Hokkien words in Thai

[niuc]

This is a known phenomenon in linguistics called "Sprachbund" (not that I need to tell Ah-bin this). The Wikipedia article describes it better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund. It even mentions Thai in this context.

Thank you, Sim, for the info

I wrote a whole long reply to this, but the system logged me out and now I'm too tired....sorry.

Ah-bin, thank you for your effort. It's a pity to miss your original comments , which must have many valuable insights. I also experienced being logged out, so now everytime I always back up what I write before hitting preview/submit.

Basically I think what it boils down to is that Tai and Sinitic-speaking peoples mixed and lived with each other for so long and so closely that they picked up many features of each others' speech. There are Tai words in Hokkien and Cantonese, and Sinitc words in Tai languages, and then there are some words in all of them for which no-one can determine the direction of borrowing.

This sounds logical to me.

Oh, and I think "elephant" was supposed to be borrowed from Tai into Sinitic, which makes sense when you think that elephants were more common in the south where the tai-speakers lived.

I have doubts about this, because 象 is a pictogram (象形字). Elephants might be quite common in lots of places including Central & Northern China thousands of years ago, but I am not sure. However, Tai (part of 百越?) did live at places much northern from their current ones, at least around (south of?) 長江, right? And to slightly complicate the matter, Yue Kingdom 越國 seemed to use 漢字 also, at least found in its king 勾踐 Goujian's sword. I think Goujian was 百越人 rather than what we would call 漢人, but I am not sure. If he was, does it mean there was a possibility that non-Sinitic languages such as Tai-Kadai might use 漢字 (or their own native version of "ideograms")? And possibility of non-Han ideograms becoming part of 漢字?

[Ah-bin]

Elephants might be quite common in lots of places including Central & Northern China thousands of years ago

They certainly were, but then , what is now central China was actually the far south for the people who began writing with 字. These 字 were used by all sorts of people, the more pictographs that were used, the easier it was for people who spoke different languages to use them. Also, just because a king chose to have a sword inscribed with characters, doesn't mean that the people he ruled could speak the court language, much less read it. Also there is the possibilty that they were writing pictographs but saying something utterly different when they read them out just like 6 (lak, liu, six, ono, etc etc....) or like 肉 read as bah in Hokkien, where the pronunciation has no relationship to what is used in other places (rou, yuk etc,).

For some odd reason 為 also has an elephant in its earliest forms too, which proves your point that they were found far to the north of where they are now. I remember that I'd read somewhere in some linguistic work that elephant was meant to be a Tai borrowing, but I forget where.

越 as a name for people began in the Shanghai area, and wasn't extended down to people along the coast and in the far south until Han times. It didn't really have any specific attachment to any linguistic groups as far as I can tell. Chinese scholars have usually insisted that Yueh=Tai, but there are reasons for that. I think you can find a nice study and criticism of the idea of Yueh people in Heather Peters' "Tattooed faces and Stilt Houses, who were the ancient Yue?" which is available online here:

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp017_yue.pdf

I have rambled a bit and probably not really addressed what you've written properly, but I hope it's interesting anyway.

[xng]

Chinese scholars have usually insisted that Yueh=Tai, but there are reasons for that.

I do agree with the chinese scholars because if you look at the minority natives in southern and central china today, Bai Yue people are from the Tai-kadai and Miau-Yau language family.

Mon-khmer people lived further south of any chinese conquest ie. today's myanmar, thailand, cambodia, malaysia.

Myanmar natives has been displaced by sino-tibetan people
Thailand/Laos natives has been displaced by Tai-kadai people.
Only Cambodia still retains its khmer natives.
Malaysia natives has been displaced by austronesian people.

Vietnam is too complex to argue....whether they are tai or khmer people

[Ah-bin]

Mon-khmer people lived further south of any chinese conquest ie. today's myanmar, thailand, cambodia, malaysia.

Austroasiatic (the family to which Mon-Khmer is subordinate) includes Vietnamese, Wa (spoken in Yunnan) Khmu (also in Yunnan) and Lai (spoken in Guangxi). The Han dynasty conquered all the way down to modern Da Nang.

The reasons I was talking about weren't those based on careful research and evidence-based conclusions, but rather on orthodox Communist theories of what constitutes an ethnic group. Heather Peters spells it out very well in her paper, I think.

Another reason she doesn't emphasise is that Chinese still have a naive belief that just because a name is used in an old book it refers to an ethnic group. Ancient Chinese didn't care about distinctions between barbarians, only the distinction between themselves and barbarians. They used to lump all different sorts of people together in groups, and they still do to e certain extent.

Yueh probably meant simply "foreigner who lives to the south" and nothing much more than that.

[aokh1979]

Ancient Chinese didn't care about distinctions between barbarians, only the distinction between themselves and barbarians. They used to lump all different sorts of people together in groups, and they still do to e certain extent.

They still do. All 原住民 in Taiwan are called 高山族 in the 56 ethnic groups...... T_T

[SimL]

They still do. All 原住民 in Taiwan are called 高山族 in the 56 ethnic groups...... T_T

This may be the case in popular speech, as (in a free country) it usually takes 10-20 years for the general population to catch up with where the more progressive members of society are already at (and would like the rest of the country to be).

