A Confluence of Archaeological and Linguistic Data: Chinese Loanwords for Pottery Dating to the 1st Millennium in Mainland Southeast Asia

Mark Alves

Chinese loanwords for pottery and ceramics can be shown to have been borrowed in languages of Mainland Southeast Asia during the 1st millennium CE. The supporting evidence for this presentation comes primarily from Vietnamese, with both historical phonological and ethnohistorical evidence, and Cambodian, for which inscriptions provide approximate dates of loanwords. The words include a range of meanings: 'ceramic dish', 'small cup', 'vase', 'pot, basin', 'jar', ‘rooftile’, ‘clay (for ceramics)’, and 'kiln, oven'. Such data can be compared with archaeological evidence of Chinese pottery from that period to show evidence of early language contact and sociocultural contact in this cultural domain. While the inferences based on these early loanwords are broad, the lexical data nonetheless support the notion that Chinese presence in northern Vietnam and to the south in Old Khmer-speaking region spread pottery and pottery-production practices among ancestral speakers of Vietnamese and Cambodian in that early period.