Comments on: Eurasian eureka Sun, 18 Sep 2016 01:19:05 +0000 hourly 1 By: Chris Button Sun, 18 Sep 2016 01:19:05 +0000 @ David Marjanović

"I further agree that the Min varieties, which are after all not descended from Middle Sinitic, are a mostly untapped source of information for reconstruction of Old Sinitic. Before Baxter & Sagart (2014), they were ignored altogether, and OS was reconstructed from textual evidence alone!"

I’m gonna challenge this point a little bit. Firstly this can only really be applied to Min since the other Chinese languages separated off a lot later and can all be accounted for by current reconstructions. Secondly, while the Min evidence is important, I would say the evidence from the earliest inscriptions is far more important. Unfortunately most scholars working on Old Chinese have very limited knowledge, if any, of the earliest inscriptions and so use them incorrectly, haphazardly, or not at all – but very rarely correctly and sufficiently. Furthermore, while Min might help us with the Old Chinese initials, the real problem (as I keep repeating over and over) is with the rhymes. Current reconstructions of Old Chinese simply ignore hundreds upon hundreds of connections across the Old Chinese lexicon because the monosyllables represented by individual characters are considered not to rhyme on the basis of an artificially imposed reliance on vowel-to-vowel correspondences in spite of the fact that rhyming in Chinese manifestly does not work in that manner.

By: Chris Button Sat, 17 Sep 2016 12:36:18 +0000 Another pitfall for long-rangers is the notion of being able to set up regular sound laws. When conducting comparative work on two genetically related languages, anything that deviates from regular sound laws automatically suggests some kind of external influence (unless there was wholesale mass borrowing from a certain language at a certain point). Using the "swallow" family mentioned above, the following OC-IE correspondences could be suggested as not merely coincidental:

嚥 *ʔjan "swallow". English "swallow"

咽 *ʔəɲ (from *ʔjən) "throat, swallow". Norwegian "svelg" (throat)

讌 *ʔjans "feast". German "schwelgen" (feast)

淵 *ʔʷəɲ (from *ʔʷjən) "abyss". Old English "swelg" (gulf, chasm)

Of course, it isn't down to coincidence because similar semantic developments creating chains of similar word families are common across unrelated languages. However, the idea that this implies any sort of phonological correspondence (genetic or through contact) between the two families is wrong.

By: David Marjanović Fri, 16 Sep 2016 21:50:49 +0000 I'll say it out loud: what Wu is doing is pseudoscience. It's no different than the usual Hebrew-Nāhuatl, Basque-everything, Hungarian-everything and Sumerian-everything comparisons, or the Hopi-Tibetan mirror. Instead of reconstructing down to the appropriate historical time depths, Wu picks and chooses from random modern Germanic languages and Latin-pronounced-in-English on the one side and modern Hoklo and modern Japanese on the other, merrily running sound changes backward* or ignoring their regularity altogether.

I do agree with our esteemed host that 1) there were contacts between IE and Sinitic in hoary antiquity, and 2) as people keep looking, they'll keep finding more of them; the Sinitic "honey" word is transparently Tocharian, so who knows what else is, and indeed who knows if all the words traveled in the same direction! Unfortunately, Wu isn't doing anything to advance this research.

I further agree that the Min varieties, which are after all not descended from Middle Sinitic, are a mostly untapped source of information for reconstruction of Old Sinitic. Before Baxter & Sagart (2014), they were ignored altogether, and OS was reconstructed from textual evidence alone! Unfortunately, again, Wu isn't doing anything to advance this research either. He just uses Hoklo instead of OS. This is like back in the 18th century when the philosopher Schlegel believed Sanskrit was PIE – only worse, some 3500 years worse to be precise. Of course Min in general and, I'm sure, Hoklo in particular preserves OS features that MS had already lost; at the same time, Min in general has its own innovations, as does every language. Off the top of my head, the three-way contrast of voice and aspiration in syllable-initial consonants is preserved in Wu and "Old Xiang", but not in Min; the glottal stop at the end of "shǎng tone" syllables is preserved in some Wu varieties, but not in Min either.

* Concerning the Japanese p > h change, the Portuguese missionaries consistently spelled that phoneme as f, the phonetic intermediate – in all positions, not just in fu.

