Historical linguistics and Chinese writing

[Guest Garzevro]

Hello. As you know, an important tool for the Historical linguistics is the writing (because there was no cassette-recorders in the past). When historical linguists study languages without writings (like quechua or aimara) do it using other tools like toponomy, dialectology, oral litterature, etc. My question is: is Chinese writing (Hanzi) important to study its history of language? I´ve read that someone here said that "Chinese language has changed over the past 5000 years, while the writing remain pretty much the same." Do historical linguist of Chinese have to use the same procedure that they use when they study the languages without writing?

Best regards,

Roberto Garcia

a19988104@pucp.edu.pe

[Guest Anonymous]

I'm no linguist but you're right that the spoken Chinese probably changed a lot more than written Chinese.

It's a popular theory among linguists that Mandarin, the official Chinese language today, is relatively young comparing to southern dialects.

Some claim that southern dialects are the "original" spoken Chinese, or at least the closest to it for two main reasons (that I know of):

1.) Southern China's geographic situation is mountanous and therefore more isolating than the north where it's mostly plains and allows easier and more influence from foreign nations and cultures.

2.) Many Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese loan-words from Chinese sound closer to southern dialects, namely Cantonese, than Mandarin.

Those who are not familiar with the Chinese writing system believe all Hanzi characters are ideographs. This is not true however for many characters have phonetic elements in it which may assist linguists in guessing how ancient Chinese was spoken.

[smithsgj]

Before the last century, Chinese was written in wenyanwen (classical Chinese style). It was only from the May 4th movement onwards (1911? can't remember) that people started to write at all like modern Chinese (Mandarin, really) was spoken.

A major feature of wenyanwen is that it uses a lot of one-syllable words, whereas much of modern spoken Chinese consists of two-syllable words. This leads to ambiguity, and downright incomprehensibility, when wen yan wen is read out.

But this was not always so. In earlier times, spoken Chinese forms had more distinct syllable sounds than the 400 or so available to Mandarin today. There were a lot of consonant final syllables, for example -- these scarcely exist in Mandarin.

Chinese languages are tone languages. Whereas today's Mandarin attests only four tones (or five, sort of), older language forms had more.

Both these features would have made a form with lots of monosyllabic words more comprehensible -- because of the reduced ambiguity. Wen yan wen probably does reflect the spoken language of some period.

As Kulong says, that form - whatever it was - probably corresponded more closely to today's southern regionalects (Cantonese etc) than to Mandarin. We know this because of the greater variety of tone and syllable possibilities in these regionalects

[Guest Anonymous]

As Kulong says, that form - whatever it was - probably corresponded more closely to today's southern regionalects (Cantonese etc) than to Mandarin. We know this because of the greater variety of tone and syllable possibilities in these regionalects

Don't forget that southern regionalects contain more "older" vocabularies that can be seen in ancient writings.

[smithsgj]

Yes, and I think grammatical patterns too.

[Guest Anonymous]

Yes, and I think grammatical patterns too.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't claim to be an expert in southern Chinese regionalects because... well, I'm not :-) But I have tried to pick up some Cantonese every now and then. To my surprise, it was pretty much just substituting Mandarin pronounciation with Cantonese ones except when Cantonese uses a different and generally "older" word. I haven't run into any instances where the grammar actually differs... yet.

[smithsgj]

well maybe ummm.....

yeah: ta bi wo kuai (he's faster than me)

vs ta kuai-guo wo (well, the cantonese equiv anyway). Is that a bit wenyanwen like?

[Guest Anonymous]

well maybe ummm.....

yeah: ta bi wo kuai (he's faster than me)

vs ta kuai-guo wo (well' date=' the cantonese equiv anyway). Is that a bit wenyanwen like?[/quote']

To me, "他快過我 (tai kuai-guo wo)" still makes sense in modern Mandarin. I don't believe that's a true difference in grammar such as between English and Spanish for example:

English: I like beautiful girls

Spanish: Me gusto las muchachas bonitas

The "I" in Spanish changed from "yo" to "me" and the verb also changed inorder to reflect the pronoun and the adjetive came after the noun and also a "el/los la/las" is needed infront of nouns in Spanish at all times.

I don't believe the "difference" in grammar between Mandarin and Cantonese is anything like this.

[pazu]

Before the last century' date=' Chinese was written in wenyanwen (classical Chinese style). It was only from the May 4th movement onwards (1911? can't remember) that people started to write at all like modern Chinese (Mandarin, really) was spoken.

