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LIAO CHINESE 7.1 the Chinese Language Beyond Hebei We Know Very Little of the Type of Chinese Spoken Far North of Hebei During

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LIAO CHINESE 7.1 the Chinese Language Beyond Hebei We Know Very Little of the Type of Chinese Spoken Far North of Hebei During CHAPTER SEVEN LIAO CHINESE The founding of the Song Dynasty in 960 ended a long period of disunion in China. The national capital, Dongjing, was established at Kaifengfu in the Central Plains. This area remained the political and cultural center of the dynasty for 166 years. The conventional view today is that the standard language of the period was a Central Plains-based lingua franca or koine, probably centered in the Kaifeng-Luoyang area… There is, however, one further point with requires notice here. North of the Song lay the Khitan empire (907-1119) […] In 937, before the founding of Song, the short-lived Jìn dynasty had ceded to the Khitans an area known as the Sixteen Prefectures, which correspond roughly to the northern part of modern Hebei Province. Despite a number of efforts, the Song were never able to retake this area, and it remained under Khitan control for approximately 200 years. The inhabitants of this territory were almost all Chinese […] At the town of Youzhou they built a new administrative centre, called Nanjing, the southernmost of the five capitals of their state, to govern their new Chinese subjects. From this place, after many changes and vicissitudes, the modern city of Peking would eventually evolve. Now it is of some interest here that the large Chinese population of this region, which the Liao called the Southern Capital Circuit, was cut off from the Central Plains dialect area to the south for two centuries. Although we have no proof for it, we may speculate that in this linguistic rupture lie at least some of the beginnings of the distinctive type of north Chinese dialect which would later come to be associated with the Peking area and points to the northeast. – W, South Coblin 2007:15-16 (slightly modified). 7.1 The Chinese language beyond Hebei We know very little of the type of Chinese spoken far north of Hebei during the Liao dynasty, or what type of Chinese was the basis of the many Chinese loanwords transcribed in the Kitan inscriptions. It could have been similar to the Chinese of the Tang capital, or its variants in the northwest of China during the late Tang and the post-Tang period. It could have been similar to the contemporary Song “prevalent speech of the central provinces”. It could have been similar to the geographically closer dialects of the Zhongyuan yinyun or the Menggu ziyun. On a priori grounds, we have little evidence one way or the other. What we can do, however, is to look at the varieties of Chinese in the sources listed above, and some others of about the same time, 228 CHAPTER SEVEN to set up a number of characteristics one might expect a dialect of Chinese at that time and place to have. After this is has been done, we can compare these possible characteristics with the evidence of the Kitan script. 7.2 Northeastern China during the Late Tang The Tang empire did not extend beyond the Great Wall in the east, and the southern bank of the Yellow River in the west. What sort of Chinese, if any, may have been spoken north of the Great Wall at that time is unknown. South of the Great Wall, and north of the Yellow River, lay the area broadly known as Hebei. Although part of the Tang empire, at least until the An Lushan rebellion, it was a remote and somewhat uncouth place, far from the cultural centres of the Tang. Even as early as 643, in the view of Chen Yinque, “north-eastern China, in particular Hebei province, was estranged from the Tang ruling house” (Wechsler 1979:200-201). He argued that “an influx of non-Chinese into Hebei from early in the eighth century had initiated a process by which, in the course of time, “barbarized society” in the northeast… The barbarian factor as seen by Chen Yinque, therefore, involves not merely An Lushan and the men under his command, but the population of a whole region”. An alternative view proposed by Gu Jiguang and adapted by Pulleyblank “explain[s] the rebellion in the context of the long-standing alienation of Hebei (in the north-east) from the Tang court (in the north-west)”. (Peterson 1979:471). Both views suggest a considerable degree of difference between Hebei and the rest of Tang China. With the disintegration of Tang power after the rebellion, the military commanders in the north-east asserted their independence, so that by 785 Youzhou, the province in the area of present day Beijing, was regarded as an autonomous province. Various attempts over the next few decades to reassert power in the northeast failed, and after 822 the Tang court made no further attempt to recover control in these areas. Writing in 831, the minister Niu Sengru wrote “since the Rebellion of An Lushan, Fanyang [i.e. Youzhou] has not been part of the empire.” (Peterson 1979:548). 7.3 Possible altaic influence on Chinese What all this means in linguistic terms is speculation. Norman 1982:243 noted “Northern China was controlled by dynasties of northern nomadic origin for a total of more than 800 years between the fourth and twentieth centuries. A majority of these northern rulers were of Altaic stock, generally speakers of either Mongolian or Tungusic. During this long period of contact between Chinese and Altaic, there was naturally a good deal of mutual .
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