Ginger: a Khotanese Loanword in Modern Purik-Tibetan
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GINGER: A KHOTANESE LOANWORD IN MODERN PURIK-TIBETAN ROLAND BIELMEIER (BERN) In the eighties and nineties of the last century Ronald E. Emmerick and I used to exchange letters and emails from time to time on language contact between Khotanese and Tibetan. It is now some fourteen years since I informed him in 1997 that I had found that the Khotanese word for ‘ginger’ is still in use today in certain varieties of modern Purik-Tibetan. It was his teacher, Harold W. Bailey, who apud ROSS 1952: 15 first pointed out that the Khotanese word ttuṃgara- ‘ginger’ was borrowed into Written Tibetan (WT) as doṅ gra. This is mentioned by Emmerick in his contribution to the Gedenkschrift for Giuseppe Tucci (EMMERICK 1985: 313 [13]), where he added that in chapter 2.17 of Ravigupta’s Siddhasāra Khotanese “ttāṃgare corresponds to Sanskrit nāgara and to Tibetan li doṅ gra. li in the Tibetan li doṅ gra designates Khotan, as pointed out by B. LAUFER, TP, 1916, 455-6, n.1.” For more details, especially further variants of the Khotanese word see BAILEY 1979: 130, where he proposed an Indo-European etymology deriving it from “*tuvam-kara-, with *tuva- ‘swollen, tuber, rhizome’, hence the ginger root, to base tau-: tu- ‘to swell’”. This etymological analysis is unreplaced up to now. Due to the addition of WT li abbreviated for WT li yul ‘Khotan’, there can hardly be any doubt that Tibetan has borrowed from Khotanese and not vice versa. In the BTC (2779a), at present the most comprehensive Tibetan dictionary containing material from Classical as well as from Modern Written Tibetan, li doṅ gra is explained as sga dmar gyi miṅ gźan źig (a different name for red ginger). It is interesting to note that the Khotanese word for ‘ginger’ was not only borrowed into Tibetan, but also into Tocharian. Tocharian B tvāṅkaro ‘ginger’ has been compared with Khotanese ttuṃgare by BAILEY in BSOS VIII/4: 913, 920 (cf. ROSS 1952: 14-15, repeated by ADAMS 1999: 322 “from Khotanese ttuṃgare”). According to 22 ROLAND BIELMEIER ISEBAERT 1980: §§ 66, 259, the Tocharian word was borrowed from a middle Iranian proto-type *t(u)vamkar < *tuvam-kara- via Tocharian A, where it, however, has not been found, into Tocharian B. This picture of a seemingly typical loan can now be extended into the present time, as I found this loan alive and in use in the Tibetan Purik dialect. Today, this dialect is spoken in Lower Ladakh in the Indian part of Kashmir. The Purik-speaking area starts roughly west of the Photu La (pass), including the Chiktan valley to the north on the road from Leh to Kargil, its main settlement, and beyond to Dras, where Purik gets mixed with Indo-Aryan Shina. Purik is also spoken in the Suru-Kartse valley, which extends from Kargil southwards in the direction of Zanskar. During my field work conducted in 1992 with M. Jaffar Akhon, a native speaker of the Tibetan Purik variety of Tshangra in the Suru-Kartse valley, to compile data for the Comparative Dictionary of Tibetan Dialects (CDTD), I recorded with him the word ʈoŋgára ‘ginger’ with stress on the middle syllable used in his mother tongue instead of ʧazga ‘id.’, WT bca’ sga, as used, e.g., in Baltistan, Lower Ladakh and Leh. This native Tibetan term was also known to him, but not used. Independently, Ngawang Tsering from Nurla in Lower Ladakh, who also recorded data for the CDTD, conducted fieldwork in the same year in Sapi, where he found the same word with the same pronunciation ʈoŋgára and the same meaning as well. Sapi is a Purik-speaking village in Lower Ladakh with a mixed Muslim-Buddhist population. His informant was Buddhist. It is the first village one reaches when leaving the Kartse valley in the direction of Mulbek via Shargol after crossing the Rusi La (pass) towards the north. According to the recordings and information gathered by Ngawang Tsering in 1998, the word is also used in the eastern neighbouring Phokari valley with the isolated but important Buddhist pilgrimage site Phokar Urgyan Rdzong, and further east as far as Mulbek. But still further to the east, beyond Mulbek and the Namika La (pass) in the settlements of Botkharbu, Wanla, Ledo, Skyurbuchan and Henaskut, the word is unknown. In the area of Kargil and Chiktan, Ngawang Tsering recorded the word in the same year with speakers from Chiktan and from Dargo, north- east of Chiktan, as well as with speakers from Lotsum and Skambe .