According to the
Book of Han, "the Xiongnu called the
Heaven (天)
Chēnglí (撐犁) and they called a child (子)
gūtú (孤塗). As for
Chányú (單于), it is a "vast [and] great appearance" (廣大之貌).". L. Rogers and
Edwin G. Pulleyblank argue that the title
chanyu may be equivalent to the later attested title
tarkhan, suggesting that the Chinese pronunciation was originally
dān-ĥwāĥ, an approximation for
*darxan. Linguist
Alexander Vovin tentatively proposes a
Yeniseian etymology for 撐犁孤塗單于, in Old Chinese pronunciation
*treng-ri kwa-la dar-ɢwā, from four roots: *
*tɨŋgɨr- "heaven", *
kwala- "son, child", *
dar "lower reaches of the
Yenisei" or "north", and *
qʌ̄j ~ *
χʌ̄j "prince"; as a whole "Son of Heaven, Ruler of the North". Bailey derives from
Proto-Iranian *tark- "to speak, command", from
Proto-Indo-European *telkʷ-. He also compares a Saka title with the same semantic shift. Compare also
Khotanese ttarkana and
Ossetian tærxon. Dybo derives from a
Turkic root meaning "vast as the sky", and compares
Old Uyghur *tarḳan- and
tarḳar-. The Old Uyghur
tarḳan- listed in her work is not found in Wilkens (2021), and Caferoğlu (1968) glosses
tarḳan- as "to feel embarrassed, to get tired of, to worry".
tarḳar-, meanwhile, is glossed by both as "to expel, to distance oneself from something; to destroy, to expunge". == List of Xiongnu chanyus ==