This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
@ Kanguole: Hi! I really love your work on this article. I was wondering where I could find a copy of Norman's 1981 "The Proto-Min finals" article, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology (Section on Linguistics and Paleography). I'm interested in this article as there seem to be many Proto-Min forms proposed in that article, but not much luck with Internet search it seems. Thank you! Wyang ( talk) 10:59, 20 October 2016 (UTC) (from Wiktionary)
It is established that Old Chinese didn't have tones. How are both Proto-Min and Middle Chinese independently derived from Old Chinese, yet the tones in both systems map each other so neatly? -- 188.99.142.6 ( talk) 13:18, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Wu Chinese § History mentions an ancient Chinese variety called "Old Wu–Min" that was spoken around Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang before Wu Chinese (and is therefore not a direct ancestor of Wu Chinese, but rather a substrate to it). The only way I am able to make sense of the account in that article is that this Old Wu–Min was an ancestor of Min Chinese, and temporally, the fit with Proto-Min appears close. Therefore I have assumed that they are essentially the same thing, even though Old Wu–Min was supposedly spoken considerably to the north of Fujian, and linked the term "Old Wu-Min" to this article, and later (in the section "Substrate influences") equated the two terms explicitly. In particular, I wonder if the dialectal source of the Go-on readings can be equated with Old Wu–Min or Proto-Min judging from the temporal and geographical fit. Please inform me if my deduction was incorrect. The account in Wu Chinese is fairly confused. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 14:20, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
The section "Separation from common Chinese" appears to imply that Min diverged already during the Western Han period, so presumably in the first – or even second? – century BC. It probably happened only after southern China was first settled permanently with Chinese speakers starting in the second century BC (as is also implied more directly in the article with the reference to the defeat of Minyue) – the expansion during the Qin period appears to have been only temporary.
However, it seems possible that Old Southern Chinese (as posited by Norman) in the Han period had already diverged from the rest of (Old) Chinese while still spoken only in the lower Yangtze region (specifically in Wu), before its southward expansion. Then, the divergence might be dated to the second century BC – or possibly even to the third.
In any case, the facts listed strongly suggest that Min / Old Southern Chinese had already diverged by the first century AD, so I'm not sure why Schuessler dates the common ancestor of Min and mainstream Chinese to the first and second centuries AD (or even to c. 200 AD, per here – what Schuessler might have had in mind is the wave of immigration following the collapse of the Han, referred to here), into the Eastern Han period, by which time the two listed changes in mainstream Chinese (merger of the finals *-jaj and *-je, and palatalisation of Old Chinese velars in certain environments) are said to have already happened. This implies that the true common ancestor is the language of the Western Han period (after the conventional end of Old Chinese proper around 200 BC, with the end of the Qin). (However, in Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese, p. 1, Schuessler concedes that Later Han Chinese "could, with hindsight, be considered Middle Han Chinese of the first centuries BC and AD", so he did see the problem too, and came to the same conclusion that his reconstruction did not strictly reflect Eastern Han speech, and therefore, the name given to the reconstruction is not quite appropriate.)
By the way, I'd like to see details or even examples for the palatalisation referred to, because I'm not sure what phenomenon exactly the change in question actually is – is it this one?
It would certainly be helpful for the reader to be more explicit about these points in the article rather than expecting the reader to figure them all out on their own (like I just did, as a non-Sinologist) if the reader is interested in them.
