Regularity, naturalness, rhetoric: paratextual conversations on the nature of sound change in Late Imperial China ( ) I. Bardadrac , Gérard Genettes charming autobiographico-abecedarian hodgepodge of 2006, begins with Aa , the little coastal river, known by the cruciverbalists ..., ... which separates the départements Nord from Pas-de-Calais , and ends with Zut (darn!) , which could probably become my [scil., M. Genettes] last word. 1 It would have been interesting to see the creative ramblings of one of the late Imperial Chinese philologists within the lexicographic scaffolding of the most intensely studied philological text of the time, the bùsh u -classifier system of X Shèns Shu wén ji zì . Intriguing, to follow 540, probably very uneven semantic leaps 2, leading from y , in which ... the dào has been established at the outset of the absolute beginning ( ) to hài , the very last of the celestial stems ( ti ng n ), that is, the end of all counts. Even exciting, maybe, to observe the range of scholarly free associations from d ng east, the first upper even tone entry in their other favorite dictionary, all the way down to ch as if flying up into the air, along the 206 rhyme class names of the Gu ngyùn : east winter goblet river branch quiet imbued with improper intimacy posessions wanting ( d ng d ng zh ng ji ng zh branch ... ti qià xiá yè fá ). 3 1 G. Genette, Bardadrac , Paris: Seuil, 2006, 9 & 453. 2 Assuming, that is, that they would bother to rest at the 36 empty radicals, under which no other characters were subsumed. For a good introduction to the organizational principles of the Shu wén see Françoise Bottéro & Christoph Harbsmeier, The Shuowen Jiezi Dictionary and the Human Sciences in China, Asia Major 21 (2008=M. Nylan et al. eds., Star Gazing, Fire Phasing, and Healing in China: essays in honor of Nathan Sivin ) 1: °°°. 3 Maybe, some day someone (re)constructs the literary structure of such rhyme class tables, just as Dietz-Otto Edzard (1930-2004) insisted in one of his last contributions that the Old Mesopotamian lexical lists are belletristic works of art (Die altmesopotamischen lexikalischen Listenverkannte Kunstwerke?, in: Claus Wilcke (ed.), Das geistige Erfassen der Welt im Alten Orient. Sprache, Religion, Kultur und Gesellschaft (=Gedenkschrift Friedrich Delitzsch), Wiesbaden: O. Harrasowitz, 2007, °°°. 1 It would have been interesting, not because we are taken in by the misconception, so prominent in Foucaults Les mots et les choses 4, that history really changes completely with the alphabet 5, or that the inception of alphabetic writing marks the essential difference between Orient and Occident, as he quotes from the great French orientalist Constantin François de Chassebuf, comte de Volnay (1757-1820).6 Whether ultimately traceable to the th 19 c. B.C. Canaanite workmen, semi-literate in Middle Kingdom Egyptian, who carved their acrophonic letters into mount Sinai at Serabit-el-Khadem 7, or to the Wadi-el-Hol Asiatic desert experts of a slightly later layer within the same cultural horizon8, it is not the alphabetic épistémè , the time-honoured and allegedly so different historical a priori, said to ground all further organization of knowledge, which would make such ramblings following analphabetic ordering rules interesting. Rather, it is the synchronic function, by which any received sequence partially exempts the author from the perlocutionary pressure to supply genuine information or to be immediately communicative, if only he chooses to extravagate within its strictly prestructured linearity. External framing constraints of this type could, a fortiori , shed some light on subtle layers of scholarly meaning constitution in texts, not easily accessible through more straightforward analyses of their narrative structures or historical settings alone. Absent any such experiments in the little of Late Imperial Chinese literature on 4 And, indeed, shatteringly stereotypical with several other theoretical heavyweights, from Derrida ( De la grammatologie , Paris: Edtions de Minuit, 1967) through Havelock ( Prologue to Greek Literacy, Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press, 1971) to Luhmann (Die Form der Schrift, in: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht & K. Ludiwg Pfeiffer eds., Schrift [Materialität der Zeichen; A.12], München: Fink, 1993, 349-366). For two lucid Egyptological criticisms of such positions see Frank Kammerzell, Aristoteles, Derrida und ägyptische Phonologie. Zu systematischen Verschiedenheiten von geschriebener und gesprochener Sprache, Acts of the Sixth International Congress of Egyptology , ed. S. Curto, A. M. Donadoni Roveri, and B. Alberton, Turin: Museo Egizo, 1992, vol. II: 24351, and Bjørn Jespersen & Chris Reintges, Tractarian Sätze, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and the very idea of script as a picture, The Philosophical Forum 39 (2008) 1:1-19. Genette is, as usual, quite perceptive, when he points out that the Chinese logogram throughout the 20 th century typically ( ) plays the role of a confirming myth and an exotic pawn, as it was played by the Egyptian hieroglyph before Champollion ( Mimologiken, Reise nach Kratylien [stw 1511], Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001, 402; °°° get French REF). 