Number plates, cowries, bahts

So my brother and I we were playing these games in the backseat on long car rides during the summer vacation when I was a kid: What’s the city behind the number plate abbreviation? D? Düsseldorf, DA? Darmstadt, DU? Duisburg! B? Berlin, BA? Bamberg, no BU! … H? Hannover, HA? Hagen, HU? Hanau. That was long before the reshuffling following German reunification, of course. Long before things got out of hand and number plate abbreviations became shockingly uniconic. ANG? Uckermark, NP? Ostprignitz-Ruppin, WST? Ammerland – go figure!

The other game was “Quadruple C”: international vehicle codes, countries, capitals and currencies. F? France, Paris, Francs, Centimes! HU? Hungary, Budapest, Forinth, Fillér! S? Sweden, Stockholm, Krona, Öre. But what is the capital of AND and the currency of V? Not in the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook, it turns out. So we started fighting in the backseat until my parents pulled over to frown or yell at us. Or to bribe us with an ice cream and a Donald Duck pocket book. Or until my smart-ass cousin would propose to play the French version, priggishly pronouncing the registration plate numbers in French: Soixante-quinze? Paris, Zéro-six? Alpes-Maritimes. We soon found out that she only knew those two, and – for some inscrutable reason – Neuf-cent-soixante quatorze – La Réunion.

Much later I tried to teach these games to my own children, but for incomprehensible reasons, they never liked losing to me. Preferred such stupid things as triwizard tournament trivia or Pokémon, Espéon and Umbremon quartets. Spoilsports! My visiting daughter, long in possession of a driving license herself but without a bored little brat in the backseat yet, was therefore overjoyed when she could recently challenge me with a currency question from her “Quizduell” app [1]. T, like Thailand, Bangkok, easy, but then … Rupee? Ringgit? Ri(y)al? Hmmm. I miserably failed and seconds later the app announced: Baht. Yes, of course! And we quickly googled the fourth category: satang [2]. Never heard that one before. A few days later I was reading the Blog of one of my favorite scholars of Old Chinese phonology, Zheng-Zhang Shangfang 鄭張尚芳 (1933–2018), who recently passed away [3]. He points out that this บาท bàat ([bà:t], low tone), the name of the Thai currency, is probably a loan from the Old Chinese word bèi 貝‘cowrie shell’ < Middle Chinese *pajH < Old Chinese *pˤat-s. Unlike the other three currencies rupee < Sanskrit rūpya ‘shapely’, whence ‘stamped, impressed’, used for ‘wrought silver, a coin of silver’ [4], ringgit < Malay ringgit ‘jagged’, referring to the serrated edges of silver Spanish dollars [5], and ri(y)al, which came from Portuguese reyal ‘royal’ via Persian ریال‎‎ riyāl to many Near Eastern and Asian languages – baht is not derived from an adjective. It is a name for the beautiful and precious object with which it probably travelled.

Cowries were once widely used as a sort of currency or status symbol in many cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, but also in Eastern Africa down to the Cape, parts of the Mediterranean and even across the Pacific up the Galapagos and Cocos islands [6]. This is why Linnaeus, when first classifying them in 1758, named the taxon Monetaria Moneta or Cypraea Moneta [7]. Cowrie shells are light, yet extremely durable, transportable, hard to forge, easy to slide and count on the hard surface of a table, to thread on a string. And they are geographically constrained in their range of origin just enough to acquire value. Little wonder, then, that they played such a great role in all sorts of long-distance trade relationships, sadly including the international slave trade in the 18th–19th centuries, and that there is now a whole branch of sophisticated anthropology dealing with their history [8]. Finds of cowrie shells have been used to trace early migrations and trade routes for at least a century [9], in the East Asian context most explicitly by the famous Japanese archaeologist Egami Namio 江上波夫 (1906 – 2002) [10], the father of the so-called “horse-rider theory” (kiba minzoku setsu 騎馬民族説), which claims the emergence of Japan as a state by mounted warriors from continental northeast Asia in the 4-5th century. [11]

