What do you feel about this excerp?
Hansel and Gretel... Were they Taiwanese?! The Origins of Taiwanese Language-
Chau Wu will discuss three aspects of Taiwanese culture that are different from Chinese. (1) Taiwanese language, commonly known as Holo, shares 70% of its vocabulary with Chinese. The remaining 30% pertains to core words for family life. Surprisingly, these words find corresponding words in Old Norse. About 80 rules of sound correspondence have been found so far between Taiwanese and Old Norse, which argue strongly for a linguistic kinship between the two languages. (2) In Taiwan there are place-names that sound strikingly similar to those in Scandinavia. (3) There are certain Taiwanese customs that are not observed by Chinese people. Incredibly they are similar to some ancient Germanic customs described in Tacitus' Germania. Furthermore, the most popular Taiwanese children's story, Hó?-ko? pô, closely resembles Hansel and Gretel. Thus evidence from various aspects of cultural life suggests that Taiwanese culure may have originated in northern Europe and been brough to Asia by ancestors of the Holo.
The Origins of Taiwanese
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Aurelio
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
Dear Nobuho:
The hypothesis sounds a bit farfetched but let's look at the evidence:
I'll limit the hypothesis down to
(1) there is a non-Han substrate of Hokkien (Holo, Taiwanese) Chinese (as opposed to non-Han loan words in Hokkien)
(2) this substrate is related to Old Norse, i.e. part of the Indo-European tree of languages, more precisely the Germanic branch.
The first part (1) seems possible, as there are some everyday words I've never heard a good Han explanation for, like e.g. cabo (girl). These words seem to be very few, however. That 30% of all vocabulary be non-Han in origin sounds way off to me (with my very limited knowledge of Hokkien).
Let's assume that no composite words but only single characters were counted: If I start at 4000 common characters (and a few words there are no standard characters for) this would mean that there are > 1300 words that could not be explained by regular sound change from other Chinese fangyan. I doubt that anybody will be able to show me more than 100 such words.
Now, for part (2) we need to look at the sound correspondence rules. To establish a rule, I would need at least three examples (and hopefully a few more) per rule. To establish 80 rules, I would need 240 examples (again, I doubt that anybody can produce that many non-Han Taiwanese words). Of these 240 examples none is allowed to be a Han-word (unless you assume that the other fangyan imported it as a loan word).
So it all depends on how many non-Han words the proponents of this theory can produce. If you can get a copy somewhere, please let me know
For an idea how tricky sound correspondences can get, have a look at this discussion on the "Hokkien word for one":
http://www.chinalanguage.com/forum/read ... #reply_484
Best regards,
Aurelio
The hypothesis sounds a bit farfetched but let's look at the evidence:
I'll limit the hypothesis down to
(1) there is a non-Han substrate of Hokkien (Holo, Taiwanese) Chinese (as opposed to non-Han loan words in Hokkien)
(2) this substrate is related to Old Norse, i.e. part of the Indo-European tree of languages, more precisely the Germanic branch.
The first part (1) seems possible, as there are some everyday words I've never heard a good Han explanation for, like e.g. cabo (girl). These words seem to be very few, however. That 30% of all vocabulary be non-Han in origin sounds way off to me (with my very limited knowledge of Hokkien).
Let's assume that no composite words but only single characters were counted: If I start at 4000 common characters (and a few words there are no standard characters for) this would mean that there are > 1300 words that could not be explained by regular sound change from other Chinese fangyan. I doubt that anybody will be able to show me more than 100 such words.
Now, for part (2) we need to look at the sound correspondence rules. To establish a rule, I would need at least three examples (and hopefully a few more) per rule. To establish 80 rules, I would need 240 examples (again, I doubt that anybody can produce that many non-Han Taiwanese words). Of these 240 examples none is allowed to be a Han-word (unless you assume that the other fangyan imported it as a loan word).
So it all depends on how many non-Han words the proponents of this theory can produce. If you can get a copy somewhere, please let me know
For an idea how tricky sound correspondences can get, have a look at this discussion on the "Hokkien word for one":
http://www.chinalanguage.com/forum/read ... #reply_484
Best regards,
Aurelio
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Aurelio
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
Hi again:
Gotten curious I checked my 廈門方言詞典 which has 440 pages. I counted the words which did not have a character of their own (either no character or another character being used for the same sound) and found 50 of them on the first 50 pages. So if we extrapolate that to the whole number of pages we get almost two times more words not found in Mandarin than the minimum of 240 I wanted to have. Some of these words might still be Han (i.e., you might find them in Middle Chinese or in other fangyan), on the other hand my count does not include some words with rather dubious etymologies like 牛 gu, 肉 ba' or 一 cit (because they have an accepted character of their own).
