Taishan/Thai Connection

[Shi Tong]

I would never suggest saying that all Taiwanese natives speak Indonesian dialects, I was simply pointing out the closeness of Taiwanese native languages to some other Austronesian languages, to the extent that in some cases they can converse.

I'm very sorry I cant find the article I originally read, but I remember it very well.

My sister in law's girlfriend is half 原住民, so I have no intention of insulting any of them.

[chrix]

No, if that journalist wrote they could communicate beyond a few words, it's just plain wrong. It's been known to happen...

Keep in mind that even the Formosan languages aren't mutually intelligible. Now there's one language that is usually considered a Philippine language, the language of Orchid Island, but that also doesn't mean they could communicate without problem with Filipinos.

Just because languages are closely related it doesn't mean that there isn't a language barrier..

[Shi Tong]

No, if that journalist wrote they could communicate beyond a few words, it's just plain wrong. It's been known to happen...

Well, if you're sure, then I'm sure you're right.

And yeah, journalists can write with some interesting colour on occasion (lie).

Keep in mind that even the Formosan languages aren't mutually intelligible.

Of course.

Now there's one language that is usually considered a Philippine language, the language of Orchid Island, but that also doesn't mean they could communicate without problem with Filipinos.

Ooh.. that's interesting. It's concievable that that's what I've heard.

Just because languages are closely related it doesn't mean that there isn't a language barrier..

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Fujianhua, etc, etc, etc.. of course, I realise that.

[Token_287]

Three things:

1) When I said that "there's not one transliteration method for Thai," I meant that "there's not one standard, universally accepted" transliteration method. That is to say, there's the IPA scheme, the Royal Thai Transliteration, and various other academic methods (some of them based on the original Brahmi script values of the letters), but no one of them is used in the vast majority of contexts (unlike the primacy that Pinyin has achieved). Hence varying transliterations of His Majesty the King's name as Adulyadej, Adunyadet, etc...

2) I'd be interested to see the source that says that Thai numbers were actually adopted from one of the Chinese languages. As the adoption of numbers wholesale isn't that frequent, I'd still be surprised, and it doesn't account for the similarity in basic particles and grammatical/lexical features, but hey, if there was enough contact for numbers to be replaced, perhaps other features of the language could have been as well. Hence the debate on the classification of Tai-Kadai languages.

3) Shitong's story might not be that far fetched; one of my professors of Malay Studies at National University of Singapore, an American guy who knew several Austronesian languages, had married an Indonesian woman who spoke Bugis, a language of Indonesia (and perhaps the origin of the "boogey" in "boogey man," due to the famed ferocity of their warriors, though of course this could be a folk etymology). He said that they moved to Hawaii for a while, and that his wife had been surprised to understand "much of" the daily conversations in Hawaiian that she had heard. Now, what exactly "much of" means practically, I have no idea, as this is just an anecdote. Also, there aren't that many Hawaiian speakers left. But, if the participants in Shitong's story had spoken very slowly, chosen their words carefully, and [perhaps] had set up some snippets of dialogue before the interview that were close to equivalents in both languages, it is possible. The "preconceived conversation" scenario sort of takes the point out of mutual comprehensibility, though.

[chrix]

two things:

1. Thai numerals: have a look at Suthiwan and Tadmor in Haspelmath and Tadmor (eds), Loanwords in the World's Languages. They say they come from Middle Chinese. There's also an online database to go with that called WOLD, there might be more info.

2. I don't want to go into detail publicly, but I do work with Austronesian languages, and you can take my word for it, (of course you don't have to). Sure, if you "dumb down" the scenario sufficiently, and point at things and speak slowly the other side might understand you, but how much of this understanding will be based due to extralinguistic factors is anyone's guess.

[Token_287]

Chrix,

Thanks for the reference, I'll have a look. Also, I believe you, I was just trying to tell an amusing anecdote/posit a situation in which Shitong's anecdote could be conceivable. What Austronesian languages do you work on?

[Shi Tong]

They say they come from Middle Chinese.

I'm pretty sure that a whole load of languages borrowed their numbers from middle Chinese, as I said, Fujianhua numbers are very close to Japanese ones, and this would have been an older form of Chinese than Mandarin, though my knowledge of history on Chinese languages isn't too great. I have heard this mentioned and have read small articles on this so many times, though, I would say it's pretty much concrete.

Chrix, I have a question which you might have an answer to:

Did then, the "Middle Chinese" (from what era?) put much more importance to these numbers (from 1-10) and then spread the knowledge of these around? The reason I ask is because these spoken methods either supplanted or were adopted by other people's and it would be interesting to know if the method of speaking "took over" or was simply not well used enough before. Or is there no way of knowing?

[calibre2001]

"Middle Chinese" (from what era?)

隨唐宋朝

[Shi Tong]

Wow.. thanks Calibre2001.. I love Chinese history, but there's so much of it. I started with Romance of the Three Kingdoms and did a lot of investigation into that, but then there's a large 1800 odd year gap!

[skylee]

I suppose 隨 should be 隋.

[trien27]

"Middle Chinese" (from what era?)

