Abstract
In the oral accounts recorded in the Eastern Han dynasty bamboo slips from Wuyi Square, Changsha city, there is a peculiar usage of yang 央 as a prefix by speakers before people and things, such as yang wu 央物 and yang ren 央人. Academic circles have put forward three interpretations of yang: a person’s name, the meaning of “central,” and the first-person possessive case. To further our understanding of its usage, the present article analyzes all instances of yang in the Eastern Han bamboo slips from Wuyi Square, finding that yang in spoken language can be divided into two interpretations based on the situation: first, it appears in the form of “yang + someone/thing,” which refers to “someone of me” or “something of me”; second, it appears in the form of yang ren, connoting “we.” This article thus concludes that the previous interpretation of yang as the possessive case is more accurate. But it is also discovered that the extended use of yang ren and the fact that most of its users are male do not conform to the explanation in the early dictionary Shuowen 說文 that yang 姎 is “the first-person pronoun for women.” Furthermore, considering that the grammatical structure of yang ren is similar to that of yang tu 姎徒, the latter of which was used by the Changsha 長沙 and Wuling 武陵 non-Han peoples to refer to themselves as “we” in “Biographies of the South and Southwest Barbarians” 南蠻西南夷列傳 of the Book of the Later Han, such terms may come from a mixing of Chinese and non-Han language habits.
Keywords
Eastern Han dynasty bamboo slips from Wuyi Square; yang ren; yang tu; manyi (non-Han peoples / barbarians); first-person pronoun
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