Loloish dialect and script of 18th century Liangshan reflected in the Luoluo Yiyu

Introduction

Various Loloish dialects and scripts are recorded in various manuscripts of the Luoluo Yiyu 猓猡译语 (Translation Glossary of Loloish) compiled under the instruction of the Qing Emperor Qianlong 乾隆, of which the collection at Ōtani University has been identified as a definitive edition for Imperial reading. There are few preserved Loloish texts that explicitly date from before the 19th century, other than a small number of stele inscriptions. As a precious early stage Loloish text, the Luoluo Yiyu, from 1750, with its beautiful handwriting and complete preservation, was published in facsimile with a brief introduction by Matsukawa and Miyake (2015).

Wen (1940) first undertook a preliminary contrastive study among nine manuscripts of the Luoluo Yiyu preserved in the Palace Museum of Beijing, the French School of the Extreme-Orient and Ōtani University. He pointed out that the second manuscript of the Palace Museum and the second one of the School of the Extreme-Orient were parallel with the Liangshan 梁山 (= 凉山) Luoluo Yiyu of Ōtani University, and published a photo of folio ‘11A’ from that version. As his academic interest was focused on linguistic studies, he merely focused on some possible historical evolutionary phenomena reflected in word pronunciation, ¹ but neither introduced the Loloish script nor determined the specific location where the data was collected. The aim of the present paper is to illustrate the form and content of the Ōtani version in order to provide references for the study of the Loloish language and script in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China.

An overview of the Lolo Yiyu preserved at Ōtani University

The Luoluo Yiyu preserved at the Library of Ōtani University comes from the collection of Kanda Kiichirō (1897–1984) in Taiwan. The original includes 103 folios of white tissue paper in traditional thread binding, jacketed in yellow silk brocade with a title script on its front cover, reading Jianchang shu Shama Liangshan Ge Luoluo Yiyu 建昌属沙骂梁山各猓猡译语 (Translation Glossary of Each Loloish in Shama, Liangshan governed by Jianchang Garrison, hereafter SLLY), which is abbreviated at the beginning of the text as Luoluo Yiyu. On the first folio there are also stamps of ‘Taiko Bunko’, ‘Library of Ōtani University’ and Kanda’s ‘Neiko Shouku’. The text includes 20 chapters (men 门), recording 740 entries of Loloish words and phrases from the middle of the 18th century by means of Loloish script, Chinese semantic translation and phonetic transcription.

As well as the collection at Ōtani University, it was reported that there were also eight further surviving manuscripts of the Luoluo Yiyu, five of them housed in the Palace Museum of Beijing (Feng, 1981; Fuchs, 1931) and three in the French School of the Extreme-Orient. ² Wen (1940) noticed the fact that the writing order of the Ōtani collection was from left to right, in keeping with the same Loloish regulation set in the preface, but the writing order of the Palace Museum collection was from vertical for the Chinese translation and from right to left for the Chinese transcription, evidently in order to comply with the Chinese reading habit at that time.

Like other Xifan Yiyu西番译语 (Translation Glossary of Western Barbarians) editions at Ōtani University, ³ the Chinese translation and transcription in the exquisitely decorated SLLY were written in regular characters filled in the xylographic Chinese lists printed beforehand. In contrast, the collection at the Palace Museum and School of the Extreme-Orient are simpler and cruder, for they are pure manuscripts without entry boundaries; even the full title and preface are omitted in the Palace Museum manuscripts and merely titled ‘Luoluo Yiyu’ on the first folio. Shown either by the entry orders or by the script forms, it has been proved that there are slight divergences between the Ōtani and Palace Museum collection documents, reflecting the copyist’s carelessness in the latter.

