A Philological Report on Two Versions of the Lyuzu yiyu [Lyuzu-Chinese vocabulary]

The Imperial Palace Museum in Beijing preserves important historical documents on Tibetan languages recorded during the Qianlong reign era of the Qing Dynasty under the title Xifan yiyu > [Tibetan-Chinese vocabulary], which consists of nine books on Tibetan dialects and Tibeto-Burman languages. One of these, Book No. 5, contains records of the Lyuzu language, spoken in the Mu-nya District of Sichuan, China, so we refer to Book No. 5 as the Lyuzu yiyu > [Lyuzu-Chinese vocabulary]. The Lyuzu language belongs to the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages, spoken among the Tibetan people living in the ethnic corridor of the mountainous area of southwest China. I have ever reported a brief introduction to the structure of the Naiqu dialect of Lyuzu in IKEDA (2009, 2017) based on my field research. Apart from the Imperial Palace version, Otani University in Japan has another version of the Lyuzu yiyu, the contents of which are basically the same. This report describes the characteristics of the two versions and differences between them in detail. The Lyuzu yiyu, as in the other eight books, used a common questionnaire that includes 740 words in Tibetan and Chinese, and recorded the Lyuzu pronunciation using the readings of Chinese characters. However, all the words in Tibetan Script in the Lyuzu yiyu agree with the Caodi yiyu, another Tibetan-Chinese vocabulary that recorded the Tibetan Amdo dialect. Thus, the words written in Tibetan script in the Lyuzu yiyu do not pertain to the Lyuzu language but are merely quoted from other sources. In addition, about 200 of the Lyuzu words in Chinese transcription are the same characters as the Chinese index words. One scholar considered these Chinese loan words in the Lyuzu language at that period, but actual Chinese loan words in the Lyuzu yiyu are transcribed with special characters giving closer pronunciations than the index characters. This shows that these 200 items were used to fill in the blanks where no adequate Lyuzu word was found. This provides us some hints about the process by which the vocabulary was compiled