And cowries were and are beautiful collectibles, of course! [12] Anthropologists, commenting on their widespread use as aesthetic objects and fertility symbols in Southeast Asia and the Pacific seem to debate whether their popularity is due to the nacreous luster of the mollusk shell or to the resemblance of its fissure to a vulva. The Hobson-Jobson, our all-time favorite “Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms”, citing the early long-range linguist Terrien de Lacouperie (1844–1894) [13], (in)famous for his “Sino-Babylonian” theory of a “Western Origin of Chinese Civilization”, reminds us that

“Marco Polo […] calls them pourcelaines, the name by which this kind of shell was known in Italy (porcellane) and France.” [14]

But the question of whether the association with a ‘piglet’ – Latin porcellus ‘young pig’ is a diminutive from porculus, itself a diminutive of porcus ‘pig’ – at the outset of the long journey of this thoroughly globalized term is auroral or genital in nature, will probably have to stay in the eye of the beholder.[15]

In the Chinese writing system, hundreds of characters related to the semantic fields of wealth, trade, preciousness etc. all have the ‘cowrie shell’ bèi 貝 as a classifier (a.k.a. “radical”) [16], itself probably “pictographic” in origin. [17] Some cowrie varieties were used as currency units and as ritual or decorative objects among several ethnic groups in the Far Southwest of Yunnan until the 18th or even the 19th century. [18] But already roughly half of the 336 tombs of China’s first historical dynasty Shāng (ca. 1600– mid 11th c. BCE), excavated between 1969-1977, contained lots of cowries. They were found in graves of the nobility, as well as graves of the commoners, even among piles of what apparently were human victims. Apart from being stored in the mouths, skulls, hands or simply next to the excavated skeletons, they have also been found in jute pouches and in the bottom part of carts. [19] Natural cowries and related shells were also found in great quantities in tombs of the following periods in the varieties cyprea tigris, maurilia arabica, erronea errones, oliva mustelina [20], monetaria moneta [21], cyprea moneta and cyprea annulus [22]. Just as they were used for collars and other types of attire during the second millennium B.C.E. in ancient Greece [23], they seem to have been extraordinarily popular as status symbols and adornments in Early China.

It is very hard to determine, however, when exactly these bèi – usually strung together into double strands as depicted by the pictographic character péng 朋 which also functions as a classifier for them [24] – started to function as a type of currency for alienable possessions. A terminus ante quem usually accepted by Chinese scholars is the standardization of currency systems and the abandoning of “… pearls, jades, tortoise and cowrie shells, silver and tin objects” [25], such that the first Chinese dictionary of 100 C.E. mentions in the gloss on bèi

古者貨貝而寶龜,周而有泉,至秦廢貝行錢。

“Anciently, valuable cowries and treasured tortoise shells [were used], since the Zhou [dynasty] we had quan [metallic currencies]; and when it came to the Qin [state] they abolished the cowries and circulated qian (round bronze coins with a hole).” [26]

An argument in favor of bèi being used as a currency already during the first millennium B.C.E. is the fact that large amounts of uninscribed bronze, copper, bone, stone and scallop objects mimicking the cowry shape have been excavated. Also, cowry-shaped bronzes, self-identifying as bèi by inscribed characters have been excavated at various sites in China. Judging from the distribution in tombs and their possibility to be exchanged for tracts of land, chariots or even cattle and families of slaves as evidence in bronze inscriptions, some scholars have argued that cowries served as currency from the late 11th century BCE. Against this background, Zheng-Zhang’s theory of baht being a very early Chinese loan in Tai-Kadai is perfectly plausible.

