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
JERRY NORMAN：REMEMBERING THE MAN
221
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 selfexamination; 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
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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
JERRY NORMAN：REMEMBERING THE MAN
223
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
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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
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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 presentday 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
232 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
Your comparison of the She to the Mulungeons 5 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
JERRY NORMAN：REMEMBERING THE MAN
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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. 7/2/12 6
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
234 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
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;
JERRY NORMAN：REMEMBERING THE MAN
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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 protolanguage] 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 "protolanguage" 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 SinoTibetan (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 MacroSinitic 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
236 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
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.
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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
238 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
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 preCoblin 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 [SinoTibetan]. 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
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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,
240 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
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
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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
242 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
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
JERRY NORMAN：REMEMBERING THE MAN
243
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 "counterthink" 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.
244 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS VOL. 41, NO. 1 (2013)
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.
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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。