隨唐宋朝

I suppose 隨 should be 隋.

隨 [with 辶 radical] = To follow

隋 [without 辶 radical] = The Sui dynasty [581-618 CE]

"Middle Chinese" is translated from 中古漢語 by linguists, which should be called "Ancient Chinese" is appropriately applied by Karlgren.

Middle Chinese is spoken from Northern & Southern dynasties [420-589 CE] up to the Song / Sung dynasty [960-1279 CE] including the Sui [581-618 CE], Tang [618-907 CE], & 5 Dynasties & 10 Kingdoms [907-960 CE] in between.

Edited April 15, 2010 at 12:54 AM by trien27

[Shi Tong]

"Middle Chinese" is translated from 中古漢語 by linguists, which should be called "Ancient Chinese" is appropriately applied by Karlgren.

Middle Chinese is spoken from Northern & Southern dynasties [420-589 CE] up to the Song / Sung dynasty [960-1279 CE] including the Sui [581-618 CE], Tang [618-907 CE], & 5 Dynasties & 10 Kingdoms [907-960 CE] in between.

Wow...

This is kind of off topic I suppose, but how do people know they spoke Middle Chinese for such a long time? Is it embedded in the rhyme patterns of poety/ recorded by historians? Does anyone know what kind of dialect it's similar to today (Fujianese/ Cantonese/ Shanghainese?)

[Daan]

Just like the history of English can be roughly be divided into Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English, so the history of the Sinitic languages can be divided into several language phases. Now, most scholars use different names for different phases, so the picture here is a bit more complicated than with the history of the English language. But that partly reflects the fact that linguistic research into the Sinitic languages is nowhere near quite as advanced as research into Germanic and Indo-European languages. Like the language phases of English, Old Chinese and Middle Chinese are certainly not monolithic languages; rather, there is a lot of diversity even within those language phases, with different dialects. And as time passed, new grammatical structures were introduced, some others vanished, the lexicon grew and there were sound changes.

The sounds of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese can indeed be partly reconstructed from the rhyme words in poetry, but due to the nature of the script, it's unlikely we'll ever understand the sound systems of the earlier Sinitic languages as well as we understand those of earlier Indo-European languages. The scholarly community generally feels our current reconstructions of Middle Chinese are as accurate and complete as one could hope for. This is because we have a wealth of data available on Middle Chinese, including rhyme books from the Tang and the Song, as well as many dictionaries that include phonetic spellings (sort of) and Buddhist classics with transliterations of Sanskrit. There's always a danger, though, that the works we rely on may not necessarily have reflected the spoken language as used back then.

The more conservative languages of southern China have changed less than the languages of the north since the Middle Chinese period ended, both phonetically and lexically.

[Ah-Bin]

Austronesian, but dua is a loan from Sanskrit and tiga is anomalous).

Are you really sure that dua is a loan from Sanskrit Chrix? Linguists who reconstructed proto-Austronesian numbers seem to think it's Austronesian:

http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/word.php?v=198

At the same time this list proves me wrong about "dua" in the Formosan languages.

[Shi Tong]

Daan, thanks for that, a very detailed explaintion of what I'd made a bad guess at!

So, does anyone know about the "power" of the Middle Chinese 1-10 and why it supplanted the Austronesian ones?

[Ah-Bin]

So, does anyone know about the "power" of the Middle Chinese 1-10 and why it supplanted the Austronesian ones?

The Austronesian family includes Formosan languages, Cham, Indonesian, Tagalog, Malay, Maori, Samoan, Hawaiian, Malagasy, etc. It doesn't include Thai or Lao.

It partially replaced native Korean and Japanese counting systems too. I would say trade and the position of Chinese as the language of culture and education were the main contributing factors.

[Shi Tong]

It partially replaced native Korean and Japanese counting systems too. I would say trade and the position of Chinese as the language of culture and education were the main contributing factors.

I agree with you Ah-Bin, fujianhua's numbers 1-10 sound very similar to the Japanese of today, and they resemble Mandarin numbers too closely to have originally been Japanese IMO (they are all single sylables like Mandarin numbers and they have very similar sounds for certain numbers).

The idea that trade had an influence sounds like a very good reason as to why these numbers became so well known- if you're buying 10 of something, you'll want to say the same thing as the person you're buying from to get the right number, for example, so this argument for me sounds pretty reasonable.

[chrix]

For 1-10, Japanese has two sets of numerals, a native set and a Sino-Japanese one...

[Shi Tong]

oooh.. that's really interesting Chrix, I had no idea.. Do they differ greatly in pronunciation etc? Does one set use single syllables (the Sino- Japanese version) and the other use more than that?

Where does the original Japanese one "come" from?

[Hofmann]

See Japanese numerals. Japanese counts morae instead of syllables. They seem to be more aware of the entering tones in numbers, so I usually hear them as single syllables, e.g. 一 is romanized "ichi" and I hear [itɕ].

As to where Japanese vocabulary comes from, I don't know. However, I'm sure 零 (zero) is from Arabic.

Edited April 20, 2010 at 07:39 PM by Hofmann