As an aside: I do understand that the evidence for especially the Sui (because of the Qieyun, although I understand it contains older traditions) and Zhou/Qin periods (because of the Old Chinese literature, especially the rhymes of the Yijing) is more accessible (and more directly dateable) and was researched into earlier, but de-emphasising for now the effects of the history of research and the tradition following from it, being trained in conventional (especially Indo-European) historical linguistics, it would make more sense to me to focus first on Common Dialectal Chinese and compare it with the evidence that can actually be dated to the Tang period, to which the reconstruction seems to correspond most closely, and then – with all the Middle Chinese evidence assembled – focus on the reconstruction of the common ancestor of Min and mainstream Chinese ("Proto-Sinitic" or simply "Proto-Chinese"), and compare it with the evidence datable to the Han period, especially from the first century BC, to arrive at a maximally reliable picture of the Chinese of the Han period, as inferred from all the available evidence. Only then I'd address Old Chinese proper of the Zhou and Qin periods, systematically building up from the evidence for the more recent stages. It seems to me that research in historical Chinese phonology has put the cart before the horse to some extent, by trying to reconstruct Old Chinese proper before the Chinese of the Han, and Middle Chinese before Common Dialectal Chinese and the Chinese of the Tang, due to the tradition of neglecting conventional historical linguistic reconstruction in favour of the philological approach. In fact, with the Chinese of the Han, we are on firmer ground than we are for earlier times, and the time around the first century BC is, after all, a key period in Chinese history and literature, so it makes sense to focus one's efforts on figuring out on what the language was like at the time, for now at least, and citing the results as standard reconstructions of Classical Chinese pronunciation in reference works. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 08:55, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
To quote what I wrote above: "Thus, indirectly at least, Middle Chinese reconstructions may well reflect a stage that is not much more recent than Schuessler's (de facto) "Proto-Chinese" (or Late Old Chinese) at all, only a bit."
I just saw that Pittayaporn makes the same point that Qieyun-based Early Middle Chinese is very similar to Later Han Chinese and distinguished from it only by a few innovations here on pp. 56f. (in the sentence spanning both pages). This reinforces my point that when talking about ancient China and especially the Han period, and specifically when giving renderings of foreign names into Chinese, it makes most sense to use Later Han Chinese reconstructions of the pronunciation of the characters – more so than Middle Chinese ones, given that any kind of post-Han pronunciation can easily be derived from them; but either is better than the incredibly annoying practice of using modern Mandarin-based readings for this purpose. Just as a random example, the article Funan completely glosses over the fact that the pronunciation of Chinese has changed radically since the time when 扶南 is attested in Chinese as the name of the polity in question (a fact doubtless not clear to most lay readers), instead of mentioning that the pronunciation of 扶南 in antiquity has been reconstructed as having been something like [po nam], as opposed to modern Standard Chinese Fúnán. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 13:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Schuessler (2007) has relevant remarks too:
On p. 119f.: "The nature and validity of M[iddle Chinese] has been much debated [...]. MC forms are widely quoted, even by critics, for reference and identification of traditional phonological categories. MC [the Qièyùn system] does not reflect a natural language, as many scholars emphasize; [...] The L[ater Han] forms provide a transliteration which is probably closer to some actual language."
(It might be ideal in historical contexts to quote both Later Han and Middle Chinese reconstructions. This would also mitigate the potential risk of circularity in case Later Han reconstructions are partly based on exactly those borrowings the author intends to illuminate, for example.)
On p. 125: "Mĭn dialects apparently split off from the rest of the language, starting with the Qin and Han dynasties (second, even third centuries BC)."
On p. 131: "The Chinese (or Sinitic) branch has today evolved into seven major "dialect" groups, actually "Sinitic languages", which began to diverge during the Han period (ca. 200 BC and after), but most dialects can be traced back to the more recent Tang Dynasty (ca. 600–900) [...]"
Here, Schuessler remarks that the "Old Southern dialect" has left traces in Wu as well as in Gan, Xiang, Hakka and Yue.
