EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 33 Andreini Attilio (Ca‘ Foscari University) “Some Kinda Love”… Love, Affection, and Appreciation as Seen through the Guodian Corpus of Bamboo Manuscripts Key words: bamboo slips, ethics, Guodian, hermeneutics, passions The excavated texts on bamboo slips unearthed in 1993 at Guodian 郭店 , Hubei 湖北 , offer rich insights about the complexity of the hermeneutics of the experience of love. They touch on several dimensions such as the predilection towards certain material goods, the appreciation of learning via traditional models of exemplary conduct, and the sense of abandoning oneself to one’s deep emotions and passions. These texts, transcribed around 300 B.C.E., were found in a tomb in the ancient Chu 楚 area, but it is unclear to what extent they reflect theoretical issues and practices typical of Chu. However, their relevance allows us to delve into some central issues of the debate on the affective-emotional element of human action, helping to clarify the scope of the philosophical debate of the pre-Qin era on one crucial point: the relationship between ethics and natural inclinations. Behr Wolfgang (University of Zurich) Every Breath You Take: Notes on the Etymology of ài Key words: ài 愛 , lexical gap, Old Chinese, Sino-Tibetan, word-family The Sino-Tibetan etymon reflected by the Written Tibetan (WT) noun snying ‘heart, mind, breast’, also used verbally as ‘to love, show affection towards’, was replaced by xin 心 ‘heart’ as a noun in Old Chinese (OC). As first shown in Baxter (1991), snying is cognate with OC rén 仁 ‘to show affection for others, love’, a semantic layer reflected in the famous gloss 愛人 in Lunyu 12.22 or in the Yucong 語叢 slips (3.35), where we read: 愛 , （仁）也 . Behr (2015) has argued that concomitant to the Confucian appropriation of rén 仁 (OC *niŋ) as an ethical category and to the semantic narrowing of its exoactive derivation *niŋ-s represented by 佞 ‘be eloquent’, the lexical gap left for the activity of ‘loving’ was filled by ài 愛 (OC *qˁəp-s). Graphically a corruption of 夊 below ài 㤅 ‘to love’, as shown by the Chǔ manuscripts, ài belonged to a word-family meaning ‘to draw towards oneself’ (Schwermann 2011), whence the at first sight counterintuitive polysemy with ‘go easy on someone, be sparing’. But where does this root come from, if it was not, as Xǔ Shèn thought in his gloss on the phonetic 旡 , simply ono- matopoetic of a choking, sucking sound? Building upon the observation that an OC homophone of ài spelled 僾 means ‘to pant, lose breath’, the new uvular reconstruction of ài in Baxter & Sagart (2014) opens an interesting link with a fairly distributed breath-related word-family, minimally including xī 歙 < *qhəp ‘suck, inhale’, xì 翕 < *qhəp ‘draw in, inhale’, xī 噏 *qh(r)əp ‘draw together’, hē 欱 < *qhˁəp ‘sip’, xī 吸 < *qh(r)əp ‘inhale’, kài 愾 *qhəp-s ‘sigh out’, and, of course, the notoriously untranslatable qì 氣 < *C.qhəp-s ‘odem, pneuma’. ‘To love’ would thus originally not have been conceptualized as just any ‘drawing near’ but as a kind of ‘sucking in’. Building upon manuscript attestations, the paper will explore this word-family connection within and beyond OC and argue for its crosslinguistic typo- logical plausibility.