Most of the Chinese-Barbarian glossaries (Huayi Yiyu华夷译语) were compiled within the 18th century, when Emperor Qianlong recognized that local languages and scripts needed to be understood in order to govern the non-Chinese regions. Under his instruction, the work of collecting Barbarian scripts was achieved in 1750 when Celeng 策楞, Viceroy of Sichuan, presented a memorial to the throne, in which he reported that some Barbarian scripts were collected and collated into 11 volumes, with their word pronunciation and meaning in accordance with the stylistic rules and layouts of the Four Translation Bureau (Siyiguan 四译馆), and were submitted to the Central Government along with precise overviews about the tribal headmen at the beginning of each volume. ⁴

Learning from the materials available, the 11 volumes of ‘Barbarian scripts’ include nine Xifan Yiyu and two Luoluo Yiyu collected from Sichuan (Nie and Sun, 2010: 20–21). Considering that the carving and writing specification of the SLLY is parallel with other volumes of Xifan Yiyu, we may firmly believe it to be one of the 11 volumes of ‘Barbarian scripts’; that is to say, the Ōtani collection was also achieved in 1750 and the 11 volumes of ‘Barbarian scripts’ were just the appendixes to the memorial by Viceroy Celeng.

The specific locations where the language data was collected for SLLY are recorded in the preface of the book, ⁵ by which it can be learnt that there were not any scripts used in the counties Dechang, Yuexi, Ganluo, Huili, Mianning of the present Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and Miyi County of Panzhihua City. ⁶ As for the regions ruled by Lolo tribal governments taking the same dialect and writing system, this can be explained as the following according to the 19th juan of Yongzheng Sichuan Tongzhi 雍正四川通志:

Although these dialects were widely distributed, we believe that the compilation of this Luoluo Yiyu was mainly accomplished in Xichang because the Jianchang 建昌 Garrison was established there and, according to the preface, the language data was also collected nearby.

Writing features of the Liangshan Standard Yi Script and the Luoluo Yiyu

The creation of Liangshan Loloish script cannot be dated. It was originally used by Loloish clergy for writing religious texts, and afterwards came into gradual use in the daily life of the Lolos for the keeping of accounts and literary use. According to a general estimation (Li, 1979) there may be more than 8000 Loloish glyphs, but they have not been exactly counted so far. As they have never been unified and regulated, the forms and calligraphic arrangements of traditional Loloish script vary with each individual; even a well-informed member of the clergy was not able to read through the text transcribed by others. In 1974, the governments of Sichuan Province and Liangshan Prefecture designed the ‘Plan of Standard Yi Script’ (Yiwen Guifan Fangan 彝文规范方案), which were then popularized among the residences under the authorization of the State Council in 1980. The newly established ‘Liangshan Standard Yi Script’ is a kind of syllabic writing system, including 819 glyphs representing all of the 819 syllables in the Xide 喜德 dialect of the Yi (Lolo) language. Most of the glyphs are selected from traditional Loloish script, except that some strokes are simplified or normalized (Chen, 1985). In fact, one can find many written forms in SLLY identical or similar to those in modern Standard Yi Script; therefore, deciphering the traditional Loloish script in this book is not as difficult as we expected.

The names of the Loloish translator and transcriber are not recorded in SLLY, and its specific compilation process is not found in any historical materials. At the first impression, the difference from other glossaries is that its writing manner looks evidently not similar to that of Lolos. The Lolo people used to write with slender tree branches instead of brushes, so the stroke weight looks identical and the space between glyphs looks distinctive, while in SLLY the space between glyphs is not deliberately kept, and the feature of Chinese calligraphy is shown at the initial or terminal of a stroke. It is obvious that the transcriber wrote with a Chinese brush, inadvertently showing his writing habit of Chinese characters. This fact leads us to suppose that the original book might have been completed by two co-operating transcribers—one an official copyist who wrote Chinese characters, the other Loloish who wrote his native scripts—while the last, definitive edition for submission might not have been accomplished by the Loloish transcriber, but may have been a depicted imitation by a Chinese copyist according to the original. In the Tibetan glossaries of Xifan Yiyu the handwriting is beautifully skilled because there existed a Tibetan Translation Bureau (Yiguan 译馆) of the Qing government, so a copyist knowing both Chinese and Tibetan could be easily found even within the capital; however, the applied range of Loloish at that time was far from that of Tibetan, and there was not a Loloish translation bureau in the government; so, when Loloish script had to be used, a copyist of other scripts had to be engaged for ghost-writing, meaning that the Loloish glyphs were finally written distorted.

