Talk:Chinese language
Fixed some grammar issues in the "Chinese Grammar" section and added a couple details. Hope everything still looks good.
The Anonymous Speaker #2, and responses
"The Chinese Language" is, however, a fiction. The term "Chinese" is employed to denote both the language spoken by Confucius and the one [Mao Zedong]? used in authoring his works, the language people in Beijing? use in daily life as well as the conversational language of Hongkong?. These sub-languages differ considerably. To the casual observer, this difference may seem so big as to render the usage of an umbrella term to collectively refer to them preposterous.
I don't quite agree with this paragraph. I am not a linguist so I can only express my opinion from the perspective of a native Cantonese speaker and a layman. The author is mixing the written language, spoken dialects and text from different periods in history in the same discussion. It is true that those who don't understand the differences simply lump everything together as Chinese. To my mom who don't know English, modern English and Shakespearean English are all English. According to the same argument, the English Language is a fiction too. It is just generalization due to ignorance. In my opinion, such generalized statement does not belong in an encyclopedia.
- P0M 01:18, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC): Good analysis and good example. The original comment is valid, in a way, because it is really "the Chinese Languages" (parallel to "the Romance Languages").
The language used by Confucius is known as "Wen Yen Wen" (literally: literature language text). The language used by Mao Zedong or those in present days Beijing is known as "Bai Hua Wen" (literally: plain speech text). "Plain speech" here refers to Mandarin. Both use the same characters. But it takes special scholars to understand Confucius's text. Most ancient literatures require annotation for students to understand the precise meaning.
- P0M: Actually, "wen2 yan2 wen2" refers to a written language. It is not known for sure how people spoke because there are no tape recordings (obviously) and also no discussions about the relationship between written and spoken language. "Bai hua wen" does not refer to the language that Mao Zedong spoke. "Bai hua" means something like "vernacular Chinese," and it became a kind of cultural icon in the 1920s when people such as Hu Shi advocated writing books the way people spoke. There were already novels written pretty much the way people talk. The Hong Lou Meng would be a good example of that. But the "fine" people looked down on authors who would not write in proper wen2 yan2 wen2, and one of the results was that people had to be specially educated to read the gobbledegook that the officials turned out, and they had to learn how to write the same stuff (especially ba1 gu3 wen2) if they wanted to get a government job. It is the rare author today who really writes bai2 hua4 wen2. Most people write using what is called "shu1 mian4 yu3," a form of written Chinese that is closer to spoken Chinese than wen2 yan2 wen2 but which uses elements of wen2 yan2. It seems more formal, more educated, more proper, etc.
- P0M: The wen2 yan2 wen2 that Confucius wrote does indeed require some help to get through. The language hadn't quite settled down at his time, or even at the time of Mencius or Zhuang Zi. But by the time of Xun2 Zi3, the language begins to look like a telegraphic form of spoken Chinese and the vocabulary is pretty much what it is today (i.e., most characters meant then what they mean today). By the time of Zhu Xi (1130-1200) you can get a good comparison of the difference between bai2 hua4 and wen2 yan2 because the Zhu Zi Yu-lei consists of lecture notes by his students and they more or less wrote down just what he said. It's easy to read. The Zhu Zi Wen Ji, on the other hand, is a compilation of letters, essays, etc. that Zhu Xi wrote himself. It is much harder to read because it is real wen2 yan2.
In fact, "Bai Hua Wen" became the official language around 1911. Mandarin is the closest dialect to "Bai Hua Wen" at the time. From that point on "Wen Yen Wen" became less and less popular in modern writing because they are too arcane to understand. All Chinese students have exposure to "Wen Yen Wen" when we study ancient Chinese literature in high school. Strictly speaking, there is only one official Chinese language, that is Mandarin. All others are just spoken dialects. I was told that there are 7 major dialect groups in China and hundreds if not thousands of regional dialects.
- P0M: Actually, two things were going on. One was an educational policy set by the central government because they realized that they needed to have a common language of instruction all over the country if they were going to get universal literacy and not have education be the special privilege of the rich people. The Jiao4 Yu4 Bu4 of that time decided to select what we call "Mandarin" (the language that covers most of the huge map recently posted and that it calls "guan1 hua4 in accord with a tradition of long standing). They figured it would be easiest to unify China if they made the language of the largest group of speakers the official language for the entire country. It would be relatively easy for someone in, e.g., Yunnan to learn "standard Mandarin" than it would be for somebody in Guang Dong to do so. But it would be extremely hard to get all the people in China to speak Cantonese. The next thing they had to do was to try to get a version (dialect) of Mandarin that everyone could learn fairly easily. So they wanted to avoid Beijing regionalism (calling the sun ri4 tou2 when everybody else said tai4 yang2, using "mier2ge" instead of "ming2 tian2", etc.), but they wanted to select some compromise and as time went on Beijing hua minus the extra ers became a kind of de facto standard.
