User:Frigoris/Chinese issues in Adams Dictionary

The dictionary refers to, used in template.


 * p. 148 - "obscure" origin. See entry.
 * p. 161 - the semantic suggestion of with "original (of a receipt!)" is rather unidiomatic in Chinese. The other suggestion  looks a bit more likely, as suggested.
 * p. 198 - the "Han era pronunciation" refers to the pronunciation of ,
 * p. 207 - uncertain meaning, probably "wild goose". There's a mixture of guesses there. Supposedly the transcriptions refer to, , which is semantically dubious. The meaning of the term would have been the , often glossed as . Maybe influenced by ?
 * p. 226 - presumably from, which would have given nominative singular *kau, following , with the same irregular plural derivation?
 * p. 243 - the Chinese term itself is perhaps an areal word.
 * p. 246 - supposed ancestry for looks rather fanciful.
 * p. 271 - should have been asterisked in WT. Adams infers correctly that the value of a during the Tang would have been meagre. In the poetry of, we have 速宜相就飲一斗，恰有三百青銅錢. One  =  of (undistilled) alcoholic drink (not a luxury) cost 30.
 * p. 421 - only older reconstructions of would have the medial -w-. The *-ar in older Chinese would typically been thought to be reflected in later *-an.
 * p. 434 - meaning uncertain, possibly a title. There's no definite connection to Chinese. Any idea?
 * p. 528 - presumably related to > . However, this term wasn't in active use within the Chinese themselves. It may have been a foreign phono-semantic matching anyway.
 * p. 532 - "a waterfowl", uncertain. The discussion around is a red herring. It's difficult to reconcile the MC glottal stop with the y-. A closer phonetic match would have been *, "wild duck", with the  suffix.
 * p. 532 - again, the difficulty with glottal stop in the suggested, not to mention the -p in the Chinese (acked in the dict).
 * p. 557 - apparently the pinyin húdié zhāng would have been the more common
 * , śak(u)se p. 675 - "brandy" (!). If it really comes from, it would have undergone some consonantal syncope. The problem is the mismatch of s vs ś.
 * p. 707 - is suggested, but the first syllable's vowels looks a bit less convincing. Adams: "One might note the surprisingly modern pronunciation in so early a borrowing" - which raises suspicion.
 * p. 723 - the lion. The discussion revolving around the suffix /  seems misled.
 * p. 727 - presumably the Chinese word was, "copy, slip, note" - for "receipt?"
 * p. 797 - the identification of hw- with MC 母 is, to me, rather problematic. The suggested source is, with pʰ- initial!! The hw- more likely reflects the borrowed 母, so words could include *, which, although not very idiomatic, looks more phonetically plausible.
 * p. 814 - of the two suggested meanings, the "wild rice" one = is (correctly identified as) the less plausible. In fact, the very quotation given there says that the  is 20 times the price of wheat by volume, a price unlikely to be commanded by the wild rice (seeds, presumably, rather than delicacy, which is unlikely to be traded in bulk by volume). This fits the value of , a valuable condiment (chiefly caused by the high price of salt).