Chu Language

Chu Language
The Sword Issue
This is a little complicated, but bear with us. The underlying issue is important.

The equivalence is said to be Chu glap vs general Sinitic glam "sword," within Warring States Chinese. The first of these two, glap, normally means "tongs" in Chinese. In the sense "sword," these may be thought to be plausible as variants of the same word in related languages. That is, they can be explained on that basis if it is assumed that Chu is not a different language, but a linguistic cousin of Chinese. They are so treated by Serruys Dialects 60, who posits an evolution in three semantic stages: "tongs" > "grip, sword hilt" > "sword." The whole trend of the evidence cited in our Lexicon is that Chu is not a dialect of Chinese, but a different language altogether, with different etymological affinities. This is a conflicting explanation. It has to be one or the other, and if Chu is a different language, then the situation with "sword" will have to be explained otherwise than Serruys explains it. We here offer that alternate explanation.

Serruys reconstructs the supposed common ancestor word of Chu glap and standard Sinitic glam (in his spelling) as follows:

Original tsklamp "sword" > tsklamb > tsklam "sword" (General Sinitic)
Original tsklamp "sword" > tsklamp > tsklap "sword" (Chu)
We may note, in beginning, that the Fang Yen, the supposed basis of Serruys' study, does not claim that glap is a Chu word for standard glam; the Fang Yen does not include the word glap at all. The glap/glam theory is then Serruys' own, and we will here consider it on its merits. It seems to us to have three difficulties: (1) There is not enough chronological time for that much divergence within the same language family, (2) there is no plausible mechanism for the divergence when it does occur, and (3) there is a semantic problem with the last link in the proposed evolutionary chain. We take these objections in that order.

Objection 1: Chronology. "Sword" is not an old word in Chinese. The object, and thus presumably also the name, are recent. Neither glam nor glap is attested in Jou or earlier inscriptions. Schuessler Dictionary, which purports to contain the entire known Jou vocabulary, lacks an entry for glap, and cites glam only from a recently discovered inscription, WW 1982:12 p44. It is worth noting that the "swords" mentioned in that inscription are not Chinese, but were captured from a non-Chinese enemy. The sword as an object does not seem to go further back in the Chinese culture area than the 08c, and at that time, it was little more than a ceremonial belt knife, useful for suicide, but not important in combat. The sword as a weapon did not really come into its own until the shift from chariot warfare (which relied primarily on distance weapons like the bow) to infantry warfare (which eventually gave greater prominence to close-encounter weapons like the sword, at which point swords themselves, especially in their cavalry form, became longer). This transition is essentially a Warring States matter. "Sword" thus does not belong to the original inventory of Chinese, and there are only a couple of centuries available for the phonetic evolution Serruys posits. Further, whether fast or slow, his proposed phonetic change would be more convincing if he could show that it applied to a family or class of Chinese words, and not to just one word.

Objection 2: Phonetic Conditions. This will be treated in the course of the next.
Objection 3: Semantic Sequence. We will now consider the three steps in the Serruys sequence"tongs" > "sword hilt" > "sword," one at a time, in more detail.

TONGS. As a Chinese word, glap means "tongs." It is related to glap "press between, grab from both sides, enclose," and to other words of cognate meaning. These tongs were two metal bars hinged together at one end, an object that does not greatly resemble a sword in appearance or in use. The use of tongs envisioned in the Shwo Wvn dictionary is to pick up a crucible of molten metal. Tongs may thus be part of the early but borrowed metal/writing/chariot/horse cultural complex. The word "tongs" does not appear in the Jou high literature, but the cognate verb is attested there (Schuessler 285). It has been suggested (Sagart 75) that the medial which we here write -l- was originally an -r- infix, a word-forming process with parallels in the Tibeto-Burman language family. As against this possible local relationship, "tongs" is also one of those Jou words with irritatingly close parallels in Indo-European (Pokorny 359 glabh, cited in Chang Vocabulary 5); some other related words are Anglo-Saxon clyppan, Eng clasp. Whether invented in Shang, with the appearance of metal culture, or borrowed as a word along with the rest of that culture complex (the word ma3 "horse" is one of the most transparently Indo-European words in the Chinese vocabulary), the word cannot go back to the ancestral level of the Chinese language, but it has a respectable antiquity. It would obviously be older than "sword," and so there is no trouble with this stage of the proposed Serruys sequence.