- P0M: The other thing that was going on was the "democratization" of literature and writing, and that was the bai2 hua4 yun4 dong4. It had a big impact on the kind of writing that was taught in the school system, but I don't think it was primarily a government initiative. The government kind of caught up with it.
It is true that residents of Hong Kong can read newspapers from Beijing (but not vice versa). It is because Chinese people in Hong Kong learn Mandarin as the official written language and learn Cantonese as the spoken language. We don't learn the fictional Chinese you described. If one reads a Chinese newspaper aloud in Cantonese, it sounds strange because the grammar and choice of words are in Mandarin despite every word is pronounced in Cantonese. A well written Chinese article should be in Mandarin so that all Chinese people can read the same standard language regardless of their regional dialects. In practice, most tabloid newspapers in Hong Kong use Cantonese words and grammar in their writing. As a result, a Beijing resident will have major difficulties understanding a Hong Kong tabloid. They might have better luck with serious publications from Hong Kong which are written in formal written Chinese.
- P0M: I've seen some things written in Taiwanese. I agree, it is not easy for the person who is used to reading something written in "the language of instruction." But, as you testify, people in Hong Kong can get used to reading (and even writing) things in the Mandarin idiom.
According to legend/history, the first emperor in Qin Dynasty unified the Chinese written language by burning books and buried scholars alive. In present days, most Chinese dialects can associate with the written language in one way or the other because each dialect evolved around the same written language over centuries.
- P0M: I think it really isn't clear what people were speaking in, for instance, the State of Chu in 350 B.C. But the northern culture was becoming dominant and the Chu people were coming under its sway. The charts mention above indicate that all of the current yu3 (Yue4 yu3, Wu2 yu3, etc.) evolved out of the same language. What happened when the Romans spread their empire over Europe was that Latin turned into "mutant" forms everywhere it went, and because it was written alphabetically the written languages changed along with their spoken counterparts. As a result, an Italian needs to take lessons to learn to speak to somebody from Portugal, or even to read that language. But you are right to stress the importance of the written language because it had an immense stabilizing influence on the languages as they developed, and even though pronunciations and word choices changed, the whole thing held together much more consistently than did the Romance Languages (not to mention the Indo-European languages).
Chinese dialects are quite different from one another. Not only the pronounciation of the same words are different; the choice of words are different too. For example, a refridgerator is called a "Bing Shang" (ice box) in Beijing in Mandarin; but it is called a "Suet Gui" (snow cabinet) in Hong Kong in Cantonese; but it is called a "Shon Gue" (frost cabinet) in San Francisco old Chinatown in Taisanese. Despite both in Mandarin, Computer is called "Gee Shun Gi" (computing machine) in Beijing; but it is called "Den Lau" (electric brain) in Taiwan. If these are written as spoken, they all use different characters. However, all Chinese people can guess what it is by the meaning of the characters. There are exception when there are conflicts in usage. For example, "Gee Shun Gi" are names for handheld calculators in Hong Kong. So one has to read in context or identify the dialect used by the author to tell between a computer vs. a calculator.
- P0M: Right. It's the combination of changing the pronunciations and using different vocabulary that tears languages apart. The same thing happens with the Romance Langueages or between English and German. If refrigerators were called "shuang gui" in Mandarin, then people would not have very much problem with "shon gue".
It is understandable that different names are given to modern inventions depending on cultural bias. However, some basic words are different too. For example, "home" is "Uk Kay" in Cantonese, but "Ga" in formal Chinese. If I were to write a letter to my brother, I would write "Uk Kay", but if I were to write for a newspaper, I should be writing "Ga" instead. A spoken dialect, such as Cantonese, should never be used in formal writings.
- P0M: Differences across languages can create big problems -- especially if an innocent word in one language gets used in another language and it means something totally different. Americans speaking Spanish have to be careful not to try to say "I am embarassed," because it ends up meaning "I am pregnant."
The Anonymous Speaker #2, part II, and responses
The idea is that the different dialects people call Chinese are not always mutually intelligible, so deserve to count as different languages. Hence, the one Chinese language does not exist, the single written language not withstanding. This is not the same as English, where speakers from one dialect have a pretty good chance at conversing with speakers from another. Old English counts separately, as should Confucius' speech, but not the separation between Beijing's Mandarin and Hong Kong's Cantonese. Maybe I am missing the point... :(
- P0M: Which person wrote the above paragraph? It's confusing when you don't sign your comments. Anyway, it's not very helpful to compare Chinese to English. Its better to compare Chinese Languages to Romance Languages. Then you find out that the Romance languages are a little easier to learn because they share cognates, but the Chinese Languages are lots easier to learn because they share characters. Or you could compare Germanic languages like English and German. They grew out of the same thing, but you almost wouldn't know it now.
