≪說文解字≫ 讀若에 반영된 복자음 聲母

Abstract

This study is designed to reveal the types of “Initial Consonant Clusters”(“clusters” hereafter) as reflected in “the Shuowen Duruo[讀若] Glosses”. As the time span of Old Chinese[OC] covers presumably more than 1,000 years, we will have to assume that there had been a number of phonological changes within the period. This seems to be the case with the cluster system, which would reduce in its types and numbers over time. We have some evidence against varieties of clusters existing in the pre-Qin time, which, however, eventually turned into simple consonants as they developed into Middle Chinese. Therefore, the process of cluster-simplification deserves our discussion. There are some materials that show what types of clusters were retained at the late stage of OC, such as the Shuowen Duruo Glosses, Paranomastic glosses[聲訓], yiwen[異文], tongjia[通假] as well as the annotations of the Eastern Han Scholars. This study takes the Shuowen Duruo Glosses as a main material. We start our discussion with reviewing the two antecedent studies on the consonantal system as revealed in the Shuowen, and take Zheng-Zhang Shangfang’s OC Phonology as the point of departure. We find his transcriptions on some characters problematic and attempt to revise them by providing some evidence. Thus we establish certain types of clusters which our predecessors failed to reconstruct or falsely reconstructed if they did at all. We also find that there are a number of types of clusters which had disappeared in the Duruo Glosses. That, however, does not necessarily mean that all of these missing clusters had turned into simple consonants as of the Eastern Han because they are not reflected in the Glosses. In conclusion, we have Cl, C⋅r, s(-)C and others reflected in the Glosses. This study may provide only a sketch description of the cluster system of the Eastern Han, but will make contribution to tracing back the phonological system of the time.