Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)

From: Comm (no_at_spam.com)
Date: 03/24/05 

Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 11:46:31 GMT

<phippsmartin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1111640265.515654.194990@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
> Yes, BUT when I was studying Mandarin Chinese the teacher made the
> comment that if you trace back the pronounciation of words in Chinese
> (presumably if you found ancient rhyming dictionaries?) then you will
> find that words used in Vietnamese to mean the same thing are, in fact,
> the same word. He went so far as to speculate that Vietnamese sounds
> more like ancient Chinese than modern Chinese does

I'd believe a Chinese language instructor over a western linguist.

(presumably due to
> the influence of Manchu pronunciation on Mandarin).

Woah - Turanian type people conquered MANY times and had dynasties in what's
now China. Chinese might deny that thru the walls now - but it's the truth.
China also tried to conquer us! Marrying the women, sending the conquered
men far away - a form of genocide thru the front door as we see it. They do
not or can not eat the same food we eat! So offspring unable to eat our own
food? Heh. It's like when Dr. Lu said my grandfather was Chinese. If he
said that TO my grandfather, he'd probably be dead. It's a statement with a
LOT of "other" meanings to it. Saying it to me - eh, so what. I like Dr.
Lu and I like the Chinese. Shoot me now. LOL. I don't think there are ANY
of our words in the Chinese language - and surely none of their words are in
ours. However, there are heaps of old Turk words in Russian for nouns.
That might say something about the relations between the groups of people to
a person thinking outside the box.

Yet people on this
> group have insisted that Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) and
> Vietnamese belong to unrelated language groups. Comm suggests that
> this is a paradigm, that people are classifying Chinese languages as a
> group for political reasons whereas, in reality, Cantonese differs from
> Mandarin to the same extent that Vietnamese differs from Cantonese.
> Who is right?

I'd say your teacher is right.
>
>> > All of the trees that linguists draw up are based on patterns that
> arise
>> > from tracing the histories of the individual words of a language.
> They
>> > exclude borrowing because that would make things too complex: you
> can only
>> > have one source from which to 'inherit' words, and you can only
> 'inherit'
>> > them at one point in time, while you can borrow words from as many
> sources
>> > > as you like and in as many moments in history as your fancy
> takes. The
>> > tree diagrams are simply shorthands for showing the inherited
>> > relationships; the vocabulary comparisons that you will see
> philologists
>> > make are specifically of those words that are inherited, not
> borrowed.
>
> Fair enough, but note your use here of the word "inherited". I've been
> criticized for saying that there should be a correlation between
> genetics and linguistics: if you trace back different groups speaking
> different languages and assume that they were once one group speaking
> the same language then you would have to argue that they must also have
> a genetic relationship.

Problem with that, imo, is that the living examples of people show that
equating genetics with language has to be wrong. I speak English. I even
understand some German when it's spoken. I am not Anglo Saxon or Germanic!

I think it was true a very VERY long time ago, when H. sapiens were spread
out and pretty sparce - and not in so much contact with each other. Hell,
there is still argument about whether or not Hsapiens met up and mated with
what was already there, H erectus and Neandertal. What language did they
speak?

The only other possibility is that there was a
> language shift, that people, for whatever reason started speaking
> another language.

Mendu! I mean Alyo! Er, no no, I mean Hello! :)

It has been pointed out by many people that this
> does happen when one group is conquered by another (even though I was
> criticized, yet again, for making this very suggestion).

Conquered and more - like the NA were forced to not speak their language,
forced to speak ONLY English, forced to cut their hair, and ad nauseum.
People related to the Anglo Saxons in Russia (the Czar et al) did something
very similar to the Jews in the Pale. godDAMN did those Jews get even or
what? LMAO. Reading in detail about that - you have to remind yourself that
you are NOT reading about Native Americans in the Anglo schools. It's
identical in so many ways. Don't laugh, don't sing, don't dance, wipe that
smile off your face, cover up your darker body in white clothing, walk this
way, dress that way, put your hair this way, blah blah blah. I also believe
they have no souls, Martin. If they did, they could not have done such
things. Conquest is one thing, land, resources, etc. - but this stuff is a
whole other thing.
>
>> > It is true that a complete description of the history of, say,
> English
>> > would need to talk about the French influence, the fact that French
> and
>> > Latin were such large and continuous sources of borrowing. But a
> tree
>> > diagram does not claim to do any such thing - it is limited to
> offering a
>> > history of the words that were inherited by a language only. This
> is much
>> > more easily identified, codified and worked with: since inheritance
>
>> > happens only once, you can describe it in general rules that will
> apply to
>> > all inherited words; borrowing happens all over and so a separate
>> > description is needed for each borrowed word. That is why most
> linguists
>> > use the much simpler, easier to fully understand situation and use
>> > 'related' in reference to the tree diagrams only.
>
> Now, in the case of English, we are descended from Angles and Saxons,
> Germanic tribes, so it is natural to say that the oldest English words
> are from German, even if most of the modern words were borrowed from
> other languages, mostly French and Latin. Fair enough. But in the
> case of people in South America, for example, who speak Spanish but are
> presumably descendents of local people, couldn't we argue that they are
> still speaking their traditional language but that they have borrowed
> vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from Spanish? This is an extreme
> example.

After the Spanish got done Baptising them, they bashed their brains out. I
think the Spanish enforced Spanish on these people - same as the Anglos did
to the NA in N. America. Lol, now some folks want to shove Spanish down
our throats in the USA. Growl.

 I'm just asking if vocabulary can be borrowed then why not
> everything else?

