Re: Origin of Chinese spoken languages - 2nd evidence

From: PaPaPeng (papapeng_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/21/04 

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 07:00:06 GMT

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:34:29 +0000 (UTC), SJ <donot@send.spam.net>
wrote:

>There are numerous evidences that support my theory: Chinese spoken
>languages are actually written languages, because they were evolved from an
>ideographic script called Hanja or Kanji.
>
>Today, I provided an additional evidence: tones in Chinese spoken
>languages.
>

I think it will be a good idea if everyone took a step back and look
at some published sources. The July 2003 issue of the national
Geographic provides an easy to read and well illustrated account of
the archaelogical record.

1. pg 65. Caption to map. The cultural font for China's 4,000
year-old civilization was long argued to be the Yellow River.
Excavations of magnificient bronzes and other Shang artifacts in the
early 20th century supported this tradition. But in 1986, bronzes
dating from the Shang era but of a stunningly different style emerged
to the southwest in the village of Sanxingdui. These and other Bronze
Age finds suggest that ancient China had not one cultural center, but
many.

Comment: The map of the early Chinese centers of civilization already
overlap seven modern Chinese provinces. To this day there exists in
the same geographical area as many mutually incomprehensible
linguistic Chinese dialects and even more local cultural differences
than there are (7) provinces. It is not unresonable to assume that in
ancient times there was even more diversity and less intercourse
between the centers of cultural and linguistic indentity.

It is also not unreasonable to assume that as archaelogical science
become more established in China and more sites are discovered the
roots of Chinese civilization will cover a much wider area in China.

2. pg 66-67. Historical Timeline. Dynasties and Republics.
Neolithic Cultures. 3000 B.C. to 2500 B.C.
Xia (?) 2000B.C.
Shang circa 1600 B.C.
Zhou circa 1045 B.C.
Qin 221 B.C.
Han 206 B.C.
(historical dynasties up to the Qing and the founding of the present
Republics)

Same page 66. Oracle bones changed everything.................But
before the bone was ground up, someone noticed it was engraved with
inscriptions - more than 3,000 years old.

Pg 64. To the average literate Chinese, the oracle bone characters
were at first glance unintelligible, but classical scholars like Wang
immediately recognized them as an early form of the Chinese script.

Comment: From other sources we learn that when the First Emperor Qin
Shihuangdi unifed China he also set about to standardized the Chinese
script. In the process many old characters were discarded and this
loss is reflected in the inability to read some of the characters in
oracle bone script. I believe lost characters also apply to
archaelogical artifacts from the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. But
the substance of the ancient scripts can be understood without much
difficulty by anyone literate in written Chinese.

>From the post Qin Han Dynasty onwards the Chinese script had been
standardized such that modern Chinese can read documents from that
period to the present in their entiety.

There has always been only one Chinese script although their stylistic
representation may have evolved over the 3,000 years. As established
on good authority that evolution is linear and is readable in all its
forms.

When we amalgamate the continuity of written Chinese with the multiple
centres of Chinese civilization spread over the whole geographical
area of present day China this is convincing proof that despite the
regional differences in cultural practices and linguistic
distictiveness of the local dialects the Chinese language had always
been unified and evolved from its own very ancient roots.

The attempt bring in Hanja or Kanji as influential in the development
of the Chinese language is spurious and unworthy of further
consideration. There were no equivalent levels of civilization in
Korea or Japan then and not for more than a thousand years more.

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