The character ge also appears frequently in transcribing and translating the ever-increasing number of foreign-origin words. For instance, cellular phones were once widely known as dageda, “big, big brother,” a strange term with a dubious origin, now gradually being replaced by the more down-to-earth word shouji, “hand machine.” The most fanciful use, though, may be the popular transliteration weige, literally “awesome brother,” for Viagra, the medicine for erectile dysfunction. In fact, a recent collection of essays by a popular Chinese historian is titled Hello, Weige.2
In this broad social context (despite the sometimes disastrous consequences of the one-child population-control policy in the People's Republic of China, which, if strictly enforced, would have endangered all kinship terms for siblings), and given the number of Chinese-speaking souls worldwide, ge must be one of the most frequently used terms on earth, spoken and written billions of times a day. It is therefore surprising that this quintessential Chinese kinship term does not have a Sinitic origin at all! Its invasion into the sea of Sinitic-speaking Chinese populace was the result of the Tuoba and their brethren and progeny, including the imperial Tang clan.
The Proto-Mongolic Origin of Ge and the Case of Agan
Let us look at the Chinese character ge again. It was in fact the original form of its homonym signifying “song,” “to sing.” As the erudite Qing linguist Duan Yucai commented, this character was later borrowed on account of its pronunciation for the meaning of elder brother.3 Loans similarly motivated by phonetics but serving semantic purposes were of course not infrequent in Sino-Tibetan philology.
As several prominent Qing scholars have observed, the use of ge for “elder brother” occurred fairly late: the first recorded such usage did not appear until the middle to late Tang times.4 Tang huiyao (The Essentials of Tang Institutions, 5.56) has an anecdotal story, not noted by the cited Qing and modern scholars, about a younger brother of Emperor Taizong, calling the latter erge, “the second elder brother.” While this is certainly a revealing case of the term's early usage, it should be pointed out that the earliest parts of Tang huiyao, completed during the Northern Song dynasty, were compiled no earlier than the reign of Emperor Dezong (780–805),5 more than 150 years after the conversation allegedly took place.
The origin of ge evolving into a kinship term for “elder brother” becomes clear once one appreciates the two basic patterns of kinship terms in colloquial Chinese: those using reduplication, and those with an a- prefix. The latter was particularly well represented in ancient times and may well symbolize a common Sino-Tibetan trait. Almost all Chinese characters for kinship relations can in fact be used with an a- prefix.6 Direct attestations are found as early as the late Hàn dynasty period, exemplified by “Beifen shi (Poem of grief and indignation)” composed by Cai Yan,7 a talented daughter of the Later or Eastern Hàn dynasty's scholar-official Cai Yong (132–92). In that poem, a vocative amu, “mommy,” was used when the sorrowful poetess described the sad permanent separation from her children, born during her captivity in the Southern Xiongnu territory, after Cao Cao (155–220), the warlord-turned-chancellor of northern China at the time, ransomed her freedom. Not long after, in the folk ballad “Southward Flies the Peacock,” which was based on a tragedy in the Jian'an era (196–220), already cited in a previous chapter, we meet at least four a- vocatives, namely amu, “mommy”; anü, “daughter”; amei, “younger sister”; and axiong, “elder brother.” Paul Benedict was certainly misinformed to conclude incorrectly that the usage was a late (ca. 600) development in Chinese language.8
Next, one observes that the Middle Chinese pronunciation of a-ge as reconstructed by Bernhard Karlgren is aka; its close resemblance to the Mongolian kinship term akha, which has the same meaning, makes its derivation obvious.
Evidence of the Mongolic kinship term akha/agha predates the emergence of Mongolian tribes by many centuries. More specifically, it goes back to the famous story of “The Song of Agan,” as narrated in the dynastic history Jin shu (History of the Jin, 97.2537): During the early years of the Western Jin (265–316), the young and highborn (i.e., of a chief-consort mother) leader Murong Wei of the Murong clan, a group in the general Xianbei conglomerate pasturing in northeastern China, quarreled with his lowborn (i.e., of a concubine mother) elder brother Tuyuhun about the pasture lands for the horse herds of the respective tribes they had inherited. The elder brother finally gave up by swearing to lead his tribes to a place “thousands of miles away” from the lands of his younger brother. This he did, resulting finally in the establishment of the Tuyuhun kingdom in northwestern China that lasted about half a millennium, until the mid-Tang dynasty, before being subjugated and absorbed by the ancient Tibetan kingdom.9 The younger brother, Murong Wei, was reported to have much regretted such an outcome. Dearly missing his elder brother, he composed the melancholy “Song of Agan.” Here Jin shu interprets: “agan in Xianbei language means elder brother.”
The migration of Tuyuhun's tribes was likely a reflection of the Steppe tradition of ultimogeniture, in which the youngest son, the ochigin, inherits his parents' homestead. The division of the huge Mongol empire among Genghis Khan's four sons is perhaps the best example of this tradition. The linguistic implication of “Song of Agan” is probably the first appearance of the Mongolic root akha/agha for “elder brother” in history.
Paul Pelliot was perhaps the first Western scholar to identify agan with this Mongolic root akha (aqa),10 to be followed by Peter Boodberg and Louis Bazin,11pointing at the Mongolic nature of the Murong's language. A similar observation had in fact been made much earlier by the Qing dynasty Chinese scholar Zhai Hao.12 The problem here is to explain the terminal -n, which is possessed by neither the Middle nor the Modern Mongolian stem for “elder brother.” Bazin tried to invoke the plural suffix -nar (one could, in fact, do even better by using a postulated Common Mongolian -n plural suffix).13 But this implied solution is contradicted by the historic context in which the word agan appeared: all Chinese records indicated that there was no more than a single elder brother in this story. The rendition in Jin shu (97.2537) and the word agan being used as an official title also preclude the possibility of a genitive or possessive suffix here. More familiar with Chinese records and therefore more circumspect regarding their use for his arguments, Pelliot hinted at the possibility of the common transitory –n in Mongolic languages. However, on the key word for elder brother, this seems to be unattested in known historical and modern Mongolian languages. In any case, as remarked elsewhere in this book, the grammatical function of the terminal -n attested in many ancient Xianbei words preserved in Chinese literature remains an intriguing puzzle.
One might notice that the word agan may also be identified with the Nüzhen (Jurchen)-Manchu term for “elder brother,” as the terminal -n is well attested in both Middle Nüzhen and Late Manchu languages.14 Indeed, as noted by Karl Wittfogel and Feng Jiasheng,15 Edouard Chavannes had called the Tuyuhun “la nation tongouse.”16 But be its origin Mongolian or Tunguz, the crucial point here is that agan does not seem to be the word for “elder brother” used by the Tuoba Xianbei. I have two pieces of evidence to support this observation.
First, Wei shu (History of the Wei, 101.2233), in sharp contrast to Jin shu, points out explicitly that agan is a Tuhe word, Tuhe being a rather derogatory term used consistently by its author Wei Shou, who served both the Tuoba Wei dynasty and its successor the Northern Qi dynasty, to identify the Murong group. One might remark that Wei Shou