5 Avec lécriture alphabétique, en effet, lhistoire des hommes change entièrement ( Les mots et les choses , Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 128.) 6 Ibid. 7 Orly Goldwasser, How the alphabet was born from hieroglyphs, Biblical Archaeology Review 36 (2010) 2: 40-53. 8 J.C. Darnell, F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp et al., Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Wadi el-Hôl, The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 59 (2005): 63-124. 2 language I know, the closest approximation to a fairly rigid discursive prestructuring outside the text proper appears in the fánlì ! (editorial) directions to the reader, and pre- or postfaces to works from the xi oxué "# (subsidiary learning, artes minores ) tradition. 9 To a somewhat lesser degree, it also figures in epitexts, such as scholarly correspondances on a particular xi oxué topic, maybe since both forms, prefaces and letters, stem from a pedigree of textual types, developed collaterally to the canonization of literature during the Early Imperial period 10 , and come within a tight corset of rhetorical conventions, flourishing ever since the Táng 11 . Just as the origin of the preface as a literary form is largely a Hàn phenomenon 12 one thinks of the Dàxù $% to the Odes , the Xùyì %& of the L shì ch nqi '()* , the Tàish g ng zìxù +,-% of the Sh jì +. , or even the Yàolüè /0 of the Huáinánz 1 23 and the Hòuxù 45 of the Shu wén ji zì as famous early specimens of the genre non-political or -military letters ( sh 6), especially private and scholarly letters with a certain literary pretense, originated during the same period. 13 Trying to look beyond the Early Imperial watershed for a moment, it is difficult in the context of this workshop, not to be reminded of Genettes famous classification of paratext as threshold 14 , or his borrowing of the Borgesian vestibule as a metaphor for it, when tracing 9 I.e., the works conveninetly reviewed in Xiè Q k ns 789 (1737-1802) Xi o xué k o "#: (ed. Shàngh i G jí ch b nshè ;<=>?@A , 1995-99, 50 j. ). 10 On which see, for instance, Martin Kern, Ritual, Text, and the Formation of the Canon: Historical Transitions of Wen in Early China, Toung Pao 87 (2001) 1-3: 43-91 and Michael Nylan, Classics without Canonization, reflections on classical learning and authority in Qin (221-210 BC) and Han (206 BC-AD 220), in: J. Lagerwey & M. Kalinowski eds., Early Chinese Religion, I: ShangHan (1250 BC AD 220), Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008, pp. 721-777. 11 Cf. Zh ng Jìng BC , Tángdài xù wénzì yánji shùpíng DE%FGHI , Zhèngzh u Dàxué Xuébào JK$##L 34 (2001) 3: 89-93. 12 Cf. Ch B njié MNO , Zh ngguó g dài wént gàilùn PQ=ERST , B ij ng: B ij ng Dàxué 1998, 362. 13 Discounting the idea, that event notations ( xùshì kècí 5UVW ) in the oracle bone inscriptions are early instantiations of epistolary communication (as per M Z ngf ng XYZ , Sh xìn tànyuán 6[\] , Wénsh Zh shì +^_ [1994] 9: 104-105), the earliest paleographically available private letters come from the Qín wooden slips from Shuìh dì `ab , cf. Zh ng Pénglì Bc , Qi n tán Qín-Hàn shíq de sh xìn defghij6[ , Hénán Ji oyù Xuéyuàn Xuébào k2lm#n#L (2009) 6: 107-8. First usages of xìn [ meaning letter are only sporadically attested from the late Six Dynasties period (see Zh ng Y ngán Bop , Gu n yú Wèi-Jìn Nánb icháo de sh hé xìn qrs2tuj 6 v [ , Y yán Yánji wpFG (1985) 2: 4-6 & 54 (cf. final b jì x. at 54). 14 G. Genette, Introduction to the Paratext, Marie Maclean transl., New Literary History 22 (1991): 261-272, at 271. 3 the etymology of xù %. The character is glossed in the Shu wén 15 as walls running from East to West, on the inside of which, between the door and windows, the family is located according to the ry yz 16 . This is even reinforced, if read in context with Gu Pús {| (276-324) commentary, who defines xù as what separates the inside form the outside (}~ ). Does this mean that we have to imagine the text as a cozy home, which is separated from strangers, such as the reader or the editor, by an insurmountable barrier called xù, which was erected by one of the family members, usually the author, or one of his friends? Judging from the other early usages of xù % and its homophone xù 517 (both < Middle Chinese +zjoX < Old Chinese *s-m-la-q 18 ) with a meaning to arrange in order, to continue, rank etc., the spatial focus underlying the the wall metonymy was not one of separation or even enlosure, but one of being drawn-out, continuity, or sequence.