Oldal 94 [94]
MICHAL SCHWARZ
S-uig. lu, ulu, olu ‘xparox”, Soj. ulu = Mo. (KWb. 253) luu "Drache"? c Chin. /uy,
Tib. klu.”
From Indo-European: layzin “pig”; la:cin “falcon”; laksan < Skr. laksana “(special)
sign / mark”; /esp < Tocharian B/Kuchean in Brahmi /esp “slime (one from tree
bodily liquids)”.
Both lists of loans in Old Turkic are important because Old Uyghur was a source for
first Mongolian Buddhists in the Tarim Basin. However due to the analysis of Kahar
Barat’ the Chinese word for “dragon” had two spellings or transcriptions in Old
Uyghur: besides Orkhon Turkic: /iii there are two main forms in Uyghur—Chinese
glosses: Jéng / LWYNK vs. luo / LWW. There might be co-occurrence of younger
and older form of this borrowing (such co-occurrences can also be found in cases of
ancient Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese) or influence of various Chinese dialects
(Clauson) or it might be good question if Kahar Barat identified sources correctly,
since it seems that there are two source-words: one from Chinese (LWYNK) and
other from Tibetan (LWW), because historically Tibetans expanded to Gansu as
well as to Xinjiang very early. But finally there might be some semantic connection
between both source-words and maybe even common Sino-Tibetan origin if this
word belongs to very old borrowing in Turkic and Mongolian.
In my view I have found indirect evidence for antiquity of this lexicon in Tocharian,
where there is an interesting word in Tocharian A /u, in Tocharian B /uwo for mostly
“beast” or “animal; animal/bird’#, cf. “animal, bestia.”’ This word doesn’t have
satisfactory etymology. In his dictionary of Tocharian B (from 1999 and without
change also in updated version from 2013), an American Tocharologist Douglas
Adams mentions that the plural form of this word /wasa represent morphologia
difficilior.'° It means that this word doesn’t have any good analytic solution even if
Indo-Europeanists usually think that it might be a cognate of Indo-European words:
OCS love “the chase”; Greek /édn “lion” < *“predator”. But Tocharian has its own
different words for these meanings, e.g. for “lion”: Tocharian A sisäk / Tocharian
B secake and this words probably are not a source for Chinese shi / shizi “lion”
because Chinese word has relatively safe etymology based on set of Tibeto-Burman
/ Sino-Tibetan cognates."
Here I would like to present three indications why it might be possible also another
etymological solution for this Tocharian word which is here proposed as a borrowing
from Sino-Tibetan.
7 Barat, Kahar: A Turkic Chinese Transcription System. In: Proceedings of the 38th Permanent Inter¬
national Altaistic Conference (PIAC): Kawasaki, Japan: August 7-12, 1995. Ed. Stary, Giovanni.
Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1996, 14.
8 Adams, Douglas Q.: A Dictionary of Tocharian B. Rodopi, Amsterdam-Atlanta 1999, 558.
° Poucha, Pavel: Institutiones linguae tocharicae Pars I. Thesaurus linguae tocharicae dialecti A. Statni
pedagogické nakladatelstvi. Praha 1955, 270.
10 Adams, Douglas Q.: À Dictionary of Tocharian B, 558.
11 Behr, Wolfgang: Hic sunt leones — Two Ancient Eurasian Migratory Terms in Chinese Revisited (2).
International Journal of Central Asian Studies 10, 2005, 12-13.
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