28 replies to this topic

[TaiE]

Actually in Taiwan it was more common to call people from China "a-soaⁿ" before KMT occupation.

Now we just call people from China "A-Lio-a"

I am curious how do you call mainland chinese? Care give the translations in chinese , not only letters.

[qrasy]

For Hokkien people (Fujianese), they would refer China as "Dng Suang" 长山 (long mountain), b'cos where Fujiang province consists of so many mountains which are long .

In Minnan varieties here 长 and 唐 reads the same 'tng'. (with unaspirated t)...
That's why Chinese ("Tng Lang") is the same as Longman (just kidding)
The 'tng sua~' could well point to 唐山.
(Should be "Sua~" (nasalised vowel) not "Suang".)

Edited by qrasy, 07 November 2005 - 03:39 PM.

[xng]

For Hokkien people (Fujianese), they would refer China as "Dng Suang" 长山 (long mountain), b'cos where Fujiang province consists of so many mountains which are long .

Correction ! 唐山 is pronounced as deng sua. The deng is not 长. Same sound different tone and different character.

It most probably means the tang dynasty which is one of the most glorious dynasty of china and when south china was sinicised. The mountain would mean country.

Edited by xng, 13 November 2005 - 10:39 PM.

[BowlingforIllidan]

It most probably means the tang dynasty which is one of the most glorious dynasty of china and when south china was sinicised. The mountain would mean country.

I believe that Qin Shihuang's armies established colonies in Guangdong (don't know about Fujian), but it wasn't until the Tang that the region could be called 'sinicised'

in the late 13thC, Marco Polo observed that Fujian was still inhabited by non-Chinese cannibal tribes who wore blue warpaint (Braveheart-style).

Edited by BowlingforIllidan, 14 November 2005 - 12:32 AM.

[mynahbird]

I just joined but recently a professor claimed that during the Tang Dynasty,Mingnan or Fujian was the Lingua Franca in Tang China.

He than compared the Korean and Japanese spoken language and found hundreds of similar pronouncations of many common words

and reasoned that this could have occured when contact was maximum with Korea and Japan during the Tang Dynasty.

Unfortunately I am unable to relocate the source,maybe someone else has discussed it here.

If I remember correctly during the era of the 3 kingdoms, Sun Quan already ruled parts of Fujian.

[William O'Chee]

I just joined but recently a professor claimed that during the Tang Dynasty,Mingnan or Fujian was the Lingua Franca in Tang China.

He than compared the Korean and Japanese spoken language and found hundreds of similar pronouncations of many common words

and reasoned that this could have occured when contact was maximum with Korea and Japan during the Tang Dynasty.

Unfortunately I am unable to relocate the source,maybe someone else has discussed it here.

If I remember correctly during the era of the 3 kingdoms, Sun Quan already ruled parts of Fujian.

Hmm, that's interesting. Where is this professor located?

I have always found it interesting that Minnan gives rise to Zhongshanese and Hainanese.

[mynahbird]

I'm sorry I lost the article. But it is convincing when you compare with the pronouncation
of Mingnan words with that of Korea and Japan in hundreds of words eg.Kamsiah,numerals, etc etc.
the Korean and Japanese words sound more like Mingnan than Huayu and we are talking of hundreds not just a few.
I think the professor is Taiwanese..

[xng]

I'm sorry I lost the article. But it is convincing when you compare with the pronouncation
of Mingnan words with that of Korea and Japan in hundreds of words eg.Kamsiah,numerals, etc etc.
the Korean and Japanese words sound more like Mingnan than Huayu and we are talking of hundreds not just a few.
I think the professor is Taiwanese..

Mandarin is a manchurian influenced language so it would be furthest from the imported words in Korean and Japanese.

However, I am not sure whether the imported words are closer to middle chinese or old chinese.

Minnan is closer to Old chinese sounds.

[qrasy]

But it is convincing when you compare with the pronouncation of Mingnan words with that of Korea and Japan in hundreds of words eg.Kamsiah,numerals, etc etc. the Korean and Japanese words sound more like Mingnan than Huayu and we are talking of hundreds not just a few.