But, what impresses me so much about Taiwan is that in the intellectual arena, there is a lot of freedom to think, research, and publish whatever you want. The only restriction is the quality of your work, not the political line which you have to obey. That's not to say that academia is free of politics, of course. It's a human activity, like any other, and any individual academic will be influenced by his/her own political inclinations. That's also not to say that the government might not try to influence research, for example by giving more funding to some projects than others (again, normal for any government). But what I see in my attendence of EATS conferences is that there is a lot of grass-roots encouragement, valueing, and studying of aboriginal culture. All done from a pure scientific/academic point of view.

At the 2010 conference, 3 papers were presented relating to aboriginal issues: "The Trope of the Formosan Headhunter: “Savage” Violence in Taiwanese History", "Who are the ancestors and where are the ancestral lands? - A case study of the construction of discourses relating to ‘ancestral land’ in contemporary Truku land movements", and "Interactions between Dutchmen and Aborigines on Paper: Brievenboek, Kerkboek van Formosa". From memory, every single EATS conference I've been to has had 1-2 papers on aborinal-related topics. I think it was the 2007 conference where one paper was given which disagreed with one of the the government definitions of an ethnic minority. There would be absolutely no restrictions on the publication of such a paper in Taiwan itself.

That's not to deny what you say, aokh1979: the Han can be very ethno-centric. But that's true of any dominant culture, to a greater or lesser extent.

[Ah-bin]

They still do. All 原住民 in Taiwan are called 高山族 in the 56 ethnic groups...... T_T

I would have phrased it like this to avoid ambiguity:

In the PRC all 原住民 in Taiwan are called 高山族 in the 56 ethnic groups......

They haven't been called 高山族 in Taiwan since the 1950's. In fact, I;d never heard the term until I went to Amoy in 2006. You can't actually criticise the official classifications in the PRC in public without being acused of "destroying ethnic unity". So most publications about Formosan Aboriginals in the PRC (including Baidu entries) actually lie about what they are called in Taiwan as well! I quote:

台湾当局称之“山地同胞”，简称“山胞”；又称“原住民”、“山地人”。

"The Taiwan authorities call them "shandi tongbao" or "shanbao" for short. They are also called Yuanzhimin or "shandiren"

In fact, they haven't been called "shandi tongbao" for about twenty years either. The bit about the "yuanzhumin" was added in the last few years, it wasn't there when I last looked.

This may be the case in popular speech, as (in a free country) it usually takes 10-20 years for the general population to catch up with where the more progressive members of society are already at (and would like the rest of the country to be).

It's not actually an issue of popular speech, vs. intellectuals it's more about the difference between what officially exists and what actually exists. Some intellectuals in the PRC know the "Gaoshanzu" is a fiction, but only the party has the authority to decide and define ethnicity in the PRC - and even though they haven't got their hands on the ROC yet, they at least have to pretend they have the authority to do it there too.

[xng]

Austroasiatic (the family to which Mon-Khmer is subordinate) includes Vietnamese, Wa (spoken in Yunnan) Khmu (also in Yunnan) and Lai (spoken in Guangxi). The Han dynasty conquered all the way down to modern Da Nang.

If you look at the map here. Austroasiatic lies outside China proper. So Bai Yue in ancient times mostly refer to the Tai Kadai and Miau Yau group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Se_asia_lang_map.png

As I said, I believe that North vietnam which was part of China was originally Tai Kadai people, but how they became 'Mon-khmer with tones' speaking people is controversial. It could be because they conquered South Vietnam and got influenced by them which used to belong to Cambodian/Khmer people.

The facial features of pure North vietnamese and pure south vietnamese are considerably different. North vietnamese usually are fair skin, oval shape eyes, which is similar to the Tai people while south vietnamese are darker skin, rounder eyes similar to the Khmer people. We should exclude migration of northerners to south vietnam and intermarriages.

[xng]

I just found another one which seems to be close to cantonese.

Suk 熟 - for cooked.

[niuc]

Also, just because a king chose to have a sword inscribed with characters, doesn't mean that the people he ruled could speak the court language, much less read it.

Agree.

Also there is the possibilty that they were writing pictographs but saying something utterly different when they read them out just like 6 (lak, liu, six, ono, etc etc....) or like 肉 read as bah in Hokkien, where the pronunciation has no relationship to what is used in other places (rou, yuk etc,).

Good example. Btw if not mistaken, there is no 'bah' in "core" Cuanciu, may be Hohomi can verify.

For some odd reason 為 also has an elephant in its earliest forms too

This is interesting. Do you still remember the source? Zhongwen.com says it was pictograph of a female monkey! I never knew it either!

越 as a name for people began in the Shanghai area, and wasn't extended down to people along the coast and in the far south until Han times. It didn't really have any specific attachment to any linguistic groups as far as I can tell.

I guess so. The term 百越 itself signifies there were a lot of different tribes.

I think you can find a nice study and criticism of the idea of Yueh people in Heather Peters' "Tattooed faces and Stilt Houses, who were the ancient Yue?" which is available online here:
http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp017_yue.pdf

Thanks!

In the PRC all 原住民 in Taiwan are called 高山族 in the 56 ethnic groups...... They haven't been called 高山族 in Taiwan since the 1950's.

I used to be puzzled why there were no Taiwanese 原住民 tribes when I heard about 56 ethic groups in PRC tv programs. If PRC claims Taiwan as part of PRC, it should better include those tribes for consistency. Btw I am not particularly pro or against unification (if unification better not under CCP), just talking about consistency here. I didn't know they were lumped into one 高山族, which obviously makes no sense since there are so many different tribes. And among those tribes in mainland, there are still efforts by some minorities to have their tribes recognized, instead of classified into other tribes. Surely the 56 number is fictional.