Loanwords along the Silk Road

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

Lots of the words and phrases we use every day are “loaned” or otherwise sourced from other languages. “Coffee,” for example, derives from the Arabic word qahwah, of unknown origin, which initially meant wine before it came to mean coffee. When speakers of two languages come into contact, their languages and the ways they use them rub off on each other, resulting in, among other effects, loanwords.  

Loanwords, as linguists dub them, are words that exist first in a donor language and are adapted to a receiver language. Two examples from Arabic illustrate the long history that a single word can have. A “rudder” in Arabic is sukkān, akin to the Syriac sawkånå, which goes back millennia to the Akkadian word sikkannu and Sumerian zigan. The carpenter who is able to fashion that rudder is a naǧǧār in Arabic and a naggårå in Syriac, ultimately tracing back to the Akkadian word naggāru and the Sumerian nagar, all words for carpenters. Borrowing like this is a linguistic universal; no language is really homogeneous but rather reflects the histories of contacts with speakers and writers of other languages.  

The histories of Buddhism, Christianity, and Manichaeism are partly told through loanwords. Arising in the third century CE, Manichaeism, an intentionally syncretistic religion based on a light-dark dualistic view of the world, eventually became one of the most widespread and linguistically diverse premodern religions, stretching from western North Africa into China. Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity are text-friendly religions embracing translation—a site of language contact if ever there were one—and loanword dynamics are on full display in Central Asia and western China along the Silk Road(s), where texts from these religious communities survive in a bevy of languages: Chinese, Tangut, Old Uyghur, Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, and more. 

Let’s consider a few Indic loanwords in Chinese as found in a collection of Manichaean hymns called Móníjiào xiàbùzàn. In one hymn, the adepts chant, “All the past Buddhas and Arhants.” Here, as in Chinese Buddhist sources, the word for “Buddha” is fó (佛, earlier pronounced ≈ but), derived through an Iranian language and tracing back to the Sanskrit term buddha. The word for “Arhant” in the hymn is luóhàn (羅漢), a clipped form comparable to Pali arahant and Sanskrit arhat—all meaning “Worthy One.” Earlier in the hymn collection, the adepts sing, “Its origin is a palace for demons (mó) and a kingdom for evil spirits (luóchà),” with two Indic Buddhist loanwords: mó from Sanskrit māra “demon,” and luóchà for Sanskrit rákṣa “demon, monster.” 

Old Uyghur has a conspicuous share of Chinese loanwords, like keŋ “wide” (< guǎng 廣); kunčuy “lady, queen” (< gōngzhǔ 公主);bušı “alms, gifts” (< bùshī 布施); kay “street” (< jiē 街); and fapši “teacher” (< fǎshī 法師). This last term often refers to a Buddhist teacher, but the Christian Xi’an Stele, composed mainly in Chinese, includes a marginal Syriac-language line in which a Christian priest bears a title that is an iteration of this Chinese term: “The Teacher (p̄apši) of China-stan.” 

In Central Asian Buddhist texts written in Old Uyghur, “Buddha” is burhan, the first element of which is derived from Chinese fó (佛), mentioned above. In Old Uyghur Manichean texts, the word burhan refers to Mani (for whom Manicheanism is named). In a fragment of the Christian Acts of Thekla (originally in Greek), the plural of this word, burhanlar, refers to the prophets or apostles. This same text, more than once, uses the now familiar Buddhist term arahant for the apostle Paul.  

An Old Uyghur Buddhist confession-text contains the following declarations: “We failed to see the Buddha. We failed to hear his true Dharma. We failed to meet together with the wise Sanghas. Kleśas held us in place and became a roadblock.” The Buddha, again, is called burhan; the Dharma is called nom, a Sogdian loanword derived from Greek; the Sangha is called bursoŋ, from Chinese fósēng (佛僧) via Sogdian; and the kleśas, “mental defections,” likewise bear a Sogdian name, nizvani. 

Loanwords are everywhere, not just in old Central Asian texts. You don’t need to speak or read lots of languages to see them: You can do a lot worse than to indulge your curiosity and check a word’s etymology at Wiktionary. The shared vocabulary exemplified above demonstrates and reifies our shared nexus of human speech and experience. Human languages are heterogeneous languages, and loanwords are the spoken, read, and written vestiges of language contact and, therefore, of human contact.