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

From: Lee Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 03/24/05 

Date: 24 Mar 2005 18:58:39 +0800

>>>>> "phippsmartin" == phippsmartin <phippsmartin@hotmail.com> writes:

    phippsmartin> Yes, BUT when I was studying Mandarin Chinese the
    phippsmartin> teacher made the comment that if you trace back the
    phippsmartin> pronounciation of words in Chinese (presumably if
    phippsmartin> you found ancient rhyming dictionaries?)

Yes. Those rhyme books are just one source of information. Other
sources of information include the *present* southern dialects as well
as pronunciations of words borrowed by other languages, mainly
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

    phippsmartin> then you will find that words used in Vietnamese to
    phippsmartin> mean the same thing are, in fact, the same word.

Yes. And it's a pity that they don't write those words in characters
anymore!

Indeed, Chinese loan words in Vietnamese are not that easily
recognizable to Mandarin speakers. They are much more recognizable to
Cantonese speakers, and also speakers Hakka and Minnan. That's
because these dialects are more conservation/preserving in the
historical development than Mandarin. They have kept much more
phonetic features as well as vocabularies from the older formers of
Chinese than Mandarin does. The pronunciations of words borrowed by
foreign languages usually sound in those present foreign languages
much more similar to the modern southern Chinese dialects than
Mandarin.

    phippsmartin> He went so far as to speculate that Vietnamese
    phippsmartin> sounds more like ancient Chinese than modern Chinese
    phippsmartin> does (presumably due to the influence of Manchu
    phippsmartin> pronunciation on Mandarin).

That's true. Many Vietnamese words, when pronounced alone clearly
(i.e. not in a long long sentence uttered quickly), sound very close
to Cantonese. Many Japanese and Korean words also sound like
Cantonese, too. These are all tracable back to Middle Chinese words.

    phippsmartin> Yet people on this group have insisted that Chinese
    phippsmartin> (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) and Vietnamese belong to
    phippsmartin> unrelated language groups.

Because those are loan words. You know English has many many words
loaned from French for a few centuries? Does that make English a
"French dialect"? And if you study Japanese, you'll be surprised to
find that Japanese more than 50% of its words come from Chinese, and
another 30% come from foreign languages (other than Chinese). Only a
small portion are native Japanese words. They even write most of the
loan words from Chinese in the characters as we Chinese do. Does that
make Japanese no more Japanese? Does that make Japanese a "Chinese
dialect"? No. If you look at the grammar, you'll obviously reject
that assertion.

    phippsmartin> Comm suggests that this is a paradigm, that people
    phippsmartin> are classifying Chinese languages as a group for
    phippsmartin> political reasons whereas,

No. There are reasons to group them together. The same reasons for
grouping French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and Romanian under
"Romance". All Chinese languages are SVO, and modifier comes before
the modified. They share many other features, too.

    phippsmartin> in reality, Cantonese differs from Mandarin to the
    phippsmartin> same extent that Vietnamese differs from Cantonese.

No. Vietnamese is more different from Cantonese than Mandarin is.
Look at the personal pronoun system. The pronouns in Cantonese,
although using different root words, have the same structure as
Mandarin. Usage is also alike. (i.e. when you can omit a pronoun,
and when not.) How about Vietnamese? The first question to ask is:
are there REAL pronouns in Vietnamese? The so called "pronouns" in
Vietnamese are indeed words. E.g. "co^" is usually translated "you
(feminine, respective)". But isn't it the word for "aunt"? And how
about the 3rd person pronouns? "co^ ay'" is "she"? Or "that aunt"?
This is very different from Cantonese and Mandarin.

How about word order? Do you place an adjective before the described
noun in Vietnamese, as in Cantonese and Mandarin?

How about possession? How to say "my son" in Vietnamese? Which word
goes first? And how about Cantonese/Mandarin? 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     §õ¦u´°                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee

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