Reconstructing Old Chinese *‐ts Using Han‐Time Material

Baxter & Sagart (2014b) reconstruct *‐Vt‐s on the basis of Middle Chinese reflexes in ‐jH (from some OC *‐s) coupled with either etymological or graphic connections to words in Middle Chinese ‐t . This approach, while perfectly sound, can suffer from lack of etymological or graphic data, leading to missed reconstructions. Since Old Chinese *‐ts syllables retained an *‐s in Late Han Chinese, long after OC *‐Vs and *‐ks had lost *‐s (Baxter 1992: 569), it is possible to use transcriptional (Baley et al. 2023; Baley & Hill, forthcoming) and rhyming evidence (Luó & Zhōu 1958) dated up to the Eastern Hàn 東漢 dynasty to establish an Old Chinese *‐ts reconstruction for words, respectively, transcribing a foreign ‐s or rhyming with other *‐ts words. In the present article, using a mix of network graph methods, graphic variants found in received and excavated texts, rhyme book glosses, and cognates in related languages, we demonstrate the validity of using Hàn 漢 rhyming material to reconstruct an OC *‐ts final. In the process, we propose new reconstructions for several characters previously reconstructed as *‐js by Baxter & Sagart. This proposal, in turn, opens the possibility of revisiting other syllable types and problematic reconstructions.