[/quote']

Smith, some of the Chinese classics were written in Baihuawen also, e.g. Dreams of Red Chamber (紅樓夢), was written in Baihuawen though the type may be a little bit different from the one we have nowadays.

Anyway, the author Cao Xueqing probably spoke Mandarin himself too.

There's another evidence to show that the southern dialect is an older form of Chinese (I should use only Cantonese as example cuz this is my mother tongue), so technically if you recite Tang Poems (written in the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 ACE)) in Cantonese, the musical rhythm is more dynamic than those recited in Mandarin.

Just use a very well-known poem as an example:

《相思》——王維

紅豆生南國, 春來發幾枝。

願君多採擷, 此物最相思。

With pinyin, they are:

紅(hóng)豆(dòu)生(shēng)南(nán)國(guó),

春(chūn)來(lái)發(fā)幾(ji3)枝(zhī)。

願(yuàn)君(jūn)多(duō)採(cai3)擷(xié),

此(ci3)物(wù)最(zuì)相(xiāng)思(sī)。

The framework of this poem should supposedly be: (i.e. 五言絕句)

(仄)仄平平仄, 平平仄仄平

(平)平平仄仄, (仄)仄仄平平

(Generally speaking, in Mandarin 平 are the first and second tones, 仄 are the 3rd and 4th tones. (平) and (仄) mean that you can use either 平 or 仄. )

As you can see, the "發" (fa1) in the second sentence doesn't match the framework, fa1 is the 平聲, while according to the framework the third character of the second sentence can only be 仄聲。

So assuming Wang Wei (王維) didn't make any mistake, you can safely assume that "發" was once 仄聲 in old Chinese although it was somehow transformed to 平聲 in Mandarin.

In Cantonese, 發 is faat9 (it's ninth tone, so it's classified as 仄聲).

While this may be too complex or technical, and I learnt this kind of classification painfully during high school (this wasn't in the syllabus, and I thank my teacher very much for teaching us this), it does show that Cantonese is a form of older Chinese than Mandarin.

When I was in mainland China, I bought a Tang poems book (with pinyin), just to learn to recite poems in Mandarin (as a way to improve my spoken Mandarin Chinese). But then a Dongbei guy told me with a sarcastic tone that if I wanted to feel the spirit of Tang poems, I should have first improved my Mandarin. Then I told him it was actually he who should learn one of the southern dialects to feel the rhythms of the poems...

[smithsgj]

> Me gusto las muchachas bonitas

Kulong you mentioned that the verb changed, but forgot to change it in you example. It should be 'gustan', right? "Pretty girls please me".

I'm not quite sure whether "pretty girls please me" in English is more or less acceptable/normal than "ta kuai-guo wo" in Mandarin. I've just asked a native speaker, and they reckon

Na liang che kaide he kuai

Dui, ta kuai-guo women

would provide an acceptable context. But I have no real sense of why.

That doesn't detract from your point that the grammars of English and Spanish are at far greater variance than those of Cantonese and Mandarin, with which I agree entirely.

> So assuming Wang Wei (王維) didn't make any mistake...

It would have been a *mistake* then. The framework is that rigid?

> a Dongbei guy told me with a sarcastic tone

That's funny! Whether the poems were more like Cantonese or not, they were certainly nothing like today's Mandarin.

Do you think learning Tang Shi is good for language practice? I would have thought the reading style is so specific to the task, and so unlike any other form of speech, that you would end up speaking in a strange slow pedantic way. My 4-year-old can recite "Chuang qian ming yue guang" but I'm sure he hasn't got a clue what it means: now wtf is the point of that?

[pazu]

>> So assuming Wang Wei (王維) didn't make any mistake...

> It would have been a *mistake* then. The framework is that rigid?

Smith, the framework isn't that rigid, as you can see,

A.

(仄)仄平平仄, 平平仄仄平

(平)平平仄仄, (仄)仄仄平平

Brackets imply that you can either use "平" or "仄", so there're some variations in different poems, but not for the second sentence. And in some sense, you can say, yes, the framework can be rigid like this that you can't change the second sentence. But it doesn't mean that Tang Poems can have this framework for 五言絕詩 (Wu Yan Jue Shi) only, some other frameworks include:

(just flipped the basic one vertically...)

B.

(平)平平仄仄, (仄)仄仄平平

(仄)仄平平仄, 平平仄仄平

And there're still some other variations, e.g.

