Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 August 26

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August 26

Linguistic history of China

Here are quite decent maps that cover the political and cultural history of China. But I could not find maps that deal with the linguistic history of China. I read some articles but still have some (or rather many) questions:
1) As I understand Old Chinese was originally located in the Xia state. Later during the Shan and Zhou dynasties this state expanded. What were the languages outside of the original Xia state? Was the expansion an assimilation of non-Sinitic languages into Old Chinese or rather a unification and amalgamation of closely related Sinitic languages?
2) What was the linguistic situation in Southern China during the Xian-Shan-Zhou period? I suppose in (Far) Northern China there were Mongolic, Turkic and Tungusic-Manchu speakers, in Western China - Tibetan speakers.
3a) Are the southern Chinese "dialects" the result of the later migration from the Xian-Shan-Zhou area and assimilation of the local non-Chinise languages (akin to the expansion of Latin and the development of the Romance languages)?
3b) Or did the southern Chinese "dialects" already exist in the Xian-Shan-Zhou period of Northern China?
4a) If (3a) is true how did the substrata affect the southern Chinese "dialects"?
4b) If (3b) is true how did the Sinitic languages appear in their current locations?
5) Where was the Proto-Sinitic Urheimat and how was the linguistic landscape changing anyway?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:03, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

• History of the Chinese language has some information, and cites a few scholars. You may use that as a start of your research. --Jayron32 15:24, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Obviously, I read that and some other things, but it hardly helps. They are either very vague or even contradict themselves.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:16, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

I'll take a stab at this, but it isn't really possible to offer definitive or authoritative answers to most of your questions.

1) We don't know the geographic extent of Old Chinese. In any case, Old Chinese is defined as the ancestor of the modern Chinese languages spoken between 1200 BCE and the unification of China in 221 BCE. During this period, the language underwent considerable change, both linguistically and very likely in its geographic extent. The earliest specimens of Old Chinese date from the Shang Dynasty, not the Xia Dynasty. The language spoken by the prehistoric Xia Dynasty and its precursors was probably a precursor of Old Chinese. We do not know what languages were spoken by peoples surrounding the Shang state. Some very likely spoke dialects related to what we might call standard (Shang) Old Chinese, while others probably spoke unrelated languages. A major problem here is that, because written Chinese does not preserve the phonology of older versions of the language and because of a series of stages of phoneme collapse over the history of Chinese, it is impossible to reconstruct with certainty the Old Chinese pronunciation of many characters. In any case, foreign words were probably adapted to Old Chinese phonology. So it is almost impossible to use evidence such as place names and personal names from ancient Chinese in the way that those have been used to hypothesize about the linguistic affiliations of ancient peoples whose names are recorded in the phonetic scripts of ancient Greek or Latin, for example. However, the geographic area in which Chinese inscriptions occur did expand from early Shang times to the 3rd century BCE, and it is likely that the geographic area in which Old Chinese was spoken expanded with it. We don't know to what extent this expansion involved an "assimilation" as opposed to a replacement. Usually an expanding language does pick up some vocabulary from the languages it supplants, and this probably happened, but there are also cases such as Old English in which a language largely supplants its predecessor. Again, there is no evidence to indicate which process took place.

2) Scholars usually suppose that languages spoken in southern China before the 3rd century BCE belonged to the Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Tibeto-Burman language families. There may also have been now-lost members of the Sinitic language family.

3 and 4) Most of the present-day Chinese languages are believed to descend from Middle Chinese, which probably spread beginning during the Southern and Northern Dynasties and continuing through the Tang Dynasty and supplanted (or to some extent assimilated) both other descendants of Old Chinese and languages not descended from Old Chinese that were still spoken especially in the South. Most of the present-day southern dialects did not exist as such before the first millennium CE. There was a significant migration at the beginning of the Sixteen Kingdoms period that brought speakers of early Middle Chinese from the ancient Chinese heartland along the Huang He to the heartland of the Eastern Jin Dynasty along the Chang Jiang (Yangzi). (See Jin dynasty (265–420).) A further migration south of the Yangzi into southern China took place during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, though the language probably spread not just through migration but also by adoption by speakers of other languages. There is an important exception to this pattern, Min Chinese, which seems to be descended independently from a form of Old Chinese, possibly brought to Fujian during the Han Dynasty, but also showing Middle Chinese influence. Again, because of the non-phonetic nature of the Chinese script and the process of phonemic collapse, it is difficult to know what forms derive from the internal evolution of the language and what forms, if any, are derived from other substrates.

