IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
490 SINO-IRANICA
is not part of the transcription, any more than the word fta kin, which precedes it in the Sui Annals; but the combination of both po and kin with tie indicates and confirms very well that the latter was a brocaded silk. HIRTn' joins po with tie into a compound in order to save the term for his pets the Turks. " The name po-tie is certainly borrowed from one of the Turki languages. The nearest equivalent seems to be the Jagatai Turki word for cotton, pakhta." There are two fundamental errors involved here. First, the Cantonese dialect, on which Hirth habitually falls back in attempting to restore the ancient phonetic condition of Chinese, does not in fact represent the ancient Chinese language, but is merely a modern dialect in a far-advanced stage of phonetic decadence. The sounds of ancient Chinese can be restored solely on the indications of the Chinese phonetic dictionaries and on the data of comparative Indo-Chinese philology. Even in Cantonese, po-tie is pronounced pak-tip, and it is a prerequisite that the foreign prototype of this word terminates in a final labial. The ancient pho-
netics of M is not pak-ta, but *bak-dzip or *dip, and this bears no
relation to pakhta. Further, it is impossible to correlate a foreign word that appears in China in the Han period with that of a comparatively recent Turkish dialect, especially as the Chinese data relative to the term do not lead anywhere to the Turks; and, for the rest, the word pakhta is not Turkish, but Persian, in origi n.2 Whether the term tie has anything to do with cotton, as already stated by CHAVANNES,3 is uncertain; but, in view of the description of the plant as given in the Nan gi4 or Lian ßu,5 it may be granted that the term po-tie was subsequently transferred to cotton.
The ancient pronunciation of po-tie being *bak-dib, it would not be impossible that the element bak represents a reminiscence of Middle Persian pambak (" cotton"), New Persian panpa (Ossetic bambag, Armenian bambak) . This assumption being granted, the Chinese term po-tie (= Middle Persian *bak-dib = pambak dip) would mean "cotton brocade" or "cotton stuff." Again, po-tie was a product of Iranian
regions: kin siu po tie 1 is named as a product of K`an (Sog-
diana) in the Sasanian era;6 and, as has been shown, po-tie from Parthia
1 Chao Ju-kua, p. 218.
2 STEINGASS, Persian—English Dictionary, p. 237. z Documents sur les Tou-kiue occidentaux, p. 352.
Ch. 79, p. 6 b.
5 Ch. 54, p. 13 b. Cf. CHAVANNES, ibid., p. 1o2; see also F. W. K. MÜLLER, Uigurica, II, pp. 7o, 105.
Sui Su, Ch. 83, p. 4. Hence `bak-dib may also have been a Sogdian word.
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