(just change the first sentence of the basic framework)

C.

(仄)仄仄平平, 平平仄仄平

(平)平平仄仄, (仄)仄仄平平

I think there're still some other variations but it's too clumsy to list them all here. However, definitely the basic one (Type A) can only be like that, i.e. no other changes are allowed for the second sentence (平平仄仄平). I don't know who made this rule, but this was at least what the Tang people thought about the best structure of poems. Not many poets dared to change this framework, one prominent figure was, however, Li Bai (李白), the Shi Xian (詩仙, wizard of poems). He was famous for not following the rules of poems, just use the word as he liked, but first, he was 詩仙, and second, he was Li Bai, a drunk, a great philosopher, a great poet, a sucker, a what,,, as you can think of. It would be strange if he would follow all the rules laid down by other people.

But that wouldn't be Wang Wei.

>> a Dongbei guy told me with a sarcastic tone

> That's funny! Whether the poems were more like Cantonese or not, they were certainly nothing like today's Mandarin.

It's not that rare to see a guy like this, I've seen (and so many) mainland Chinese who thought Chinese means Mandarin CHinese and Mandarin Chinese is the only form of Chinese with "dignity".

> Do you think learning Tang Shi is good for language practice?

I can speak Mandarin very well, though with some Cantonese accent, but my topic is usually strictly related to daily life, political, or of entertainment etc. Whenever I wanted to recite some poems in Mandarin, I have to first translate them from Cantonese to Chinese characters, and think about the words in Mandarin... it's quite a hard job. And I have no ideas of how some old characters pronounce. e.g. 奔流到海不復回, the word "復" is pronounced as "fou" in Cantonese (instead of the modern "fuk" in Cantonese). Some other characters which I have no ideas of how to pronounce in Mandarin, usually some very old characters like 蒹葭蒼蒼, I would deduce that the pronunciation of "蒹葭" should be similar to "兼家" (as in Cantonese) instead of "兼假", but you may never know it unless you check them up from the dictionary. It's always good to have a book with all the pinyin written, it's always a hassle to check up the dictionary.

So what's the point of reciting some poems in Mandarin? Haha, just to SHOW OFF~`. You know I was always very much annoyed by people who thought I couldn't speak perfect Mandarin so it also meant that my Chinese was bad. They forgot most of the comtemporary great writers couldn't speak good Mandarin too, including (what they thought were great) Mao Zedong.

The only way to ensure them you can speak good "Chinese" (only Mandarin Chinese) is to recite some old poems in front of them. When I was in Lhasa I met a Beijing lady who tried to "challenge" me in front of a Korean student of Chinese language (oh why did she want to challenge me of my Chinese level?), she asked me some poems and asked if I knew the next sentence or not, of course I knew, then I asked her some other poems (from the Dreams of Red Chamber), she knew nothing and just said, "oh, wo cai bu kan zhe zhong shu!" (我才不看這種書!)

So she lost face.

While this may seem very childish (me and her), this is a way to prove that Hong Kong guy can know Chinese well... TOO! Haha.

[skylee]

You know I was always very much annoyed by people who thought I couldn't speak perfect Mandarin so it also meant that my Chinese was bad.

This idea is very strange indeed. A person not speaking in perfect Mandarin is not necessarily a person who has poor knowledge in Chinese. I think the high school syllabus of HK covers enough classical materials to allow students to learn Chinese well (that is if they study at all). When I was in high school (and it was a Chinese high school), our Chinese teachers made us learn Tang/Song poems which were not in the syllabus (I am very thankful for this). We raced to read through the four great classical novels (not to mention all the novels written by Jin Yong), we had to hand in calligraphy homework every week, and our Chinese dictation was done in ink brush till Form 3. I think anyone who has received such education, even if he does not speak perfect Mandarin, would not agree that his Chinese is bad.

[Guest Anonymous]

> Me gusto las muchachas bonitas

Kulong you mentioned that the verb changed' date=' but forgot to change it in you example. It should be 'gustan', right? "Pretty girls please me".[/quote']

Huh? I believe gustar is Spanish for like as in "I like cars." I only took two years of Spanish during high school but I'd like to think I haven't forgotten it all :-)

I've just asked a native speaker, and they reckon

Na liang che kaide he kuai

Dui, ta kuai-guo women

would provide an acceptable context. But I have no real sense of why.

