Journal of Chinese Linguistics Vol.11 – 1983

Abstract 摘要
An attempt is made to establish in some principled way the direction of linguistic developments in the East Asian continent, based on the basic lexical items of the Chinese language related to eating and drinking, ‘cooking vessels’, ‘(cooked) dishes’ and the verb ‘to drink’. In order to determine the developmental direction, a) some historical evolutions of the shape and function of cooking vessels and b) regional expansions/reductions of the semantic contents of the verb ‘to drink’ were examined, in addition to the chronological order of these vessels’ transformations and the semantic changes of the verb ‘to drink’ established with the archaeological and philological evidence. The direction and order of the developments were then double-checked with the synchronic distributional patterns of modern Chinese dialectal vocabulary corresponding to these vessel names and various diachronic variants for ‘(cooked) dishes’ and ‘to drink’. Despite the successive occurrences, in the historical documents, of the diachronic variants of these words primarily in the order of the synchronic distribution from the southeastern to the northwestern corner of the continent, it is argued that this order does not necessarily reflect the actual order in which these words came into being in the regional variants of the Chinese language, and some philological evidence for that argument is presented. The order we established reflects the mere appearance order of these diachronic forms in the written history, while the actual words themselves had mostly come into being in the earliest period of the Chinese language. In other words, what is normally described as a linear, longitudinal development along the time axis in the history of the Chinese language often turns out, upon close examination, to be a horizontal or at least diagonal tracing of synchronic distribution of various linguistic phenomena completed in an early stage of the historical period of the language. Here lies, we believe, part of the reason for the beautiful correlations between the longitudinal and latitudinal occurrences of lexical items discussed in his study. The direction we established here by examining the Chinese lexical items related to eating and drinking is supported by the distributional pattern of river names in the East Asian continent examined by geographers.

根据一些有关饮食的汉语基本词汇的历史变体（如鼎，镬，锅等）和跟它们相对应的地区变体（如闽语鼎，粤客语镬，北方话锅等）的分布。我们能确定在东亚大陆里语言发展的总方向。“河”和“江”在东亚大陆（包括朝鲜半岛）里的分布也反映着同样的发展方向。我们的讨论不只利用历史和方言的知识，还跟据炊具之形态变迁和各个词意的历史上扩大和缩小。这样确定的语言发展的方向其实不一定反映着有关各词的产生次序。查看历史资料就知道有些词虽然文献里出现是相当新的，不过它们的原形已能发现在汉语最古的词汇里。我们相信普通所谓词汇的历史发展不一定都是“纵”的发展；虽然不能说是完全“横”的描写，至少是“斜”的描写。这就是历史变体基本上对应地区变体（如最古的鼎和闽语鼎，中古的镬和粤客语镬，最新的锅和北方话锅等）的原因之一。语言的发展好象基本上在古代完成。所谓历史上的变化很多反映着各地变体出现在历史文献里的次序。汉语也不是其例外。