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East-West Borrowings via the Silk Road of Textile Terms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

James Hamilton
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The Silk Road, which began operating more than two thousand years ago, constituted certainly for many centuries the main cultural and linguistic highway between peoples of the East and peoples of the West, and to an even greater extent between the peoples of the East or West and those living along the Silk Road in Central Asia. This is reflected by the many loan words transmitted along the Silk Road from one end to the other, especially those connected with the textile trade.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 43 , Issue 171 , September 1995 , pp. 25 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. On kiikiilliig, cf. Nicholas Sims-Williams and James Hamilton, Documents turco- sogdiens du IXe-Xe siècle de Touen-houang, Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, Part II, Volume III Sogdian, London, 1990, p. 35.

2. The reconstructions given here of the pronunciation of Chinese words in earlier periods are based, though with a few simplications, on the indications found in the volume by Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciaton in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Mandarin, Vancouver, 1990.

3. Cf. E. G. Pulleyblank, "The Chinese and Their Neighbors in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times", in D. Kneightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization, Berkeley, 1983, pp. 453-454. As indicated by Professor Pulleyblank, the Wu huan were the more southerly branch of the Eastern Hu, who lived in the 2nd century A.D. on the eastern frontiers of Mongolia, and whose name, in the Chi nese pronunciation of the period, transcribes *Awar or Avar, tribes of the Heph thalite kingdom in Afghanistan in the 4th and 5th centuries, who fled to Europe in the 6th century when the Hephthalite kingdom was overthrown by the Turks. In 520, in his description of the principal wife of the Khan of the Heph thalites, then residing north of the Hindu-Kush, the Chinese pilgrim Song Yun noted (cf. René Grousset, L'Empire des Steppes, Paris, 1939, pp. 113-114) : "Sur la tête, elle porte une corne longue de huit pieds, avec des ornements de pierres précieuses de cinq couleurs."

4. Cf. G.J. Ramstedt, "Finnish Turku, Swedish Torg, Danish and Norwegian Torv, a Word from Central Asia", Neuphilologische Mitteilungen L, Helsinki 1949, pp. 99-103; idem., Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft, I, Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 104 (1957), p. 49; Aulis J. Joki, Die Lehnwörter des Sajansamojedischen, Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 103, pp. 334-335; Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica, Chicago 1919, pp. 501-502; Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, vol., II, no. 884.

5. On serge and its origin, cf. notably the Oxford English Dictionary (Compact edi tion, 1977), Oxford, 1971, under serge, p. 2736 (494).

6. The other name used for China and the Chinese in classical antiquity was Θινα or Sinai, attested somewhat later, from the end of the 1st century A.D. on, which was probably first borrowed through contacts with India from Sanskrit Cīna and perhaps also from Middle Persian Ćīnstān (cf. Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, I, Paris, 1959, under 155 Cin, pp. 264-278).

7. On the origin of Σηρ∈ς and σηρικον, cf. E. G. Pulleyblank, "The Consonantal System of Old Chinese", Part II, Asia Major, IX-2 (1963), pp. 229-230.

8. Cf. the Oxford English Dictionary (see note 7 above), under silk, p. 2824 (46).

9. Cf. James Hamilton and Nicoara Beldiceanu, "Recherches autour de qars, nom d'une étoffe de poil", BSOAS, XXXI (1968), pp. 330-346.

10. With regard to these Sogdian forms, cf. also N. Sims-Williams and J. Hamilton, Documents Turco-sogdiens du IXe-Xe siècle de Touen-houang, pp. 25-26, n. A1, where an Indo-European etymology is also envisaged.

11. The expression karci kamuta, "woollen trousers", occurs in one of the documents in kharosthī script found by Aurel Stein near Niya on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin, which were written in a Middle Indian dialect of the Gāndhārī type, similar to the ancient Prâkrit of Gāndhāra in northwestern India, intro duced into Serindia, that is to say Chinese Turkestan, in the 2nd century A.D. {cf. Hamilton and Beldiceanu, op. cit., pp. 335-337).

12. On the derivation of "satin" from Zaiton, cf. Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, I, Paris, 1959, p. 595, and the discussion of Çaiton, pp. 583-597.

13. Cf. James Hamilton, "Un acte ouïgour de vente de terrain provenant de Yar khoto", Turcica, vol. I (1969), pp. 43-44.

14. See this translation of Kāšyarī's definition of the term qamdu, occurring on p. 211, 1.1, of the facsimile, in the edition by Robert Dankoff and James Kelly of Mahmūd Kāšyarī, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (Dīwān Luγāt at-Turk), Part I, (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 317. Mahmūd ibn al-Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Kāšyarī, author of the Dīwān, was born in Barsγān near the Issig-köl in the Qarakhanid kingdom in the first half of the 11th century, and completed his dictionary in Baghdad in about 1077 (cf. op. cit., Part I, pp. 4-7).

15. The correspondence of Turkish yuη with the Mongol and Sino-Korean forms was noted by G. J. Ramstedt, Kalmückisches Wörterbuch, Helsinki 1935, pp. 279-280.

16 The form qἰßtu occurred notably in line 11 of the Uighur manuscript Pelliot Chi nois 3046 verso from the Dunhuang manuscript grotto, edited by me as Ms. 34 in Manuscrits ouïgours du IXe-Xe siècle de Touen-houang (Paris 1986), pp. 165-169, but my attempt there (n. 34.11) to explain the origin of the form qißtu may now be disregarded. On the various occurrences of the word in question and the vari ous etymologies hitherto proposed, cf. Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische und mongoli sche Elemente im Neupersischen, I, Wiesbaden, 1963, pp. 450-451, and Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish, p. 582.