Mandarin regularly "bent" the sounds around, it's nothing strange to find a long list of words sounding very different from what it was.
Doesn't mean that the language used was Minnan, either. Other languages copied the literary language, that included Minnan; many Chinese characters have difference between colloquial and literary readings in Minnan.

Mandarin is a manchurian influenced language so it would be furthest from the imported words in Korean and Japanese.

On one hand some people say that "Manchurian is similar to Korean and Japanese" yet in another side they say "Mandarin's deviation from Korean/Japanese loanwords is because of Manchurian". Apparently it's contradictory.

However, I am not sure whether the imported words are closer to middle chinese or old chinese.

Neither Japanese nor Korean have "native words" beginning with R nor L. To tell them apart...
Well, for Sino-Korean the behavior of 匣母字 including 寒 suffices to prove that it's Middle Chinese.
And the pronunciation of "烏" is /o/ instead of /a/ [as can be seen from Old Chinese 烏弋山離 = Alexandria], suggests Middle Chinese influence.

Neither Japanese nor Korean distinguished p from f (though Modern Chinese to some extent does), but we still have a way to tell Early/Late Middle Chinese apart: 萬 rhymed with 願 in Early Middle Chinese, but with 慢 for Late Middle Chinese.
(if 3 of them rhyme, we have to use some other methods to tell but it suffices to tell what layers the loanwords in Japanese and Korean are)

Japanese has 2 main layers of Chinese loanwords, Go-on from Early Middle Chinese, Kan-on from Late Middle Chinese. Sino-Korean should be mainly late Middle Chinese.

Minnan is closer to Old chinese sounds.

If compared to Mandarin, in terms of 古無輕唇音, 古無舌上音, and reading of (some) 匣-consonant characters as 群母.

The rhymes corresponding to 飽/包 and 抱/袍 rhymed in Old Chinese. We can't see the phenomenon in Minnan, but "by some luck" Mandarin re-generated this rhyming.

Edited by qrasy, 03 October 2010 - 04:51 PM.

[phead128]

Cantonese people identify with Tang dynasty more because they believe remnants of the defunct Tang dynasty culture, heritage, and language remain pure and kept 'alive' within the Southern Chinese region more so than compared to then Northern one.

Cantonese dialect itself is most similar to the spoken Chinese of the Tang dynasty.

Edited by phead128, 03 February 2011 - 04:00 PM.

[xng]

Cantonese dialect itself is most similar to the spoken Chinese of the Tang dynasty.

Actually both Cantonese and Hakka are descended from middle chinese

[qrasy]

Cantonese people identify with Tang dynasty more because they believe remnants of the defunct Tang dynasty culture, heritage, and language remain pure and kept 'alive' within the Southern Chinese region more so than compared to then Northern one.

Minnan people also uses 唐山 and 唐人 while the language has a significant proportion of features that aren't explainable by Tang speech.

But it's comparable to that Japanese still called mainland China as "唐" even after Tang was replaced by Song dynasty.

Cantonese dialect itself is most similar to the spoken Chinese of the Tang dynasty.

When you try to trace the source of this assertion, you'll find that it's rather unreliable.
Of course, before I seriously tried, I didn't know that.

There are numerous peculiarities in Cantonese phonetics that didn't exist in Middle Chinese, and I won't go into details in this post.

Actually both Cantonese and Hakka are descended from middle chinese

With different degrees of distortion.
The 2 dialects above are "lucky" enough not to have p/t/k/m significantly distorted (where some people somehow put most attention to instead of vowels and initials).

[sg_han]

Actually both Cantonese and Hakka are descended from middle chinese

min is not?

which is older min or yue?

[qrasy]

min is not?

which is older min or yue?

1. This is off-topic.
2. A significant fraction of the words in Min appear to defy Middle Chinese sound rules.
3. You have to tell what you really mean by "older" instead of "taking it for granted" (as if it were a daily definition).
It can be referring to the age of "proto-Min" (when it has become clearly separate from non-Min), the era when it's supposedly starting to drift away (but almost like only dialect differences with non-Min), or simply referring to features of the languages like Minnan you observe today (and ignoring only recent minor changes).

Edited by qrasy, 17 February 2011 - 09:26 AM.