And Germanic is not a reliable proxy for Indo-European as a whole, among other reasons because Germanic notoriously has a large percentage of vocabulary that can't be (or anyway hasn't been) traced back to Proto-Indo-European.

The size of this vocabulary has been shrinking for decades; it's pretty small now. But of course the point stands that even Proto-Germanic wasn't PIE and isn't a particularly good proxy for it – let alone for a more eastern ancient IE variety that could have been in contact with Sinitic.

By: Brian Fri, 16 Sep 2016 19:53:32 +0000 From a mathematician's point of view: What is the likelihood that so many cognates could be found between two completely unrelated languages? It depends on how strict "cognate" is. Here it seems that a "cognate pair" means a word in Taiwanese, and another word in any one of English, Latin, Old Norse, Old English, etc., whose first syllable (usually) bears some resemblance to a syllable of the word in Taiwanese. This resemblance can be quite weak (e.g. vir – lin, man – lang) and is not constrained by the usual hypothesis of "regular correspondences," a hypothesis which drastically reduces the likelihood of false coincidences. I suspect one could find this many cognates in any dictionary…

It does not help that the author seems to be blissfully unaware of widely accepted historical pronunciations — the Latin "genius" was probably pronounced with the "g" of "get," not the "g" of English "genius," and past commenters have mentioned similar errors on the Chinese side.

By: J.W. Brewer Wed, 14 Sep 2016 19:32:24 +0000 Yes, the extent to which ethnic-Han people in general would have immigrated to Formosa had it remained under Dutch rule (compared to what happened in reality over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries) is obviously speculative, but if the Dutch had wanted to develop the island economically and the indigenous ("aboriginal") population had seemed inadequately numerous for those needs (and/or too difficult to get to do what the colonizers wanted …) they would have wanted/needed a supply of immigrants from somewhere, and its unlikely it would have been Europeans so the obvious candidates would have been: a) from Dutch-ruled islands farther south; b) from right across the straits in Mainland China and interested in getting out from under Manchu rule. Although I guess a more numerous "aboriginal" population with a smaller-but-economically-significant Han population (as was the case in e.g. the Philippines under Spanish rule) would have been another plausible scenario.

By: Victor Mair Wed, 14 Sep 2016 18:59:12 +0000 We'll know more about Chau Wu's understanding of the time and place when IE and Sinitic were in contact when he publishes the second installment of his work, but he could not have been thinking that his Minnan ancestors would have met Germans or Dutch on Formosa around the 1660s because the bulk of them didn't arrive until the 18th and 19th centuries. I'm sure that he will say the time of encounter was much earlier and the place was to the north.

By: J.W. Brewer Wed, 14 Sep 2016 15:07:05 +0000 Perhaps it was unfortunate that Koxinga drove the Dutch out of Taiwan in the 1660's, thus preventing an opportunity for a reconciliation and cultural synthesis between Hokkienophones and their long-lost Germanic-speaking cousins?

By: RP Wed, 14 Sep 2016 10:37:47 +0000 @ardj,
I'm pretty sure the distinguished Chinese historical linguist quoted by VM is speaking satirically (i.e. he or she is extremely sceptical), so there's no particular need to debunk his evidence.

By: Chris Button Wed, 14 Sep 2016 01:29:51 +0000 @ardj

The etymologies of 燕 "swallow (bird)" and 嚥 "swallow (verb)" are indeed unrelated in Chinese as well as English.

The bird is attested back in the oracle-bone inscriptions and is an early pictograph.

The verb 嚥 reconstructs as *ʔjan and is the ablaut of 咽 "throat, swallow" which reconstructs as *ʔəɲ (palatal nasal) from earlier *ʔjən. Both of these in turn are related to 讌 "feast" *ʔjans via a semantic extension analogous to the relationship of "swallow" with Norwegian "svelg" (throat) and German "schwelgen" (feast). Ultimately all three are related to 淵 "abyss" *ʔʷəɲ from earlier *ʔʷjən with another IE parallel in Old English "swelg" (gulf, chasm). It should be noted that "swallow", "svelg" "schwelgen" and "swelg" are not genetically related to the Chinese word family in any way, but the semantic extensions are similar because humans tend to make sense of the world in the same way wherever they are.

