| Summary: | In recent years, a growing body of literature has questioned the received idea
that Old Chinese, like modern Chinese dialects, lacked morphology. First, recent descriptions of languages belonging to subgroups such as Qiangic,
Kiranti, or Kham1 have shown that lack of morphology and isolating typology is
not widespread within the Sino-Tibetan family; quite on the contrary, it is limited
to a few branches (such as Lolo-Burmese, Karen, Bai and Tujia) which have
suffered severe phonological attribution and lost most traces of older
morphology.
Second, within the field of Chinese phonology itself, works such as Sagart
(1999) and Pan (2000) have given a new impulse to the research on word families
and morphological alternations, as well as a more rigorous framework of
etymological studies.
The book under review, though deeply influenced by Sagart and Pan’s works,
is radically different from them both in its phonological reconstruction system
and in his method of studying morphological alternations. Some of the new ideas
proposed in this book have already been published in a series of articles in
various Chinese linguistics journals (Jin 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
2004, 2005a,b,c), and it represents the culmination of more than a decade of work
on Old Chinese phonology and Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics.
|
|---|