That doesn't detract from your point that the grammars of English and Spanish are at far greater variance than those of Cantonese and Mandarin, with which I agree entirely.

My point was that under what circumstances would the grammar be "different"? We know that grammar is considered "different" between two different languages such as English and Spanish. But under each language, there are variations of the grammar used either in different regions of a large nation or by a certain sub-culture. Just a random example, many youth in the U.S. say "where you at?" instead of the proper way of "where are you?" Does that mean the grammar is "different"? I personally don't believe so. "where you at" is just as understandable as "where are you" to a English speaker just as "ta bi wo kuai" is just as understandable as "ta kuai-guo wo" to a Mandarin speaker.

Do you think learning Tang Shi is good for language practice? I would have thought the reading style is so specific to the task, and so unlike any other form of speech, that you would end up speaking in a strange slow pedantic way. My 4-year-old can recite "Chuang qian ming yue guang" but I'm sure he hasn't got a clue what it means: now wtf is the point of that?

Learning any aspect of a language, be it modern literature, classic poems, or even TV and films, would all be good methods of practice. However, some are more efficient than others.

it's great that your 4-year old can recite 李白's poem but if he doesn't understand what it means then there is really no point. It's one thing to memorize and be able to recite a poem, it's another to understand the context and be able to learn from it.

[Guest Anonymous]

It's not that rare to see a guy like this, I've seen (and so many) mainland Chinese who thought Chinese means Mandarin CHinese and Mandarin Chinese is the only form of Chinese with "dignity".

Well, it's arguable that Chinese, as in 中文, does mean Mandarin Chinese as in 普通話/華語/國語/漢語 because it does represent the official spoken Chinese. However, to claim that Mandarin is the only form of Chinese with dignity would be arrogant and false, just as many Americans I've encountered who believe the whole world should speak English. I'm sorry that you've run into many people like that.

As for poems rhyming better in Cantonese...

Although having the 平/仄 was sort of an unspoken rule, do you honestly believe that *ALL* poets would follow that rule in *ALL* their poems? Besides using 平/仄, poets also had to make sure the poems "rhyme" at the end of each sentences. Not to mention that each sentence must have the same number of characters. It'd be very challenging to write a good poem that way. Sometimes maybe the poet must turn a blind eye and make a mistake or two in order to complete the poem instead of starting over.

Although I'm not arguing that Cantonese isn't close the ancient spoken Chinese, but I don't believe using the 平／仄 as an evidence is relevant and convincing enough.

You know I was always very much annoyed by people who thought I couldn't speak perfect Mandarin so it also meant that my Chinese was bad.

Just pretend that they don't know any better, and in some cases, they really don't. Like I mentioned earlier, some of the same Americans I've encountered who believe the whole world should speak English also believe that if someone has an accent in speaking English, he or she must have limited vocabulary and would not be familiar with English literature, which is just untrue. The world is filled with people like this. We just have to learn to live with them.

[Guest Garzevro]

> Me gusto las muchachas bonitas

Kulong you mentioned that the verb changed' date=' but forgot to change it in you example. It should be 'gustan', right? "Pretty girls please me".[/quote']

Huh? I believe gustar is Spanish for like as in "I like cars." I only took two years of Spanish during high school but I'd like to think I haven't forgotten it all :-)

I'm a native Spanish speaker (and student of Linguistics), and I think that Smithsgj is right when he said that "gustar" is more close to "please" in a syntactical way. "Me gustan las muchachas bonitas" is in a literal way "Pretty girls please me." (In Spanish, you can change the order and say "Las muchachas bonitas me gustan"). In both cases, the subject of the sentences is "Las muchachas bonitas" (in the Spanish sentence) and "Pretty girls" (in the English sentence). "Me" in the Spanish sentence and "me" in the English sentence are both the objects of the sentences.

But, I think that in English, the sentence "Pretty girls please me" is not very common and people prefer to say "I like pretty girls", where the subject is "I" and the object is "pretty girls". In Spanish, on the other hand, we can say something syntactically similar to "I like pretty girls" when we say "Yo gusto de las muchachas bonitas", where the subject is "Yo" and the object is "de las muchachas bonitas", but this sentence is very rethorical and almost nobody say it.

That's why it's more often to translate "Me gustan las muchachas bonitas" as "I like pretty girls".

Well, and Chinese? This is what I want to know: does Mandarin make any difference between "I like pretty girls" and "Pretty girls please me? Does Cantonese?

