TRACING VARIATION IN OLD CHINESE: WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WAS “YǍYÁN 雅言”?

Abstract

Based on the single pre-Qin attestation of the compound yǎyán 雅言 in the Confucian Analects (Lúnyǔ 論語 7.18) the idea of a normative spoken standard language is often projected back by early modern and modern authors into remote pre-imperial antiquity. An overview of the conceptual history of the term and of the competing etymologies of yǎ in early Chinese texts is offered in order to problematize this “invented tradition” and its ideological baggage. Four types of evidence (uniformity of phonology and syntax in excavated texts, ode citation practices, phonophoric repair by double phonophoric characters, lexical variation) are then presented and their usefulness to support an early written standard of elite inter-communication is discussed. Straightforward creolization and mixed language accounting for the emergence of Old Chinese are rejected. Instead, a scenario of interrupted language transmission in a highly diverse linguistic Sprachbund area is sketched and argued to best account for the observed asymmetries between a high degree of early lexical and orthographical variation (including substrate influences) on the one hand, and phonological and syntactic uniformity of texts from geographically diverse areas on the other.