The Etymology of Naxi [khɑ³¹] "Emperor"
Yang Haichao investigates the origin of the Naxi word khɑ³¹ "emperor," challenging the prior consensus (Cui Rongchang and others) that it is an early Chinese loanword from "khan" (可汗). The author shows that "khan" was never used in Chinese to denote the emperor of a Central Plains dynasty and that the Naxi had negligible contact with Han culture before the Ming, ruling out a Chinese source; he likewise rules out Tibetan and Bai on phonetic grounds, and rules out common inheritance from proto-Naxi's sister languages Yi and Jiarong, since no regular sound correspondence exists. Instead, the close phonetic and semantic match with Mongolian khan/qaɣan, corroborated by a Ming-era trilingual inscription and by the parallel case of Pumi khɑ³⁵ "emperor" (used in the compound for "maize"), leads the author to conclude the word was borrowed from Yuan-era Mongolian, providing a lower bound on the time depth of reconstructed proto-Naxi.
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