Chinese and Sumerian

IN. SUMERIAN AND CHINESE 27;

constitute the Sumerian group are AMA (written s¢ay inside house; cf. the old

Chinese character) and J GIN, DUN, TUN (C.T. xii. 10). As is often the case, the old Chinese character retains only the upper part of the ideogram, viz. the sign AMA. Unfortunately the compound ideogram has not yet been found in any archaic inscription ; consequently, although the elements composing it are both ancient, we cannot at present be sure that >a==? [IVEY has not been evolved out of some single character. Anyhow, the symbol Aouse+star is found in both languages expressing the nearest of kin; a fact which can hardly be due to chance coincidence. (The

ancient Chinese ,°,, a star, resembles the Sumerian ar, zd., in that both suggest

a group or constellation, or perhaps rather the stars as a whole. The sounds of the two words are different; a fact which may account for the inversion of the original symbol in the Chinese figure.)

The great variety in the modes of writing the Chinese characters exhibited by different styles and periods—the ‘effraenata scripturae licentia’ of which Callery speaks, after giving some astonishing examples of it (pp. 31-34)—may be paralleled to some extent by the changes undergone by the old Sumerian characters in the course of their transition from the earliest known linear forms to the modern Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform symbols. It will be evident that, for our purposes, all intermediate and fanciful variations may be neglected. We are only concerned with the antique Chinese (or 4 wéz) and the linear Babylonian characters, such as those with which we have been dealing. But, unless we are greatly mistaken, our argument will derive strong support in a multitude of cases from the demonstrable relationship of the words involved, as well as from that of the characters which suggest them. When Wang-ch'ung (a.D. 27-97) argued that 1 kwei, ‘a disembodied spirit’, ‘ghost’, ‘demon’, really means ¢hat which has returned (deriving the word from fet kwei, ‘to return’), he showed, as Edkins has somewhere truly observed, that the Tones did not count for much in his etymology, the former word being in the First Tone, the latter in the Third. Nor need the Tones trouble us. Morrison quotes from the Lwh-shu ku (Dict. of Zaz-tung; twelfth cent. a. p.) the statement that ‘the doctrine of Tones (Skzug-yun) and of the Syllabic spelling was not known in ancient times’; adding that ‘the whole of this system, and these nice and, in part, imperceptible distinctions, are comparatively modern in China; and a large proportion of them have been introduced from foreign countries’. See his Dict., vol. i, Pt. I, p. v. It will not, therefore, be necessary for us to spend any of our time in a futile inquiry whether Sumerian Homophones were or were not distinguished by differences of Tone. Possibly, like their Chinese cognates, to some extent they were so distinguished; but as the question of the etymology of words and the derivation of characters is but little affected by these subtleties of intonation, we shall take leave to neglect them altogether. Our objection to Wang-ch'ung’s ingenious identification of kwet, ‘ghost’, with Awe ‘to return’, is based, not on his disregard of the Tones, but

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