proposes an Austroasiatic etymology for the ethnonym *li by comparing to Khmer dhle "sea", from Pre-Angkorian Old Khmer danle(y) "large expanse of water"; thus the ethnonym might have referred to a people living by the sea, When analyzing possible Austroasiatic loanwords into Old Chinese, Schuessler noticed that one layer of loanwords, from one or more Austroasiatic language(s) into Old Chinese spoken in the Yellow River basin, showed affinities to modern Khmeric and Khmuic languages, and occasionally to Monic. Earlier, Edwin G. Pulleyblank (1983, 1999) also proposed that the Yi were Austroasiatic speakers. Laurent Sagart (2008) instead suggested that the Yi languages were ancestral to Austronesian languages and formed a sister-group to Sino-Tibetan. Usages The sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank describes how Yi usages semantically changed. "Their name furnished the primary Chinese term for 'barbarian' and is sometimes used in such a generalized sense as early as the Spring and Autumn period. At the same time, it continued to have a specific reference, denoting especially the Yi of the Huai River region, who constituted a recognized political entity. Paradoxically the Yi was considered the most 'civilized' of the non-Chinese peoples." Pre-Qin usages It is not easy to determine people's times that a Classical Chinese document reflects. Literature describing a pre-Xia Dynasty period does not use the character Yi. As for the Xià Dynasty, some groups of people are referred to as the Yi. For example, the Yu Gong chapter of the Shu Ji or Book of Documents terms people in Qingzhou and Xuzhou Laiyi (), Yuyi () and Huaiyi (). Another Yi-related term is Jiu-Yi (), literally Nine Yi, which could have also had the connotation The Numerous Yi or The Many Different Kinds of Yi, and which appears in a passage in The Analects that reads, "The Master (i.e., Confucius) desired to live among the Nine Yi." The term "Dongyi" is not used for this period. Shang Dynasty oracle shell and bone writings record yi but not Dongyi. Shima Kunio's concordance of oracle inscriptions lists twenty occurrences of the script for 夷 or 尸, most frequently (6 times) in the compound zhishi 祉尸 "bless the personator; blessed personator". Michael Carr notes some contexts are ambiguous, but suggests, "Three compounds refer to 'barbarians' (in modern characters, fayi 伐夷 'attack barbarians', zhengyi 征夷 'punish barbarians', and yifang 夷方 'barbarian regions')." Oracle inscriptions record that Shang King Wu Ding (r. c. 1250–1192 BCE) made