Old iranian origins of the terms of fire, burning, and light in old chinese
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: ABSTRACT The present study continues the series of investigations devoted to identifying the Old Iranian lexical substratum in Old Chinese. The focus is on fourteen sinographs associated with the semantic fields of light, fire, heat, and burning: 兆 (zhào), 昭 (zhāo), 焞 (tūn), 炤 (zhào/zhāo), 燾 (dào/tāo), 暾 (tūn), 燉 (dùn), 煓 (tuān), 照 (zhào), 烔 (tóng), 曈 (tóng), 炵 (tōng), 晪 (tiǎn), 晀 (tiǎo). All are attested in different chronological layers—from Shang oracle-bone inscriptions to the dictionaries of the Liang and Yuan eras. Traditional Chinese lexicography explains each sinograph separately but does not answer the question of why graphs belonging to different semantic spheres—light (key 日), fire (key 火), and burning—use close phonetic components converging on a single sound contour according to the reconstructions of different scholarly schools. The present work continues Issue A9 [51], devoted to metallurgy terms, and fills in its material: the cluster of fire, burning, and light is set apart into an independent study. The material comprises Chinese primary sources and traditional lexicography, paleographic and chronological data. The method is verificational analysis based on the primacy of semantics and the concept of phonetic approximation. Keywords: Old Chinese; Old Iranian languages; 兆; 昭; 焞; 炤; 燾; 暾; 燉; 煓; 照; 烔; 曈; 炵; 晪; 晀; Sino-Iranian language contacts; Iranian loanwords in Chinese; Sino-Iranica; Sino-Iranian; Sinology, Old Chinese etymology; etymology of the Chinese language; Chinese historical phonetics; verificational analysis.
Author: Kokoyti, Taymuraz
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225377173