By the way, a friend who is trained and still working in an Indo-Europeanist context but has also taken an interest in Sinology lately agrees that it is strange that the attempt to straightforwardly reconstruct "Proto-Chinese" (with or without the Min evidence respectively) has not been made earlier in the history of Sinology. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 03:29, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
I have again reverted the insertion of Austronesian, because it is not mentioned by the cited sources, and there is no evidence of interaction between proto-Min and Austronesian. (There have been proposals of a relationship between Austronesian and Tai–Kadai or Sino-Tibetan, but these are for a much earlier date.) Kanguole 14:03, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
Yeah but read very carefully at the Minyue culture, then you'll know that it is possibly Austronesian and that the Minyue people share this culture with the aborigines of Taiwan. Jjdawikieditor103 16:11, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
@ Kanguole: Hi! I really love your work on this article. I was wondering where I could find a copy of Norman's 1981 "The Proto-Min finals" article, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology (Section on Linguistics and Paleography). I'm interested in this article as there seem to be many Proto-Min forms proposed in that article, but not much luck with Internet search it seems. Thank you! Wyang ( talk) 10:59, 20 October 2016 (UTC) (from Wiktionary)
It is established that Old Chinese didn't have tones. How are both Proto-Min and Middle Chinese independently derived from Old Chinese, yet the tones in both systems map each other so neatly? -- 188.99.142.6 ( talk) 13:18, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Wu Chinese § History mentions an ancient Chinese variety called "Old Wu–Min" that was spoken around Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang before Wu Chinese (and is therefore not a direct ancestor of Wu Chinese, but rather a substrate to it). The only way I am able to make sense of the account in that article is that this Old Wu–Min was an ancestor of Min Chinese, and temporally, the fit with Proto-Min appears close. Therefore I have assumed that they are essentially the same thing, even though Old Wu–Min was supposedly spoken considerably to the north of Fujian, and linked the term "Old Wu-Min" to this article, and later (in the section "Substrate influences") equated the two terms explicitly. In particular, I wonder if the dialectal source of the Go-on readings can be equated with Old Wu–Min or Proto-Min judging from the temporal and geographical fit. Please inform me if my deduction was incorrect. The account in Wu Chinese is fairly confused. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 14:20, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
The section "Separation from common Chinese" appears to imply that Min diverged already during the Western Han period, so presumably in the first – or even second? – century BC. It probably happened only after southern China was first settled permanently with Chinese speakers starting in the second century BC (as is also implied more directly in the article with the reference to the defeat of Minyue) – the expansion during the Qin period appears to have been only temporary.
However, it seems possible that Old Southern Chinese (as posited by Norman) in the Han period had already diverged from the rest of (Old) Chinese while still spoken only in the lower Yangtze region (specifically in Wu), before its southward expansion. Then, the divergence might be dated to the second century BC – or possibly even to the third.
In any case, the facts listed strongly suggest that Min / Old Southern Chinese had already diverged by the first century AD, so I'm not sure why Schuessler dates the common ancestor of Min and mainstream Chinese to the first and second centuries AD (or even to c. 200 AD, per here – what Schuessler might have had in mind is the wave of immigration following the collapse of the Han, referred to here), into the Eastern Han period, by which time the two listed changes in mainstream Chinese (merger of the finals *-jaj and *-je, and palatalisation of Old Chinese velars in certain environments) are said to have already happened. This implies that the true common ancestor is the language of the Western Han period (after the conventional end of Old Chinese proper around 200 BC, with the end of the Qin). (However, in Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese, p. 1, Schuessler concedes that Later Han Chinese "could, with hindsight, be considered Middle Han Chinese of the first centuries BC and AD", so he did see the problem too, and came to the same conclusion that his reconstruction did not strictly reflect Eastern Han speech, and therefore, the name given to the reconstruction is not quite appropriate.)
By the way, I'd like to see details or even examples for the palatalisation referred to, because I'm not sure what phenomenon exactly the change in question actually is – is it this one?
It would certainly be helpful for the reader to be more explicit about these points in the article rather than expecting the reader to figure them all out on their own (like I just did, as a non-Sinologist) if the reader is interested in them.
