Re: new book on the spread of IE

On Feb 16, 1:30 pm, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
benli...@xxxxxxxxxx skreiv:





On Feb 17, 5:24 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 16, 6:09 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 16, 12:00 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 15, 10:31 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Feb 15, 10:34 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Case in example. The arrival of voiceless labio-dental fricative
/f/ to Chinese dialects is ubiqutous (this even happened in
Vietnamese, which is not exactly a Chinese dialect.)

It isn't the least bit a Chinese dialect.

I think I know more about Vietnamese and its relationship to
Chinese than you.

It is very, very obvious that you do not.
Vietnamese is, with not the slightest doubt or question, an
Austroasiatic language, belonging to the Mon-Khmer division. It has
a large number of Chinese loanwords.

You obviously have not been following any of my postings on
Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer. Who has been talking more about Mon-Khmer
here recently in sci.lang if not me? Your stereotyping people is
amazing.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/3ea88b36a314cdd6

You know zero Mon-Khmer language yet you want to lecture someone
that can speak a Mon-Khmer language.

As I said, I know more than you do in this area.

Even if every tooth in the head of every speaker of an Austronesian-
speaker were extracted, what effect would that have on the utterly
unrelated Chinese languages?

Get your Chinese stereotype out of your mind. Southern Min has
exactly 6 vowels, just like Austronesian. Again, I know more on this
than you do.

There is a cultural awakening in Mainland China. People are getting
more and more interested in finding out about themselves. Finding
out their true heritage. I'd say in mainland this is happening at
the college and graduate school level. In Taiwan it's already
shifted down to the elementary school level. A lot of past lies are
now dwindling at lightning-fast speed. And people like you are
becoming outdated fast enough.

I guess it's about time we had a Chinese ethnomaniac telling us that
linguistics has got it all wrong, to go with our Indian, Slavic,
Greek and other specimens of the type.

The fact that Peter, Brian and you read his posts the same way makes me
doubt my own reading capacity. But still:

First I read ekkilu's "Vietnamese, which is not exactly a Chinese
dialect" as a classic understatement, parallel to e.g. when making the
case for the Iraq war, describing a liberal politician supporting the
war as "not exactly a rightwing nutcase".

Precisely. Thanks. When I said it, I meant it like in:

"Bill Clinton, who is not exactly black".

Any person up to date in American politics would know what I mean, and
would append the following sentence on their own:

"Bill Clinton, who is not exactly black, nevertheless has been fondly
called the 'first black president'".

So, when I said:

"Vietnamese, which is not exactly a Chinese dialect"

any person who knows about Vietnamese linguistics would know what I
mean.

"Vietnamese, which is not exactly a Chinese dialect, nevertheless has
quite a few phonological developments that are parallel to Chinese,
like the upper-lower register split, the presence of the Chongniu
categories, the recent arrival of the voiceless labiodental fricative,
and perhaps even similar tonogenesis mechanism at an earlier stage.
The traditional view is that these changes were influenced by Chinese,
but it is worthwhile to think otherwise."

Anybody that has been follow my postings would know I have always been
looking from the South-to-North direction. If people know anything
about Dawenkou at all, they'd know how far north the pre-Austronesian-
(or Austric/Austro-Thai)-like civilization was once upon a time.
People tend to assume that China exported influences, without
realizing that more than half of China belonged to some very different
civilizations. The South was the land of a very different and rich
conglomerate of civilizations, which today is simply labeled as
"China".

Finally I read his "cultural awakening" as a hope for a renaissance for
Chinese minority cultures. His observations may be false, as may the
tooth fairy tale, but I didn't catch any Chinese ethnocentric
sympathies. If anything, I'd suspect them to be Pan-Austronesian.

The funny thing is I don't need any of the identity stuff. Identity is
poisonous. But in order for people to wake up from it, they need to
first find out the truth about themselves. It takes some time for
people to separate what's taught in school to what's reality. History
books serve so far only to brainwash people. The process of waking up
involves typically three steps: (1) to question one's current
identity, (2) to find out one's true heritage, (3) to find out that
heritage means nothing. Some people are hopelessly stuck at the very
first step.

But I'm far from being a native speaker of English and may well have got
it all wrong.

You got it all right. The native speakers simply were so full of
stereotypes that their minds could no longer work.

-- Ekki
.

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