It can be shown by internal (Old Chinese) and external evidence from Tibeto-Burman cognates [27] that the final dental of Old Chinese *pˤat-s probably came from a labial [28], thus matching the reconstructed Sino-Tibetan (ST) etymon for ‘snail’ *bwap. It is therefore completely unlikely that, as Paul King Benedict (1912–1997) claimed half a century ago, Chinese bèi is an early loan from Austro-Thai (AT) *gwoy/qwoy (i.e. Indonesian t’igay, Thai hooy), which, “along with the loan-words for ‘market’, ‘price’, and ‘sell’”, would point to “a fundamental indebtedness of early Chinese culture to AT in the economic (marketing) sphere.” [29] Haec etymologia olet. Still, one somehow has to admire the chuzpah with which Benedict postulated a development of underlying labialized velars and uvulars to labials in such cases. No doubt he drew his inspiration from the Indo-European development *kw- > p- in Celtic, Osco-Umbrian and Aeolian Greek, which is best known from the famous Mycenean orthographies of the type <a-pi-qo-ro> ‘female servant’ vs. ἀμφίπολος (from */amphikʷ olos/), or <qa-si-re-u> vs. βασιλεύς ‘monarch, king’, much discussed in the 1960ies and ever since. [30] Notice as well, that Benedict’s claim is the reversal of the loan-direction once claimed by Saveros Pou & Philip N. Jenner, who described Chinese bèi as the source of Thai phaj (B2) ‘copper coin’ which would in turn have been the source of the Khmer words for ‘old small coin’ (bai) or ‘cowrie; shell used as money’ (pie) [31]. If, how, and when this relates to another Thai word เบี้ย bia (C1) ‘cowrie, cowrie shell money’, or if that is simply yet another borrowing from some form of Middle Chinese is anyone’s guess!

In hindsight, Benedict’s chuzpah seems still modest in comparison to the anonymous author(s) of the entry on bèi in China’s Wikipedia analogon Baidu. [32] They attempt to show that it is none other than Chinese bèi 貝 which is underlying Latin pecunia ‘money, wealth’, rather than accepting its boring standard derivation from Indo-European *péḱu ‘cattle, livestock; wealth’ [33]. In this scenario, the ‘cowrie’ word would have traveled as a Wanderwort across Eurasia, one presumes, along the ancient network of trade routes first dubbed “Silk Road” by Baron Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen (1833–1905) in 1877. [34] In the era of in-your-face “One Belt One Road”-rhetoric in the People’s Republic, and clandestine acquisitions of real estate, natural resources and industries all along it, the nonchalant reorientation of the Silk Road westward is unsurprising. Under the subtle politics of etymology, then, not only the Thai “around the corner” would still be still exchanging cowrie shells as currency today, the wealth of Europe would be of Chinese descent as well. Quadruple C: China, Cowries, Countries, Cash

 

References:

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quizduell.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_baht.

[3] http://blog.sina.com.cn/zzsf.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupee#Etymology.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysian_ringgit#Etymology.

[6] See for the classic study of this: Stearns, Robert E. C., “Shell Money”, The American Naturalist, 3.1 (1869): 1–5, available here: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.60251514;view=1up;seq=15volume=III.

[7] [http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=216874; http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Taxbrowser_Taxonpage?taxid=85112.

[8] E.g. Hogendorn, Jan S. & Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade, Cambridge: CUP, 2003; Allibert, C., “Des cauris et des hommes. Réflexion sur l’utilisation d’une monnaie-objet et ses itinéraires”, in: Allibert, C. & N. Rajaonarimanana, eds., L’extraordinaire et le quotidien, variations anthropologiques, Paris: Karthala, 2000, pp. 57–79.

[9] Jackson, Wilfrid, Shells as Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture, Manchester: University of Manchester, 1917, pp. 186–188.

[10] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egami_Namio.

[11] “Migration of the cowrie-shell culture in East Asia”, Acta Asiatica 26 (1974): 1–52.

[12] See, e.g. Felix Lorenz Jr. & Alex Hubert, A guild to Worldwide cowries, Wiesbaden : Verlag Christa Hemmen, 1993 or http://nmnh.typepad.com/no_bones/2015/03/on-inventorying-cenozoic-cowrie-collections.html] for some spectactular examples.

[13] E. Bruce Brooks, “Sinological Profiles: Albert Terrien de Lacouperie 1845 (Normandy) – 11 Oct 1894 (London)”, https://www.umass.edu/wsp/resources/profiles/lacouperie.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Étienne_Jean_Baptiste_Terrien_de_Lacouperie; W. Behr, “‘Monosyllabism’ and some other perennial clichés about the nature, origins and

contacts of the Chinese language in Europe”, in: A. Malinar & S. Müller, eds., eds., Asia and Europe – Interconnected: Agents, Concepts, and Things, Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, forthc. 2018.

[14] Yule Col. Henry and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive, London: John Murray, 1903, available at: http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/contextualize.pl?p.0.hobson.1477178.

