契丹小字25号原字音义考

Abstract

The glyph No. 25  of Khitan Small script, although frequently appearing in extant materials, has not yet been deciphered in terms of its phonetic and semantic values. This paper proposes that glyph  and  exhibit instances of interchangeable usage, suggesting that the pronunciation of  is the same as that of , and thus reconstructs its pronunciation as ʧa. The Khitan Small script  corresponds to the Khitan Large script , indicating that the pronunciation of the Large script grapheme  should also be ʧa. In terms of meaning, this paper posits that the phonetic form ʧa- (ʧɑɣɑ-) in the Khitan language may correspond to several homophonous but semantically distinct words. Among these, the ʧa- (ʧɑɣɑ-) meaning “to inform” may be etymologically related to the ǯa- meaning “to guide, to instruct” in the Mongolic languages. The ʧa- (ʧɑɣɑ-) meaning “to preside over” may be connected to the ǯa- meaning “to guide, to instruct” or the ǯaki- meaning “to command, to order” in the Mongolic languages. The ʧa- (ʧɑɣɑ-) meaning “to connect, to inherit” in Khitan may be related to the ǯaɣa- meaning “to connect” in the Mongolic languages. Additionally, the author suggests that the Khitan Large script  should be pronounced as *ɑl~l, corresponding to the Khitan Small script ,  and .