By: Eidolon Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:43:53 +0000 For the record, Chau H. Wu used to believe that Hoklo/Taiwanese culture and language came from Old Europe, specifically Germany, and gave a lecture as such in 2006, which you can still read bits an pieces of online. You could still detect a bit of this in the statements he makes in the paper, such as when he says that an European, perhaps Germanic, people must have brought language and culture to Asia, and specifically to the Hoklo Taiwanese.

Personally, I find any deep genetic relationship between Chinese and Indo-European, such as those advanced by Pulleybank, an extraordinary claim in need of extraordinary evidence. I think we can all agree that the Chinese did not, as a population, come from Europe or the region in which the early Indo-European/proto-Indo-Europeans are said to have lived. As such, even though early East-West cultural exchanges are certain, that is not enough for the sort of language shift that would be required for Chinese to be a lost Indo-European language. You'd need, as Chau alludes to, some sort of actual Indo-European or proto-Indo-European ruling class in China with the influence to replace the native languages with their own. This requires a lot of archaeological and anthropological evidence, which we simply don't see.

To this end, while I do believe that there must have been early loan words in Old Chinese from West Asia and Central Asia, including but not limited to Indo-European, and which corresponds to the spread of ideas and technologies that happened around this time and indeed throughout history, I do not think it goes much further than this. It sure would be nice, in a way, for the first and second most popular language families in the world, covering over 66% of humanity, to have been genetically related. But then again, not if the Chinese are led to believe that their ancestors were colonized by Indo-Europeans over 3000 years ago, as that'd just fuel the Western imperialist narrative even more.

By: ardj Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:17:58 +0000 @Victor Mair
I am quite unqualified to comment on this, but would just note that the English verb swallow and noun meaning a bird appear to have entirely different etymologies / sources. Of course that may also be true of the two Chinese equivalents quoted.

By: Will M Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:16:04 +0000 Matt: Thanks! It's probably painfully obvious that Chinese (or Japanese) historical linguistics isn't my field, but I think I'm on the same page with you.

I imagine you would agree, then, that it's highly unlikely that "At the time of Proto-Holó receiving this word, it may have been thought to have a throaty sound *hat" (previous paragraph), and that Japanese hachi is wholly inadequate as evidence of this. Rather, this is another of the "widely-accepted Sinitic etymologies" JS refers to.

By: Chris Button Tue, 13 Sep 2016 21:31:37 +0000 Pulleyblank’s name is mentioned at the beginning in terms of a possible genetic relationship between IE and OC (coupled with some language contact) as opposed to one solely through language contact as Chau Wu is suggesting. In this regard, it is probably worth stressing just how different Pulleyblank’s approach is from that of Chau Wu.

Pulleyblank’s take (at least as I see it) seems to have been that if IE goes back to a “vowelless” analysis of syllabic schwa with an ablaut variant /a/ (albeit often obscured by people writing /i/ and /u/ for the sonorants /j/ and /w/ because they have a transcriptional flexibility that other sonorants do not) and if OC also goes back to a similar “vowelless” analysis (albeit obscured by by people often confusing surface phonetics with underlying phonology) then perhaps there is a genetic relationship between the two. Given that Pulleyblank was heavily influenced in his thinking by the “vowelless” analyses being done by people like Sidney Allen and Aert Kuipers on Northwest Caucasian languages (and also looked at vowelless analyses of other far-flung languages), it is unclear whether he would have thought all of this leads back to an even greater proto-language family or not. Unfortunately as a relatively green MA student struggling to keep up with anything Pulleyblank was throwing at me, I never asked him in detail about this and it is sadly too late now.

My own take is that the most basic element of language is the syllable. A distinction between vowels and consonants is an abstract concept that we are taught rather than something we innately know, and is really something for phoneticians dealing with surface phenomenon rather than phonologists. The syllable is manifested by schwa which may be overtly noted between, for example, two voiceless obstruents, or is something inherent in a sonorant. As a result, the fact that IE and OC were both originally “vowelless” does not mean there is necessarily any connection between the two since this is ultimately the case for all language families if we go back far enough and don’t try to force the data to fit preconceived models.