Well, from how I see things, I know my people assimilated, blended in,
intermarried and were pretty friendly after the fighting stopped. And when
in those countries, they borrowed and left people to their own cultural ways
and devices. Some other people are very reluctant to borrow anything from
other people - or live and let live.

In which case we are all speaking whatever language
> we inherited from our ancient ancesters plus any elements that were
> borrowed along the way. We would then expect a 100% correlation
> between genetics and "inherited" as opposed to "borrowed" language.

I don't find that intuitive. :) I speak English.
>
>> Martin said:
>> >> Certainly English speaking people
>> >>> can decipher a lot of words from Romance languages and very
> little from
>> >>> Indian languages (meaning languages spoken in India and not meant
> to
>> >>> imply that there is an all encompassing Indian language group).
> Again,
>> >>> it would be prejudicial NOT to recognize the relationship between
>> >>> languages in India and Europe just because they sound different.
> By
>> >>> the same token, however, it is intuitive to think that closely
> related
>> >>> languages should sound similar and that people who speak one
> should be
>> >>> able to understand someone who speaks the other.
>> >
>> > This argument seems to be confusing two very, very different
> things. Two
>> > languages can 'sound similar' and two languages can have vocabulary
> in
>> > common.
>
> Perhaps I should have been clearer. I don't understand, say, Greek or
> Hindi, and probably wouldn't be able to identify any of the words in
> either but I can still judge whether they sound similar. I was
> refering to Comm's subjective descriptions of languages (eg her claim
> that Chinese sounded like "cats meowing" to her) and not to
> similarities in vocabulary.

Vietnamese sounds even more like cats. Which brings up this question - does
anyone find it odd that people in that part of the world speak in TONES? No
one else does - even if some of us have tonality in the way we speak - sort
of - we don't use the same tones for the same words.
>
> On the other hand, related languages should sound similar AND have
> words in common and should therefore it should be easier for people
> speaking realted languages to understand each other.
>
>> > It is certainly true that English has a greater percent of its
>> > vocabulary in common with French than with Hindi. However, in terms
> of
>> > their > sounds, Hindi is much, much more like French than either
> are to
>> > English.
>>
>> Hmm, it doesn't sound anything like French to me.
>
> It's subjective.

I say it's totally subjective too. But if The Linguists want to claim it's
not - hey, whatever.
>
>> > Suggesting that 'closely related languages should sound similar' is
> not
>> > really a tenable argument: Armenian sounds a lot like its close
> neighbours
>> > in the Caucasus, but is not related to them at all. As for being
> able to
>> > understand them, I don't see how that argument is meant to work at
> all.
>> > I'm afraid that, despite having spoken English for my entire life,
> I still
>> > very often do not understand Scottish people talking - and that is
>> > supposedly the same language! Punjabi and Hindi are extremely
> closely
>> > related, but I can't understand Punjabi. Nor can I understand
> Dutch, one
>> > of English's closest relatives.
>
> But pronounciation, the use of tone and rhythm, these are what
> determine how a language sound. Surely these things are inherited (or
> borrowed as the case may be) along with vocabulary and grammar, so that
> you would EXPECT realted languages to sound similar. I suggested that
> could be a "prejudice".

What does this sound like (I'll be phonetic, capitalized means accent is on
that) and qualify vowels with examples:

Bi chamd dur TAI ("Bi" like "bit," "tai" as in the word "tie")? What's
that sound like to you if you say it fast? It comes out fast like "Bicham
durTE".

Or, this: Bi taiv DOH rov nus TAI (O, as in "money.") Comes out Bitaiv
DOrov nusTAI

How about this one: Bi BO geen SHU shin tun (or SHAshintun, or SHAshintan,
"a" like "ah." - depends on who's speaking). (o in "bo" like O with umlaut
in German or like the the word "awe" depends on speaker; "u" like "but.") .
Say it fast - what does it sound like?

Heh, now's the one time I WISH these others would say what that sounds like
to them, if they can say the words fast - and better if they have no idea
what language that is on their own. Watch them make idiots of themselves
and say something small kiddie. Nyaa nyaa nyaa. LOL.

>
> Martin
>

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Daft figures!
    ... people in Scotland speak Arabic than Gaelic; ... Chinese than Gaelic; six times as many speak Urdu; and eight times as many ... introduce ESL (English Second language) classes. ... In most instances this worked quite well, and minority language ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: The Obamasiah! and His Ego. . .
    ... language Obama does not speak. ... Why should our children speak Spanish? ... be pushing Chinese as there will be a lot of jobs available to Chinese ... How is it harmful for our children to learn a second language? ...
    (alt.sports.baseball.bos-redsox)
  • Lingo limbo
    ... Many of us pride ourselves on knowing more than one language, ... most of us are able to speak and understand one or two other languages. ... speak and understand English, Mandarin, Bahasa Malaysia and maybe one or two ... I was tongue-tied and struggled for the correct Chinese words to ...
    (soc.culture.malaysia)
  • For more finance executives, working in China means taking up Mandarin
    ... on a pen and discussing financial terms - in Chinese. ... "Say 'tongji,' " chimes his language teacher, Elena Jiang, crisply ... the era when executives from overseas could rely on ... "An executive can probably get by without speaking Mandarin, ...
    (soc.culture.china)
  • Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)
    ... > comment that if you trace back the pronounciation of words in Chinese ... I'd believe a Chinese language instructor over a western linguist. ... I speak English. ... > either but I can still judge whether they sound similar. ...
    (sci.lang)