Book Review: The Roots of Old Chinese

Sagart’s very topic, Old Chinese morphology, is controversial. The monosyllabic nature of Chinese makes morphological derivational mechanisms far from self-evident, and an Old Chinese (OC) reconstructed monosyllable, even with an initial consonant cluster, is so compact that some skeptical linguists reject the idea of segmental morphology in OC as a matter of principle. Others approach Chinese like any other natural human language on the premise that it is impossible to conceive of a language whose lexicon is a heap of thousands, tens of thousands, of individual words which cannot be genetically grouped and reduced to a more manageable and intelligible number of etyma and roots. One’s attitude correlates rather transparently with one’s native language. Thus it was the French scholar Maspero who pioneered the inquiry into OC segmental morphology, particularly prefixes, and Haudricourt who suggested that tones derive from earlier syllable final segmental phonemes which could have morphological functions.