Chinese languages

My English dictionary shows a tree of the divergence of Indo-European family of languages. According to it, the European languages all descended from a prehistoric language "Proto-Indo-European", possibly in the fifth millennium B.C. From what I have heard, all the current Chinese dialects also had a common ancestor.

My question is, if the above is true, how could whole continents of peoples all have agreed or come about to use a common language so long ago, when civilizations were less developed and travel was less prevalent?

Regards,
rathpy

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Hmm, it doesn't take much figure out that the population of the past is smaller than today. So the numbers of speakers of any language at that time is small too. In that light, I don't think you can say "whole continents of peoples". People would have been fairly scarce then compared to what it is today.

I believe that ProtoIndoEuropean (PIE) is a convenient label rather than any actual language. As there isn't any tangible evidence of this language being spoken, it is a concept in name. What of the languages which never were recorded but died a death in history?

I say this through thinking about what I've learnt about Chinese. Dialects of Chinese like Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, Shanghainese, Chaozhou, Fuzhou etc and their readings or pronunciation of characters are compared to the way the character rhymes have changed since a stage called Middle Chinese as recorded in the Middle Chinese rimebook Qieyun, and the differences seen are commented on. For example, where rimes have stayed in groups, have moved into other groups, and the initials have changed over time or where MC groups have merged or diverged in each language.

This assumes a stage in Chinese called Middle Chinese which is fixed because we have written documentary evidence in the form of the rimebook Qieyun and its later redactions. Can we say that Chinese was homogenous then? One thinks not. The reason being that even in the middle of the Han Dynasty, a book known as Fangyan (Dialects) was written which showed that the author was aware of differences in vocabulary and possibly pronunciation some two thousand years ago, predating Qieyun by five six hundred years. Since there isn't any homogeniety during the Sui-Tang Middle Chinese era, one could equally reason that if you go further back in history, to the Eastern Zhou 770-220BC there must also have been some variation in speech and pronunciation over the territory under Zhou influence. (If you look at the money at the time, you find four main types of coinage, blade money, spade money, disk and hole money, and a form known as ant-face money from Chu in the south. This suggest four regions of different languages immediately.) So if you take this further back, say to early Zhou immediately before Shang conquest, the language of Zhou conquerors may have been fairly homogenous amongst themselves, and limited in its own area of influence only.

We have inscriptions from the Shang dynasty and less well know are Zhou inscriptions contemporaneous with the last couple of Shang rulers. The inscriptions unfortunately doesn't tell us how exactly Shang and Zhou speakers sounded like, so we can't be sure if the two spoke the exact same version of the language, or if they were the same language altogether.

Moreover, from my reading into the subject of Shang inscriptions, Shang people mention the names of neighbouring peoples or tribes around them, sometimes mentioning human sacrifice of victims taking from surrounding them. They are thus considering themselves as separate socially in some ways from their neighbours. Whether this is due to language or customs is anyone's guess. From analysis into the inscriptions, folks over the past 100 or so years have figured out that elements of Chinese today are found in the language then, but others which we don't find. For instance word order, we find both Subject-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb-Object constructions amongst other possible forms.

I tried looking for books in Amazon on Shang inscriptions, but its as rare as hen's teeth. This summer, I was in HongKong, and manage to find a number of sources in the libraries and a couple in bookshops.

Dyl.

rathpy wrote:
> My English dictionary shows a tree of the divergence of
> Indo-European family of languages. According to it, the
> European languages all descended from a prehistoric language
> "Proto-Indo-European", possibly in the fifth millennium B.C.
> From what I have heard, all the current Chinese dialects also
> had a common ancestor.

There's a nice article in the back of the _American Heritage Dictionary_
(this isn't the one you're looking at, is it?) called "Indo-European and the
Indo-Europeans" (http://www.bartleby.com/61/8.html). The section
"Lexicon and Culture" (starting about halfway through) discusses what can
be concluded about where the Indo-Europeans came from originally, based
on what words are universal to the language family, e.g., they originally
lived in a place with snow and salmon, but not the sea--the sea would've
been encountered after they split up and spread out, and different words
come up to name it.


Thomas Chan

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Thomas Chan wrote:
> There's a nice article in the back of the _American Heritage Dictionary_
> (this isn't the one you're looking at, is it?) called "Indo-European and the
> Indo-Europeans" (http://www.bartleby.com/61/8.html). The section
> "Lexicon and Culture" (starting about halfway through) discusses what
> can be concluded about where the Indo-Europeans came from originally,
> based on what words are universal to the language family, e.g., they
> originally lived in a place with snow and salmon, but not the sea--the sea
> would've been encountered after they split up and spread out, and
> different words come up to name it.

That's the dictionary. Thank you.

Regards,
rathpy

Author: rathpy (---.lnk.telstra.net)
Date: 03-12-04 14:02

Thomas Chan wrote:
> There's a nice article in the back of the _American Heritage Dictionary_
> (this isn't the one you're looking at, is it?) called "Indo-European and the
> Indo-Europeans" (http://www.bartleby.com/61/8.html). The section
> "Lexicon and Culture" (starting about halfway through) discusses what
> can be concluded about where the Indo-Europeans came from originally,
> based on what words are universal to the language family, e.g., they
> originally lived in a place with snow and salmon, but not the sea--the sea
> would've been encountered after they split up and spread out, and
> different words come up to name it.

That's the dictionary. Thank you.

Regards,
rathpy

[%sig%]

The Bible's explanation for this is that several languages were created at the tower of Babel. Perhaps you are familiar with this story. There was a single language in existence before this event, and then God created some new languages so as to break up the project that was under way in Babel. It would appear that the some form of ancient Chinese came from this event and the Chinese moved east from there.

Of course, many people today do not believe this account. However, it should not be discarded without consideration. There is some evidence for this. For instance, anthropologist/archaeologists think that civilization originated in Mesopotamia. Also, the similarity of the pyramid type structures around the world (including China) in seemingly very different cultures. Perhaps the most interesting evidence for this group, is the Chinese written language itself. It contains characters that tell stories of man’s early history and the dispersion at the tower of Babel.

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钦堑rathpy wrote:

> My English dictionary shows a tree of the divergence of
> Indo-European family of languages. According to it, the
> European languages all descended from a prehistoric language
> "Proto-Indo-European", possibly in the fifth millennium B.C.
> From what I have heard, all the current Chinese dialects also
> had a common ancestor.
>
> My question is, if the above is true, how could whole
> continents of peoples all have agreed or come about to use a
> common language so long ago, when civilizations were less
> developed and travel was less prevalent?
>
> Regards,
> rathpy
>

They are thus considering themselves as separate socially in some ways from their neighbours. Whether this is due to language or customs is anyone's guess. From analysis into the inscriptions, folks over the past 100 or so years have figured out that elements of Chinese today are found in the language then, but others which we don't find. For instance word order, we find both Subject-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb-Object constructions amongst other possible forms.