5) We do not know the location of the proto-Sinitic Urheimat, partly because the membership of non-Chinese languages in the Sinitic family is disputed, and partly because the probable ancient diversity of Sinitic languages, which should have been greatest around the Urheimat, was probably later wiped out by the spread of, first, Old Chinese and, later, Middle Chinese. There is a pattern of cultural continuity between Yangshao culture and Shang culture that suggests that the cultural ancestors of the speakers of Old Chinese were centered in Shaanxi and Shanxi. Meanwhile, some scholars see the Bai language group as distant members of the Sinitic family. If this is true, it might suggest an Urheimat in the Sichuan Basin, bordering on the present-day area of the Tibetan languages. However, the evidence is inconclusive, so we can only speculate.

Marco polo (talk) 18:35, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Slightly tangentially, the OP might be interesting in today's post on the Language Log blog which discusses the origins of certain Chinese words and links to a lengthy paper examining the alleged linguistic and other evidence of whether the Xia dynasty actually existed, or was a myth invented for political reasons around a millennium later.

Some of the regular posters on Language Log are quite knowledgeable about the Chinese languages' relationships and histories. (Which is not to deny that Marco polo's own summary above is extremely interesting and useful.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:29, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I agree that, as our article on the Xia Dynasty points out, the existence of that dynasty is disputed. Still, most scholars believe that there was a predecessor state to Shang, centered at Erlitou, that largely corresponds to later descriptions of the Xia. So a majority of scholars of ancient China accept that there is a factual basis for the accounts of the Xia, even if not all of those accounts are factual in every detail. Marco polo (talk) 18:41, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

The Chinese historiography, either in the past or in the present, has had a tendency to overage their history as a result of their ethnocentric mythology (a Chinese: "We are the greatest and most ancient civilization with the 5,000-years continuous history!" - a Western barbarian: "Ehm... OK" ☺). So I do not expect that everything said in Chinese manuscripts actually happened. Though we have at least a relative chronology (plus-munus 100-500 years - it's not too important for "the most ancient civilization" ☺).
Your answer was quite interesting. I thought myself if I could not find something clear then there is indeed little or no linguistic evidence (due to the absence of a Chinese phonetic writing in the first place). Anyway, my allusion with Latin and the Romance languages seems quite legit. The Yellow-Yangtze "Mesopotamia" might be like Italy where might be a proto-Chinese core somewhere (like Latium), and that core might be surrounded by Sinitic (like Italic) and non-Sinitic languages (like Etruscan, Celtic or Greek). The Middle Chinese expansion was like Romanization of the non-Italic tribes in the Roman empire (either by migration or assimilation), they were even close chronologically.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:41, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

The expansion of Chinese was like the expansion of Latin in some ways but different in others. Unlike Latin, which spread once, between about 200 BCE and 200 CE, Chinese spread twice. There was the Old Chinese expansion, from about 1000 BCE to about 100 BCE, which left a variety of divergent dialects. Then there was a second expansion of Middle Chinese, from about 400 CE to about 700 CE, which supplanted all other dialects descended from Old Chinese with the exception of Min Chinese. So, in terms of chronological depth, Min Chinese is most distant from, for example, Mandarin. Since the divergence of Old Chinese dialects was roughly contemporaneous with the divergence of Germanic languages from Proto-Germanic, the relationship of Min Chinese to Mandarin is analogous to the relationship of Swedish to English. The divergence of Middle Chinese dialects is more recent than the divergence of Romance dialects from Vulgar Latin. Chronologically, it is more comparable to the divergence of the Slavic languages. So the non-Min southern Chinese languages have a relationship to Mandarin analogous to the relationship between, say, Czech and Russian. Marco polo (talk) 14:56, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Do you mean the Old Chinese expansion was in the Yellow-Yangtze Mesopotamia? I think the origin of Min may be a little different: some archaic peripheral dialects (periphery always tends to be more archaic) moved southward as a result of the fall of the Yue state. The migration might be not so massive, but still proto-Min Old Chinese could assimilate the local population. The later conquest of the Min state forced that assimilation.

I don't think that the expansion of Latin happened once in the short span of time. There were rather several waves (the first one was during the conquest of the Italic peninsula) into several directions (Hispania, Gallia, Africa, the Balkans). The spread and the dissolution of the Slavic languages was also much durable, the last stages are thought to be as late as the 12th century. What confuses me is the modern Slavs still somewhat can understand each other, but as I know understanding between the speakers of the Sinitic languages is close to zero. They may be quite recent (not much than 2000 years) but these Chinese "dialects" are rather like the groups of the Indo-European family. Probably the first waves were during the Qin-Han period. And due their nature the changes and differences are more prominent than in other language families.

By the way I found in ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese a very good overview of the history of the language[1]. And I also found some interesting maps [2][3][4] (I cannot say where they are from, don't you know?).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 08:00, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

The first two maps are from The Cambridge History of China, V. 1, pp. 241, 242.[5]--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:36, 31 August 2015 (UTC)