Re: Origin of Chinese spoken languages

From: John Atkinson (johnacko_at_bigpond.com)
Date: 10/25/04 

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 11:58:57 GMT

"LEE Sau Dan" <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote...

> >>>>> "John" == John Atkinson <johnacko@bigpond.com> writes:
>
> > LSD:

> >> Yeah, you should do it first. Give us a list of Tibeto-Burman
> >> langauges which use the Chinese script.
>
> John> OK, here's a list:
> John> The Yi (Lolo) use a syllabary with an estimated 8000
> John> characters.
>
> The Yi script is a separate script.
>
> John> It is frequently mentioned by Chinese writers of the Ming
> John> period, and is probably over 1000 years old. Presumably it
> John> was invented in imitation of the Chinese script, though few
> ..............^^^^^^^^
> John> of the characters look like specific Chinese ones.
>
> You must look up the word "invent" from a good English dictionary.

OK. Concise Oxford do you?
"The action of devising, contriving, or making up.
Contrivance or production of a new method, of an art, kind of instrument,
etc.previously unknown; origination, introduction."
Precisely what I meant.
>
> John> The Naxi (or Moso) have two traditional writing systems.
> John> One pictographic, looking something like the earliest
> John> Egyptian heiroglyphs or the prototypes of the Chinese
> John> characters. Legend dates this system to the thirteenth
> John> century. The other is a syllabary, with many of the symbols
> John> borrowed from Chinese, others from Yi.
>
> Again, these scripts are independent of the Chinese script.

The pictograms probably are. The syllabary isn't. The inventor(s) of the
syllabary was certainly familiar with the Chinese script. Though he may or
may not have been able to read it, he used it as the model. They're
definitely not independent inventions.

> John> The Lisu have a syllabary consisting of characters that look
> John> like Chinese. It was invented in 1925 by Wang Renbo.
>
> "Look Like" means they aren't the same.

They certainly aren't "the same". I didn't claim they were. I didn't even
claim they were "derived from" Chinese script (as, arguably, Japanese is). I
said they were "influenced by" it.

> The Latin script also "looks
> like" the Greek script. Who would say they're the same script?

No, but the Latin script was derived from (one form of) Greek script. In
fact, Latin and Greek scripts are much more similar to each other than any
of the three syllabaries I mentioned are to the Chinese.

John.

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