HILT. Whatever their ultimate filiation, glap "tongs" and its cognate "grab" are not implausible as the source for a derived word glap "sword hilt" within the same language. That meaning is rare, but it does occur twice in the late piece Jwangdz 30, the "Discourse on Swords." What are the date and local affinities of this chapter? There is no evidence for its existence of this chapter before Imperial times (the pre-Imperial Jwangdz writings seem not to have gone beyond JZ 29), and it is probably to be placed within the persuasion-story context of early Han. This does not rule out an archaizing usage, or a picturesque dialect usage. We find, however, that there is a difficulty here with the Chu aspect of the Serruys theory. Serruys wants glap to be the carrier of the meanings "hilt, sword" in the Chu "dialect" of Chinese, with "glam" being the corresponding word in standard Chinese. But the JZ 30 tale in which "glap" does mean "hilt" and not "tongs" is not set in Chu; it is set in Jau. And it cannot be urged in rebuttal that Jwangdz is a Chu book, and that its author used the Chu variant form regardless of the narrative setting. In that same story, the word for "sword" is invariably glam (35x in all), not glap.
SEQUENCE. Between Serruys steps 2 and 3 there is a further semantic difficulty. It is that the proposed derivational sequence tongs > hilt > sword makes the word "hilt" etymologically primary, and sees "sword" as a mere extension of that earlier meaning. This requires the invention and naming of sword hilts before there were swords to go with them. That hypothesis somehow lacks industrial credibility.
Its linguistic credibility will depend on whether glap "sword" is attested in the literature, in parallel with the well established word glam "sword," and whether, if it exists, glap "sword" is so distributed as to be a plausible Chu dialect variant of standard glam "sword." It appears that a form glap "sword" never occurs in the extant literature. What we have instead is a more limited variant of the word for "longsword," on which see next.
LONGSWORD. Glap as"sword" occurs only in the phrase ddiang-glap "longsword," never independently. The more common phrase for "longsword," as one would expect, is simply ddiang-glam. The variant ddiang-glap seems to occur only twice in the literature, both times in a song. Further, the two cases of ddiang-glap are not confined to Chu-associated texts. They are as follows:

(1) (Shv Jyang = Jyou Jang 2). This was previously a separate poem, and only later grouped with others in the set now called Jyou Jang, within the Chu Tsz anthology. Some claim Chyw Ywaen as its author, but best opinion is that it is a later piece. Throughout the rest of the Chu Tsz, "sword" is glam and "longsword" is ddiang-glam. Those uses include 3x in the Jyou Gv or "Nine Songs," which are earlier in date than the Shv Jyang, and have a more plausible claim to be associated with Chyw Ywaen. The implied singer of the Shv Jyang poem is, however, undoubtedly an elegant Chu person. The standard commentary to this passage defines ddiang-glap as "the name of a sword."
(2) (Jan-Gwo Tsv #154 = HK #133, 3x). The singer is an unappreciated swordsman addressing his weapon: "Long sword, let us go back." Throughout the rest of the 497 stories making up the JGT (which is known to be a composite text, put together by combining six earlier collections of stories), and also throughout the rest of this story, "sword" is glam and "longsword" is ddiang-glam. This story is set in Chi, and there is no reason to identify the singer of the song, an impoverished former landowner, as other than a Chi individual. The commentators, pressed to explain the difference between the form ddiang-glam in the story, and the variant form ddiang-glap in the song, define the latter as a sword hilt. But what is long is the sword, not the hilt, and there is no reason for the angry swordsman to threaten to go away with only his hilt; he will surely take the whole weapon with him. The "hilt" explanation is thus a bit of commentarial ingenuity, and does not deserve a place in the dictionary. The difference between the sword in the song and the sword outside of the song is that in the song, the sword is directly addressed. This brings us close to the commentary on the previous case, "name of a sword." We might summarize both cases as "a way of addressing a sword."
GRASP. It will be seen that nothing in the phonetic environment in either of these lines would explain a local assimilation on the order of glam > glap. We must thus treat ddiang-glap as something other than a phonetically conditioned variant of ddiang-glam. We have also seen that the relevant instances of glap "hilt" and ddiang-glap "longsword" are not Chu-distributed, but instead occur all over the map: Chu in the south, Jau in the north, and Chi in the east, in texts which otherwise regularly use the word glam for "sword." We thus seem to be dealing, not with a dialect word, but with some other sort of variant. And that variant occurs only in the one specific compound "longsword," and not generally.
What we have established so far is that, in Chinese generally, glap means "tongs," and secondarily "grab hold of," and that the latter meaning has extended to "hilt." In the same language and in the same texts, the word for sword is glam. The two are phonetically close, but distinct. And there is no distributional evidence to support the idea that glap, in the rare cases when it occurs in the compound ddiang-glap, has Chu affinities. It too is a general Chinese phenomenon, albeit a very rare one. The Chinese swordsman thus carried a weapon which as a whole was called glam, and whose hilt was called glap. The juxtaposition of the two in daily life may easily have suggested a pun. We accordingly suggest that a pun, and not an etymological link, is involved here.
Our Hypothesis. Remember that the cases of ddiang-glap do not mean "sword," but "the name of a sword" (Chu Tsz) or a sword directly addressed (Jan-Gwo Tsv). These are not common noun uses, and the latter case especially is something like a playful use. We suggest that ddiang-glap is a piece of swordsman's slang for ddiang-glam, building on the phonetic closeness of glap "hilt" and glam "sword," two words otherwise unrelated. Why would a swordsman (in certain rare circumstances) call his weapon not "longsword" but "longhilt?" We can suggest an imaginary parallel: a gunslinger in the American West who addresses his pistol as "Fast Draw." In both cases, the reference is to the drawing of the weapon, not the weapon itself, the speed of draw being an important skill of the duelist.
Conclusion. What we come out with is a development wholly within Chinese. The relation between "tongs" and "hilt" is indeed etymological, but there is no etymological relation between "hilt" and "sword." They are connected by a punning lateral relationship, and not by a time relationship in which glap "hilt" occupies the middle stage. The presence of ddiang- "long" helps the punning phrase to retain linguistic recognizability, which would be problematic if glap were merely substituted for the free word glam. This may explain the limitation of the usage to the compound, rather than the free word. Finally, the colloquial or argot nature of ddiang-glap "longhilt" would explain its rarity in the preserved literature, most of which is generally elegant in tone.
Except for the temporary lateral bridging by means of the pun glap/glam, then, those two words seem to be etymologically separate. Our equations, replacing those of Serruys, above, would then be:

glap "tongs" > glap "hilt" (general Sinitic)
glam "sword" = glam "sword" (general Sinitic)
We here leave open the question of the ultimate origins of these words (readers of Tolkien will remember Glamdring). But as for these words at the stage when their behavior can be observed in texts, there seems to be no Chu factor, and there is no suggestion that the nonce-expression ddiang-glap "longhilt" is a dialect or other regional variant of standard ddiang-glam "longsword." This would seem to dispose of the commentarial figment of glap "sword," and with it the assumption that Chu and standard Chinese are sister languages, descended from a common ancestor, an idea which is directly contradicted by the lexical and anecdotal evidence gathered on other pages in this section.
We thus end by agreeing with the Fang Yen in not listing "glap" as the Chu dialect word for "sword."

That concludes the argument. But here, for those who wish to linger afterward, is a final exhibit. It is a line in a nationalistic Chu poem, in which the term ddiang-glam "longsword" is used to describe the weapons of the slain Chu soldiers. The same line also contains the word qlap "grasp" (cognate to glap "hilt") in its verbal sense, of the Chin imported bows which the Chu soldiers were also wielding when they were killed. The next line tells us that the heads of the fallen have been severed from their bodies. The line is:

(3) (Gwo Shang = Jyou Gv #10). The line describes slain Chu warriors after a battle, and goes "They still wear their long swords [glam], ah; they still grasp [glap] their Chin bows."
And the poem, which was meant to conclude a memorial ceremony, ends by characterizing the soldiers as being now "heroes among the dead." This ceremony was staged by a Chu government which still hoped to win the Warring States Sweepstakes, and conquer all the other states for Chu. If there is a moment when a distinctively Chu word glap for "sword" would be especially appropriate, this solemn occasion is surely it. The absence of that word, even in the favorable context of the ddiang-glam compound, seems to us decisive in refutation of the Serruys theory. The word for "sword" in Chinese, as Chinese was known in Chu, was definitely glam, not glap, and the word for "longsword" in that language was ddiang-glam.
The moral of this exercise is that it is not enough for linguists to pick out a gloss here and there. Linguists (like everybody else) have to read the texts from which the glosses were taken. And then read the texts from which the glosses were not taken, to see what the glosses are actually worth.

20 Jan 2001 / Contact The Project / Exit to Results Page