I estimated the average number of characters per page as 10 (which gives us the 4000 total of common characters I guessed in my previous post). From this quick check it looks that at least 10% (though not 30%) of Hokkien cannot be linked to Mandarin and might (still to be checked!) not be linked to Middle Chinese (i.e. might not be originally Han).
Now, that does not mean that Hokkien must be of Norse origin or whatever, but it means that their might be enough material for a significant statistical comparison with another language family (though I'd rather look in the region first instead of thousands of miles away). Anyway, I find that rather exciting.
Best regards,
Aurelio
Gotten curious I checked my 廈門方言詞典 which has 440 pages. I counted the words which did not have a character of their own (either no character or another character being used for the same sound) and found 50 of them on the first 50 pages. So if we extrapolate that to the whole number of pages we get almost two times more words not found in Mandarin than the minimum of 240 I wanted to have. Some of these words might still be Han (i.e., you might find them in Middle Chinese or in other fangyan), on the other hand my count does not include some words with rather dubious etymologies like 牛 gu, 肉 ba' or 一 cit (because they have an accepted character of their own).
I estimated the average number of characters per page as 10 (which gives us the 4000 total of common characters I guessed in my previous post). From this quick check it looks that at least 10% (though not 30%) of Hokkien cannot be linked to Mandarin and might (still to be checked!) not be linked to Middle Chinese (i.e. might not be originally Han).
Now, that does not mean that Hokkien must be of Norse origin or whatever, but it means that their might be enough material for a significant statistical comparison with another language family (though I'd rather look in the region first instead of thousands of miles away). Anyway, I find that rather exciting.
Best regards,
Aurelio
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Aurelio
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
"two times more than" -> typo, should have been "almost twice as many"
Regards,
Aurelio
Regards,
Aurelio
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Sim Lee
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
Hi there Aurelio,
I enjoy your posts because they are well thought out and explained, and you come across as quite knowledgable.
This is slightly off-topic (well, quite a lot off-topic actually!), but I thought I'd point it out to you, in case you hadn't seen it before.
It claims (slightly?quite? plausibly) that a Hokkien word for spider is related to Polynesian.
http://www.hoklo.org/YuetCulture/Articles/?item=4#4
In my own spoken Hokkien I have the two words for "spider": "ti tu" and "la gia" (the latter of which is obviously the one their talking about in the article). I'm not at all sure if my usage is correct, but I would be tempted to use "ti tu" for any spider, and "la gia" for a largish, hairy one, with long legs - like a tarantula, or a bird-eating spider.
I was pretty excited when I first read this article. To me, efforts in seeking connections between the non-Han underlayer of Hokkien and any other language families are better spent in the direction of Polynesian, Mon-Khmer, or even Japanese, Ainu etc. I mean, surely just the geographical distances and logistics of arranging for some Old Norse tribe to move all across central europe, central asia, and east asia makes a connection very far fetched. Furthermore, even if such a connection ever existed, the chances of traces surviving in the respective descendent languages are quite remote (this ties in partly with your "statistical" approach).
A further "refutation" of the claim for a scandinavian link is that common scandinavian only arose in the first millenium anyway. [ My memory fails me here, but probably no earlier than 500 AD even - I may be wrong, it might have been as early as 0 AD, but certainly no earlier. ] That is to say, it started to differentiate itself from common germanic only in this period. Given this fact, if there were any connection between scandinavian and Hokkien, these would be equally as findable in gothic, english, german or dutch. If there were parallels between _only_ scandinavian and Hokkien, this would have to be a case of parallel evolution, further weakening the case of a link.
I haven't managed to word all this as clearly as it is in my head, but I hope it makes some sense.
Regards,
Sim.
I enjoy your posts because they are well thought out and explained, and you come across as quite knowledgable.
This is slightly off-topic (well, quite a lot off-topic actually!), but I thought I'd point it out to you, in case you hadn't seen it before.
It claims (slightly?quite? plausibly) that a Hokkien word for spider is related to Polynesian.
http://www.hoklo.org/YuetCulture/Articles/?item=4#4
In my own spoken Hokkien I have the two words for "spider": "ti tu" and "la gia" (the latter of which is obviously the one their talking about in the article). I'm not at all sure if my usage is correct, but I would be tempted to use "ti tu" for any spider, and "la gia" for a largish, hairy one, with long legs - like a tarantula, or a bird-eating spider.
