차마고도 지역의 언어 접촉과 ‘차(茶)’ 어휘의 이원적 확산 ― 지리언어학적 재해석을 중심으로

초록

This paper reinterprets the lexical data from Wang Feng and Wei Jiaoqiao (2017) and Wang Feng (2025) from a geographical and historical perspective, analyzing various language contact phenomena centered around the Tea Horse Road. Specifically, it aims to distinguish the Tea-Horse Road trade routes into the ‘Southern Inland Trade Zone’ and the ‘Northern Main Trade Zone,’ and to clarify how the distribution of ‘tea’ vocabulary within each zone corresponds to actual historical trade patterns. While the lexical form for ‘tea’ in world languages is generally derived from the Chinese character ‘茶’, languages distributed within the Tea-Horse Road region of China, such as Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, and Mon-Khmer, exhibit a pattern where the indigenous ‘la’-type form coexists with the Chinese-derived ‘tsha’-type (non-la) form, or diverges regionally. Analysis in this study confirms that within the southern trade sphere centered on southwestern Yunnan, the la-type vocabulary, derived from the Proto-Tibeto-Burman ‘leaf (la)’, spread horizontally among ethnic groups. This suggests the existence of an indigenous trade network formed prior to Han Chinese involvement. Conversely, in the northern trade sphere connecting Sichuan and Tibet, vocabulary derived from the later Han Chinese ‘tsha’ type predominates. This paper interprets this as a result of state-led vertical language diffusion following the establishment of the ‘Tea-Horse Office’ (茶馬司) and the expansion of government-sponsored trade after the Song Dynasty. Furthermore, the high phonological similarity between ancient Chinese tea-related variants—such as ‘槚, 蔎, 瓜蘆, 皋蘆’—and their equivalents in minority languages indicates that early Chinese itself was influenced by these languages. This demonstrates that linguistic contact along the Tea-Horse Road was not a one-way Sinicization process, but rather a dynamic interplay where ‘upward diffusion of indigenous languages (*la)’ and ‘downward diffusion of Chinese (*tsha)’ overlapped, varying by route and period.

키워드