The fact that the copyist of the definitive edition was not literate in Loloish may be further proved by the glyph arrangement in the book. The preface stated that the whole writing should be arranged from top to bottom and glyphs should be arranged from left to right, ⁷ but, compared with Liangshan Standard Yi Script, it seems that in all probability the copyist of the Loloish script wrote his glyphs from right to left, horizontally. ⁸ One can imagine that the copyist of the definitive edition must have misunderstood the reading order as Chinese style, so that he turned the paper written in Loloish in a 90° counter-clockwise direction and copied it according to the arrangement stated in the preface. The following contrast with Standard Yi Script shows that if we turn the Loloish script in the original in a 90° clockwise direction and then read from right to left horizontally, it is exactly equal to the Liangshan Standard Yi Script reading from left to right horizontally.

snow 阿 [v³³]. Regarded as , Liangshan Standard Yi: . ⁹

Venas 诗鸡 [^{33 33}]. Regarded as , Liangshan Standard Yi: .

earth 咩多 [m³³ d³³]. Regarded as , Liangshan Standard Yi: .

bad water 依勒过 [⁴² li³³ 33]. Regarded as , Liangshan Standard Yi: .

Considering the unskilled handwriting of the Loloish copyist and strict standardization in modern Yi script, we believe that the writing forms of traditional Loloish are identical to those of modern standard Yi, other than the opposite glyph order to begin with left or right. However, it is hard to understand that one and the same glyph was sometimes written in obviously different forms. In the following examples, we changed the vertical line of the original Loloish script to horizontal, reading from right to left:

sky 么迷 [mu³³ m³³]

lightening 木咳 [mu^{33 55}]

wind starts 木里坡 [mu^{33 33} phu³³]

moon 梭波 [⁴² bo³³]

moonrise 落薄多 [⁴² bo³³ du³³]

moonset 啰波过那舞 []

The word ‘mu³³’ (sky) appearing in the first three entries was written in three slightly different forms as , and ; the word ‘⁴²’ (moon) appearing in the last three entries was written in three slightly different forms as , and . We do not know the reason for this, but it is certain that the concept of strict writing specification was not reflected in the mind of that copyist.

Dialect of LuoluoYiyu

The place names given in the original preface of SLLY show that its language data was mainly collected from the region of Shengzha 圣乍 sub-dialect of the Northern Yi at present. The Chinese government decided in 1980 to carry out the ‘Plan of Standard Yi Script’ voiced as the standard pronunciation of Xide喜德 and the Shengzha sub-dialect as the basis of dialect (Chen, 1985), in view of its widest distribution, largest population and the relatively developed economy in the Shengzha region.

Differences in the first two folios of SLLY and their modern Xide forms are given in Table 1. ¹⁰

In Table 1, there are only yun (cloud) and wu 雾 (fog) entirely differentiated from those in modern Xide dialect; that is, the transcription ni 呢 for ti、gu 咕 for m(u) cannot be explained by phonetic interchange in traditional philology. We do not know whether such facts occur as the result of word transference or merely errors of transcribing, but in any case, considering the great phonemic divergences and conversational difficulties among Yi dialects, the distinctions of a small percentage cannot interfere with our conclusion that the basic materials of SLLY come from the Shengzha sub-dialect of the Northern Yi branch.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Contrast of the first two folios of SLLY and their modern Xide forms.