I was pretty excited when I first read this article. To me, efforts in seeking connections between the non-Han underlayer of Hokkien and any other language families are better spent in the direction of Polynesian, Mon-Khmer, or even Japanese, Ainu etc. I mean, surely just the geographical distances and logistics of arranging for some Old Norse tribe to move all across central europe, central asia, and east asia makes a connection very far fetched. Furthermore, even if such a connection ever existed, the chances of traces surviving in the respective descendent languages are quite remote (this ties in partly with your "statistical" approach).
A further "refutation" of the claim for a scandinavian link is that common scandinavian only arose in the first millenium anyway. [ My memory fails me here, but probably no earlier than 500 AD even - I may be wrong, it might have been as early as 0 AD, but certainly no earlier. ] That is to say, it started to differentiate itself from common germanic only in this period. Given this fact, if there were any connection between scandinavian and Hokkien, these would be equally as findable in gothic, english, german or dutch. If there were parallels between _only_ scandinavian and Hokkien, this would have to be a case of parallel evolution, further weakening the case of a link.
I haven't managed to word all this as clearly as it is in my head, but I hope it makes some sense.
Regards,
Sim.
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Aurelio
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
Hi Sim Lee:
Thanks a lot for the encouraging words. I find the Chinese languages fascinating and I only wish I had more time to study them.
Your argument came across very clearly: A comparison should be made based on Indo-European or at least common Germanic phonetics unless one wants to assume a large migration of Nordmen after AD 0 that went completely unnoticed by world history. That's a very good point.
Thanks for the link to hoklo.org, too. They've added quite a bit to their website since the last time I'd been around. Under "YuetCulture" there is a rationalization for "cabo", too. Very interesting.
Yesterday I found a curious semi-parallel between German and Hokkien (no, this is not supposed to support the Norse-hypothesis ):
I checked how to write siu" (too much) in 漢字 (the real character and not 太). I found that it's a special use of the word (not the character) 傷 (to wound). Now, in German the standard word for "very" is "sehr" (pronounced [ze:a(r)]) which derives from the same word as English "sore". There is also a German verb "ver-sehren" which means "to wound". Looks like both languages decided to use terms related to "pain, wound" to describe the degree of an action (the Scottish do it too, BTW, it's spelled "sair", if I remember correctly).
Would you have any more resources on the origins of Hokkien?
Best regards,
Aurelio
Thanks a lot for the encouraging words. I find the Chinese languages fascinating and I only wish I had more time to study them.
Your argument came across very clearly: A comparison should be made based on Indo-European or at least common Germanic phonetics unless one wants to assume a large migration of Nordmen after AD 0 that went completely unnoticed by world history. That's a very good point.
Thanks for the link to hoklo.org, too. They've added quite a bit to their website since the last time I'd been around. Under "YuetCulture" there is a rationalization for "cabo", too. Very interesting.
Yesterday I found a curious semi-parallel between German and Hokkien (no, this is not supposed to support the Norse-hypothesis
):I checked how to write siu" (too much) in 漢字 (the real character and not 太). I found that it's a special use of the word (not the character) 傷 (to wound). Now, in German the standard word for "very" is "sehr" (pronounced [ze:a(r)]) which derives from the same word as English "sore". There is also a German verb "ver-sehren" which means "to wound". Looks like both languages decided to use terms related to "pain, wound" to describe the degree of an action (the Scottish do it too, BTW, it's spelled "sair", if I remember correctly).
Would you have any more resources on the origins of Hokkien?
Best regards,
Aurelio
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
Anyone has any real examples to support that hypothesis, like a sample of Old Norse and Taiwanese that correspond?
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Chau H. Wu
- Posts: 17
- Joined: Wed Jun 07, 2006 4:56 pm
Re: The Origins of Taiwanese
Hi A-hiong:
For a sample of correspondence between Old Norse and Taiwanese, please go to:
chhongbi.org/index2.html
or:
www.taiwantbts.org
When the Web page appears, click on SOAN TEK (Choose), and on the drop-down menu, click on Sep 2005 v.138.
A content page of the September issue of Tai-Bun Thong-Sin will appear. You will find an article entitled, "Sound Correspondence between Taiwanese and Old Norse/Latin/Greek". On page 3, there are diagrams showing a corresponding pattern and on page 4 a list of examples for that pattern.
Best regards,
Heruler
For a sample of correspondence between Old Norse and Taiwanese, please go to:
chhongbi.org/index2.html
or:
www.taiwantbts.org
When the Web page appears, click on SOAN TEK (Choose), and on the drop-down menu, click on Sep 2005 v.138.
A content page of the September issue of Tai-Bun Thong-Sin will appear. You will find an article entitled, "Sound Correspondence between Taiwanese and Old Norse/Latin/Greek". On page 3, there are diagrams showing a corresponding pattern and on page 4 a list of examples for that pattern.
Best regards,
Heruler
Heruler