As an aside: I do understand that the evidence for especially the Sui (because of the Qieyun, although I understand it contains older traditions) and Zhou/Qin periods (because of the Old Chinese literature, especially the rhymes of the Yijing) is more accessible (and more directly dateable) and was researched into earlier, but de-emphasising for now the effects of the history of research and the tradition following from it, being trained in conventional (especially Indo-European) historical linguistics, it would make more sense to me to focus first on Common Dialectal Chinese and compare it with the evidence that can actually be dated to the Tang period, to which the reconstruction seems to correspond most closely, and then – with all the Middle Chinese evidence assembled – focus on the reconstruction of the common ancestor of Min and mainstream Chinese ("Proto-Sinitic" or simply "Proto-Chinese"), and compare it with the evidence datable to the Han period, especially from the first century BC, to arrive at a maximally reliable picture of the Chinese of the Han period, as inferred from all the available evidence. Only then I'd address Old Chinese proper of the Zhou and Qin periods, systematically building up from the evidence for the more recent stages. It seems to me that research in historical Chinese phonology has put the cart before the horse to some extent, by trying to reconstruct Old Chinese proper before the Chinese of the Han, and Middle Chinese before Common Dialectal Chinese and the Chinese of the Tang, due to the tradition of neglecting conventional historical linguistic reconstruction in favour of the philological approach. In fact, with the Chinese of the Han, we are on firmer ground than we are for earlier times, and the time around the first century BC is, after all, a key period in Chinese history and literature, so it makes sense to focus one's efforts on figuring out on what the language was like at the time, for now at least, and citing the results as standard reconstructions of Classical Chinese pronunciation in reference works. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 08:55, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
To quote what I wrote above: "Thus, indirectly at least, Middle Chinese reconstructions may well reflect a stage that is not much more recent than Schuessler's (de facto) "Proto-Chinese" (or Late Old Chinese) at all, only a bit."
I just saw that Pittayaporn makes the same point that Qieyun-based Early Middle Chinese is very similar to Later Han Chinese and distinguished from it only by a few innovations here on pp. 56f. (in the sentence spanning both pages). This reinforces my point that when talking about ancient China and especially the Han period, and specifically when giving renderings of foreign names into Chinese, it makes most sense to use Later Han Chinese reconstructions of the pronunciation of the characters – more so than Middle Chinese ones, given that any kind of post-Han pronunciation can easily be derived from them; but either is better than the incredibly annoying practice of using modern Mandarin-based readings for this purpose. Just as a random example, the article Funan completely glosses over the fact that the pronunciation of Chinese has changed radically since the time when 扶南 is attested in Chinese as the name of the polity in question (a fact doubtless not clear to most lay readers), instead of mentioning that the pronunciation of 扶南 in antiquity has been reconstructed as having been something like [po nam], as opposed to modern Standard Chinese Fúnán. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 13:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Schuessler (2007) has relevant remarks too:
On p. 119f.: "The nature and validity of M[iddle Chinese] has been much debated [...]. MC forms are widely quoted, even by critics, for reference and identification of traditional phonological categories. MC [the Qièyùn system] does not reflect a natural language, as many scholars emphasize; [...] The L[ater Han] forms provide a transliteration which is probably closer to some actual language."
(It might be ideal in historical contexts to quote both Later Han and Middle Chinese reconstructions. This would also mitigate the potential risk of circularity in case Later Han reconstructions are partly based on exactly those borrowings the author intends to illuminate, for example.)
On p. 125: "Mĭn dialects apparently split off from the rest of the language, starting with the Qin and Han dynasties (second, even third centuries BC)."
On p. 131: "The Chinese (or Sinitic) branch has today evolved into seven major "dialect" groups, actually "Sinitic languages", which began to diverge during the Han period (ca. 200 BC and after), but most dialects can be traced back to the more recent Tang Dynasty (ca. 600–900) [...]"
Here, Schuessler remarks that the "Old Southern dialect" has left traces in Wu as well as in Gan, Xiang, Hakka and Yue.
By the way, a friend who is trained and still working in an Indo-Europeanist context but has also taken an interest in Sinology lately agrees that it is strange that the attempt to straightforwardly reconstruct "Proto-Chinese" (with or without the Min evidence respectively) has not been made earlier in the history of Sinology. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 03:29, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
I have again reverted the insertion of Austronesian, because it is not mentioned by the cited sources, and there is no evidence of interaction between proto-Min and Austronesian. (There have been proposals of a relationship between Austronesian and Tai–Kadai or Sino-Tibetan, but these are for a much earlier date.) Kanguole 14:03, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
Yeah but read very carefully at the Minyue culture, then you'll know that it is possibly Austronesian and that the Minyue people share this culture with the aborigines of Taiwan. Jjdawikieditor103 16:11, 2 September 2021 (UTC)