No.	Meaning	Chin. transcription	Xide form
1	天 sky	么迷 mo mi	mo33m()33
2	日 sun	哼哵 heng bie	ho33bu33
3	月 moon	梭波 suo bo	o21bo21
4	星 star	姆鸡 mu ji	m(u)33t33
5	cloud	木呢 mu ni	m(u)33ti33
6	雷 thunder	木兹 mu zi	m(u)33ts33
7	电 lightning	木咳 mu ke	m(u)33i55
8	霜 frost	亨曲 heng qu	hi33thu33
9	雪 snow	阿 a	vo33
10	雾 fog	咕吽 gu hou	m(u)33h55
11	露 dew	遮衣 zhe yi	t55
12	雨 rain	妈哈 ma ha	m(u)33ha33
13	雹 hail	嗟 jie	dzi33
14	风 wind	咩哼 mie heng	m(u)33()33

One of the significant characteristics in the phonological system of the Yi language is that its finals of all syllables take single vowels without nasal endings -n or - (Zangmianyu Yuyin he Cihui Bianxiezu, 1991: 247), while these nasal endings do exist in the Southwest Chinese dialect (Xinan guanhua 西南官话) and are widely spread in Sichuan (Yuan et al., 2001: 35). Thus a natural expectation may accordingly be that Chinese characters with nasal endings should never be used for phonetic transcription in SLLY, but this is not the reality. The most common exceptions are heng 亨 and heng 哼 in the above list, which is pronounced xən⁴⁴ in the Southwest Chinese dialect but used for hi³³, ho³³ etc., in Yi speech. There seems to be only one explanation for such phenomena: the dialect taken by the transcriber of SLLY was not the pure Southwest Chinese dialect, but its variant within the Yi people; that is to say, the original transcriber must have been a Lolo literate speaking Chinese. We know in fact that either in Sichuan or Yunnan, when Yi people meet Chinese loanwords in their speech, they always naturally omit the Chinese nasal finals and change them into open syllables in order to tally with the phonemic pattern of their own language; for example, they pronounce Chinese ian⁴⁴sən⁴⁴ 先生 as se³³s³³ and in³¹x³¹银行 as i²¹ha²¹. ¹¹ Thus the reason why SLLY used the Chinese character xən⁴⁴ 哼 for Loloish ho³³ may be well comprehended.

It is beyond doubt that the transcriber did not have sufficient ability in using the Chinese language and evidently lacked experience in compiling this kind of book, because Chinese transcriptions of one and the same Loloish syllable are not one and the same, ¹² and the initial and final categories of Chinese do not correspond to those of Loloish; these facts mean that it is not easy to restore Yi words on the basis of their Chinese transcriptions. By the time of the Qianlong era of the Qing dynasty, regulations had already been set for transcribing Tibetan, Manchurian and other non-Chinese languages, but the transcriber of SLLY entirely ignored the existence of those regulations; that is, he merely worked unconcernedly on the word list transmitted from the local authorities, aiming at little other than relative tolerability in acoustical similarities. As the transcriber provisionally created some characters such as bie 哵, die 嗲, li 唎 with radical kou 口, it seems that he merely intended to remind the readers that these were phonetic transcriptions without semantic meaning, unlike what was done by Buddhist translators in Tang and Song times, who used the characters with radical kou to transcribe some Sanskrit sounds that did not exist in Chinese, for example luo 罗 for la and luo 啰 for ra, in order to maximally imitate non-Chinese sounds for readers.

As a result of the different social and living environments, the study word list of Xifan Yiyu set by the Qing government did not closely accord with the reality of the Loloish region at that time, for some popular concepts in the Central Kingdom never appeared in the daily life of Liangshan Lolos. On these occasions, the translator had to find some temporary way to paraphrase them consistently. For example, the Lolos took knives as weapons rather than swords, so in SLLY the word for ‘sword’ (jian 剑) had to be transcribed into Chinese liangmiandao 两面刀 (knife-edge on both sides). In addition, more than 200 years having passed since the compilation of SLLY, the social upheaval in this period created a patchwork of original words and expressions thoroughly removed from people’s daily life. In contemporary Liangshan Prefecture we cannot find all the parallel words and expressions in SLLY; this indicates that explanation of the whole book will be a long journey.