evidence of an earlier two-way system, Proto-Indo-European could only have had a two-way phonemic opposition in its stops.
It is a fairly simple matter to show that, as a result, all known Indo-European languages belong to one of three
Sprachbund-like
groups, membership in which is determined by the number of categories in the attested or internally reconstructed phonemic stop systems of each daughter language family. Group A, the first-wave languages (with only unvoiced stop phonemes, though there is evidence of the former existence of both unvoiced and voiced stops), consists of Anatolian and Tokharian. Group B, the second-wave languages (with unvoiced, voiced, and voiced aspirate phonemes), consists of Germanic, Italic, Greek, Indic, and Armenian. Group C, the third-wave languages (with unvoiced and voiced stop phonemes), consists of Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Albanian, and Iranian.
7
It is true that “Anatolian distinguishes inherited voiceless and voiced stops, though admittedly not word initially,”
8
and these distinctions in Anatolian may be reconstructible as such back to the proto language, but the remark “not word initially” is a key point. Tokharian, the other member of Group A along with Anatolian, also has some reflexes that suggest a two-way opposition of stops, but like Anatolian, no word-initial voiced stops. In other words, the two languages,
as attested
synchronically, do not have a phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops; the historical distinctions that are preserved word-internally are allophonic. The two daughter families thus belong in the same group from the point of view of both the fundamentally important linguistic phenomenon on which it is based, namely the distribution of the stops, as well as archaeology (on the basis of which both daughter languages appear to have migrated away from the Indo-European homeland around 2000
BC
). The distinctions preserved in Anatolian and Tokharian do, however, support the two-way opposition of stops better known from Group C, and thus the reconstruction of the same bipolar system for Proto-Indo-European.
Avestan and Vedic: Aspects of a Problem
It is frequently noted that Avestan, which is believed to be the “earliest-attested” form of Iranian, is astonishingly close to Vedic Sanskrit, the “earliest-attested” form of Indic, in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. In addition to these linguistic features, the contents and religious purposes of the texts in these languages are so remarkably similar in several respects, though of course radically different in overt doctrinal religious content, that based on their evidence it has been possible to reconstruct not only a Proto-Indo-Iranian language but a culture as well. More specifically, it is believed that the Avestan and Vedic texts preserve languages very close to what is thought to be an earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language representing a stage midway between Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indic and Proto-Iranian daughter languages. The Avestan and Vedic texts are thus thought to faithfully preserve the languages, and to a great extent the cultures, of the late Proto-Iranian and late Proto-Indic peoples respectively, if not the putative Proto-Indo-Iranians themselves. The texts themselves are now generally believed to have been transmitted orally, with extremely few later intrusions, from about three and a half millennia ago.
9
However, there are several problems with these views. First, the Avestan texts and the Vedic texts are actually attested from less than one thousand years ago.
10
The idea of dating them—as texts—to three or four millennia ago is romantic but hardly supported by much evidence. The usual practice of referring to the Avestan and Vedic texts as the earliest-attested forms of their respective languages is thus a gross distortion. The earliest-attested Avestan manuscripts are actually dated to the thirteenth century
AD
and are based on an archetype dated to only about three centuries before that.
11
By contrast, the Old Persian language is recorded from the middle of the first millennium
BC
. Yet, because of the Indo-Iranian theory, above all, Avestan is thought to be a much older form of Iranian, chronologically, than the Old Persian texts.
12
Because the Avesta are the holy texts of the Zoroastrian religion, they are also believed to preserve references to the putative common Indo-Iranian pantheon and other common Proto-Indo-Iranian beliefs and cultural practices. However, the earliest-attested data on Iranian religious beliefs—including the early Old Persian inscriptions—contain no reflections of Zoroastrianism per se. The belief system found in the early Avestan texts is not attested until Late Antiquity.
Second, the earliest truly attested forms of Iranian are the North (or “East”) Iranian and South (or “West”) Iranian words and phrases in Assyrian and Greek texts; the first actual texts written in an Iranian language are the Old Persian texts (inscriptions, clay tablets, and seals) of the sixth and fifth centuries
BC
. These Iranian languages are very different from Avestan.
Third, Avestan is said to be an East Iranian language, but it has been shown that the now-usual arguments for placing it—and the home of Zoroaster—in Central Asia are chimerical. The apparent “East Iranian” features of Avestan are due to the influence of an East Iranian language during the transmission of the text.
13
The language cannot be placed firmly anywhere in the known Iranian-speaking world, or for that matter anywhen, until the Avestan texts were transcribed into Middle Persian script.
Fourth, it is extremely curious that except for Avestan, phonologically Iranian as a whole—in Old Persian and other early forms, in the Middle Iranian languages, and in the modern Iranian languages—is solidly, unquestionably, a Group C third-wave language, with a clear two-way phonemic opposition in the stops. Only Avestan contains occasional reflexes of a three-way stop system parallel to the system reconstructed on the basis of Vedic Sanskrit, which belongs to the Group B
Sprachbund.
Finally, a major problem with Avestan that has so far apparently been overlooked would seem to vitiate, or at least call into serious question, both the traditional view of its linguistic relationship and the theories derived from it. As noted above, it has been remarked, “The Avestan speech is very closely related to Sanskrit,” so astonishingly close, in fact, that “we are able to transpose any word from one language into the other by the application of special phonetic laws.”
14
Avestan’s extensive case system and verbal conjugation system is not just similar to that of Vedic Sanskrit; it is almost
identical
to it. That is extremely odd. To demonstrate the similarity of the two languages, Indo-Iranian specialists have translated Avestan passages into Vedic Sanskrit, or “Old Indic”—for example, the following Avestan sentence (from Yašt 10.6):
15
| Avestan | təm amanvantəm yazatəm |
| Old Indic | tám ámanvantam yajatám |
| Proto-Indo-Iranian | *tám ámanvantam yajatám |
| English gloss | This powerful deity, |
| Avestan |  |
| Old Indic | |
| Proto-Indo-Iranian | |
| English gloss | |
| Avestan |  |
| Old Indic | |
| Proto-Indo-Iranian | |
| English gloss |