[15] On the intricate history of pig words see Gerd Carling’s recent blog “Hero, lethal creature, or filthy animal?” at: http://www.gerdcarling.se/2018/07/25/hero%2C-lethal-creature%2C-or-filthy-animal-the-history-of-pig-words-40132742

[16] http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/UnihanRSIndex.pl?minstrokes=0&maxstrokes=50&submit=Submit&radical=154.

[17] Go to http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?kaiOrder=700 for a good overview of paleographical forms.

[18] Lǐ Jiāruì 李家瑞, “Gǔdài Yúnnán yòng bèi de dàgài qíngxíng 古代雲南用貝的大概情形 [The approximate situation of the usage of cowries in Ancient Yunnan]”, Lìshǐ Yánjiū 歷史研究 9.1956: 85–100; Vogel Hans Ulrich, “Cowry Trade and Its Role in the Economy of Yunnan, the Ninth to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century,” in: R. Ptak & D. Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400-1750, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991, pp. 231– 262; Chan An-shen [Zhān Ēnshèng] 詹恩勝, Yuán-Míng-Qīng chū Yúnnán dìqū bèibì yǔ tóngqián wénhuà de biànqiān 元明至清初雲南地區貝幣與銅錢文化之變遷 [The transition from cowrie currency to copper cash cultures in the Yunnan area during the Yuan-Ming-Early Qing period], Ph.D. Diss, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 2011, available at: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=yJ6w.3/record?r1=1&h1=0#XXX.

[19] Dài Zhìqiáng 戴志强, “Ānyáng Yīnxū chūtǔ bèihuà chūtàn” 安阳殷墟出土贝化初探 [A preliminary exploration of the cowries excavated in the Ruins of Yīn at Ānyáng], Wénwù 文物 (1981) 3: 72–77.

[20] Zhū Huó 朱活, “Gǔ qián” 古钱 [Ancient Money], Wénwù 文物 (1981) 1: 92.

[21] Dai Zhiquang, loc. cit.

[22] Wáng Yùquán 王毓铨, Zhōngguó gǔdài huòbì de qǐyuán hé fāzhǎn 中国古代货币的起源和发展 [The origins and development of ancient currencies in China], Běijīng: Zhōngguó Shèhuì Kēxué chūbǎnshè, 1990, p. 14.

[23] E. Bielfeld, “Schmuck”, in: F. Matz & H.-G. Buchholz, eds., Archeologica Homerica I, Bd. I.C, Die Denkmäler und das frühgriechische Epos, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1968, p. 26.

[24] For the paleographic development of peng see http://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/yanbian?kaiOrder=945.

[25] Shǐjì 史記 [Records of he historian] 30.8, Zhōnghuá shūjú 中華書局 ed., p.1442.

[26] Shuōwén 說文 10A, http://ctext.org/text.pl?node=30306&if=en.

[27] For forms in the daughter languages, cf. J.A. Matisoff et al., Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus, http://stedt.berkeley.edu/~stedt-cgi/rootcanal.pl/etymon/6106 s and S.A. Starostin & I.I. Pejros, Materialy k étimologičeskomu slovarju sinotibetskix jazykov, Ms., Moscow, 1984, s.v. ulitka.

[28] Bodman, N.C., “Proto-Chinese and Sino-Tibetan”, in: F. van Coetsem et al., eds., Contributions to Historical Linguistics, Leiden: Brill, 1980, p. 136.

[29] “Austro-Thai”, Behavior Science Notes 4 (1967): 321-2; see also p. 297-8.

[30] E.g. Oswald Szemerényi, “The labiovelars in Mycenaean and historical Greek”, in: Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici. Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1966, pp. 29–52, available here http://tinyurl.com/y9mq4eco.

[31] “Some Chinese Loanwords in Khmer”, Journal of Oriental Studies [Hong Kong] 11.1, 1973, p. 10/#23 and p. 17/#47.

[32] https://baike.baidu.com/item/贝/15601486.

[33] Cf. Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bern, München: Francke 1959, vol. III, p. 797 (s.v. ²peḱ-).

[34] See Tamara Chin, “The Invention of the Silk Road, 1877.” In: Critical Inquiry 40.1 (2013), pp. 194–219.