Best,

Roberto García

a19988104@pucp.edu.pe

[Guest Anonymous]

I'm a native Spanish speaker (and student of Linguistics), and I think that Smithsgj is right when he said that "gustar" is more close to "please" in a syntactical way. "Me gustan las muchachas bonitas" is in a literal way "Pretty girls please me." (In Spanish, you can change the order and say "Las muchachas bonitas me gustan"). In both cases, the subject of the sentences is "Las muchachas bonitas" (in the Spanish sentence) and "Pretty girls" (in the English sentence). "Me" in the Spanish sentence and "me" in the English sentence are both the objects of the sentences.

Thanks for the correction Garzevro. I went back to checked with my Spanish textbook and it said that gustar means "to like" and the example was do you like to read and we're supposed to answer it with gustar.

That's why it's more often to translate "Me gustan las muchachas bonitas" as "I like pretty girls".

I don't understand, other than the fact that I used the wrong verb tense of gustar, how is gustar in "me gustan las muchachas bonitas" used for "to like" while the other tense is "to please"? Anyway, this is getting off topic and doesn't have anything to do with my point.

My point was that the grammar between English and Spanish are obviously and distinctly different while the difference in grammar between Mandarin and Cantonese are far less severe and are more similiar to the "variations" of a specific language's grammar like the example I gave above with "where you at" and "where are you".

Well, and Chinese? This is what I want to know: does Mandarin make any difference between "I like pretty girls" and "Pretty girls please me?

to like is 喜歡 xihuan and I'm pretty sure it's used the same way "to like" is used in English as in I like cars, I like girls, I like to read. Except in the case of when in English, you say "I would like to leave." but then again, the word "like" changes meaning in this sense.

[Tsunku]

I think in Chinese, pretty girls please me (me gustan las muchachas bonitas) would be like saying 美女让我觉得....(whatever your adjective of choice is). The subject is the pretty girls(美女), they are acting on you, making you feel pleased. In Chinese you could also say 我喜欢美女, where the subject is (我)I, like Kulong said. There's a distinction, as Chinese has "to like," and a way of expressing the idea "pretty girls please me," (but in a grammatically different way than Spanish does, right? Or does 让 in the above sentence serve the same purpose as the Spanish reflexive? My spanish is also rusty).

[pazu]

> do you honestly believe that *ALL* poets would follow that rule in *ALL* their poems?

Kulong, this is usually not an easy question to answer, you have to check up all poems to have a convincing answers. But just from my impression, yes, it seems that most of them are. It was said that there were more tones in ancient Chinese and I wonder if it would be easier for the poets in the Tang Dynasty to figure out which was which.

And another reason why Cantonese (or some other southern dialects) is more suitable to recite Tang poems, because Cantonese has 9 tones while Mandarin has only 4. And I think it's obvious that Cantonese is more musically dynamic than Mandarin. I still remember I was very much surprised when I learnt Mandarin at school, my teacher tried to recite some poems in Mandarin, which seemed to me extremely "flat", although she was from Beijing and a natvie speaker (and a qualified teacher) of Mandarin.

[holyman]

do you honestly believe that *ALL* poets would follow that rule in *ALL* their poems?[

most poets do except for odd ones like li'bai, who sometimes goes beyond the rules. those who are famous for rigid styles(like maybe du'fu) will probably stick to the rules. the four tones in tang poems was the 'in thing' during tang dynasty, flourished with the huge amount of buddhist scriptures translation that took place at that time, so i think no decent poet would miss that.

there are a lot of such examples as pazu mentioned, maybe we can look aat some more:

黄河远上白云间，the last word is 'gann1' instead of 'jian1'.

一片孤城万仞山。

渭城朝雨浥轻尘，

客舍青青柳色新，

劝君更进一杯酒，

西出阳关无故人。

the second poem is again from wangwei and it should be something close to chaozhou or minnan. in 'jueju'(4 lines poems) the last word of the 1st, 2nd and 4th usually rhymes althou the rules says only 2nd and 4th are required. so it should be 'tin(ding)2', 'sinn1' and 'jinn2'(instead of 'ren') respectively.

[Guest Anonymous]

Hmm... I don't know. I definitely won't argue that Cantonese and other southern regionalects are older than Mandarin. However, maybe spoken classical Chinese might have been similiar to modern southern regionalects, but to say Cantonese is what it sounded like might be a stretch.