- P0M: Anyway, I basically agree with your observation. I am not sure how to quantify the trouble it takes for an English speaker to learn German or for a Hakka speaker to learn Dungan, but it should be possible to get a rough idea by measuring how long it takes people to be able to "handle exchanges on the street" in both situations.
- P0M: The problem really is to find a way to talk about the "family tree" of languages without getting into nationalism and politics.
Both Beijing and Hong Kong use the same written Chinese language which was based on "Bai Hua Wen". Beijing use Mandarin dialect and Hong Kong use Cantonese dialect as their spoken language. The situation is similar to the 300+ dialects in India which seem totally unrelated, except English as a common language.
- P0M: Right. Essentially, Hong Kong people write formal essays in a foreign language -- just the way educated people used to write in Latin so they could be understood by people from all over Europe who were educated.
The key point and the only difference here is the unification of the written language which happened centuries ago. Imagine if a dictatorship rules India today and he destroys all non-English books and scholars in India like the Qin emperor did. And 500 years from now, the Indian language will evolve into something like today's Chinese which are written the same way but spoken totally differently in each region of India.
- P0M: I think you are assuming that everybody in India speaks essentially the same language and that it would keep its written form but evolve into different spoken languages. But, as I understand it, the languages spoken in India are quite diverse, and English has taken over the de facto role of common language simply because everybody was encouraged to learn English when the various nations in what we now call India were united under England's colonial rule.
The original author returns
I'm the original author of the Chinese language article, and it seems like I've dropped in quite late - sorry... I agree with nearly everything you say, but it seems like I've done a bad job rendering all this into understandable English. I'm not a Chinese speaker, so you are in a better position to write this article than I am - please go on and do it!
I can understand that the statement "The Chinese language is a fiction" ails you - I somewhat regret having written it since it is very blunt. But I think the basic idea is correct. And I also think you definitely can't compare the situation of Chinese with the situation of English (again, I'm not an expert with English, not even an English native speaker - so this may be complete bullshit), but neither can you compare the situation of Chinese and the Indian languages. There is no reason whatsoever to use a collective term like "the Indian language" - Hindi and Mahrati don't even belong to the same family of languages, I think. On the other hand, there _is_ a good reason for calling both Cantonese and Putonghua "Chinese" - I speak very little Cantonese, but AFAIK its grammar is identical to Putonghua grammar in great parts (no flectional system, use of particles like "de"/"ge"...). Calling Confucius' language "Chinese" is justified, I think, for the same reason it is justified to call the language of early medieval England "Old English" - no modern English speaker could understand it without linguistic training, but it is the direct ancestor of his language and hence "the same language". (Just an aside about the Chinese dialect groups: I think there are _eight_ of them, but I only found the names of _seven_ in my sources - see article - do you know which one could be the eighth?) So the situation as I see it is that "Chinese" is an umbrella term (you would perhaps agree to that), but that this fact is often not understood. In Germany, most people don't, and so I think an encyclopedia article would be a good place to set this right. If my article doesn't accomplish this - well, blame it on my bad English and "go thou and improve it"! -- Xiemaisi
PS: Oh, one last thing: You claim Qin Shihuangdi did the "fen shu keng ru" to unify Chinese language?!?!? First time that I've heard this explanation! I'm not an expert with this either, but to the best of my knowledge, he did it to suppress Confucianism. And in fact he didn't burn _all_ the books - he spared the exemplars in the Imperial Library. All he wanted to do was monopolize knowledge in his hands and make it controllable. That the Imperial Library burnt down during the riots towards the end of the Qin Dynasty (and thus all these books really _were_ lost) wasn't his fault! Oops, this is beginning to sound like the vindication of a tyrant ... Best I stop it now ;-)
"English in India" is an incorrect analogy. English is an alphabetic language. Even if India lost all written languages, the English alphabets would be used like Pinyin in China instead of unifying the dialects themselves. My point is that several factors (the unified writing system, the time past, syllablic nature of the language) all contribute to the evolution of Chinese dialects to the current state. The Chinese language is quite unique and it is hard to compare to other languages which based on alphabets. It is like comparing oranges and apples.
What does the orthography have to do with anything? Are Mycenaean and Hellenic Greek different languages, just because one uses a syllabary and the other an alphabet?
I changed the description of Chinese language as a fiction. The problem with that statement is that is assumes that the idea of the world consists of separate distinctive language which are intelligible with each other but are unintelligible to outsiders is the "correct" one. This idea of how languages are structures comes
out as a result of European ethno-linguistic nationalism of the 19th century, and there is no particular reason I know of to claim that it is more "correct" than the Chinese way of thinking about language.
I also edited some of the comments on grammar and writing system which are wrong. It is *NOT* true that there is a single writing system which is automatically intelligible to all Chinese. Most Chinese would have extreme difficulty reading something in wen-yan, and most Mandarin speakers would find something written in colloquial Cantonese to be completely untelligible. It's also not true that Chinese has a simple grammar (it doesn't have inflectional endings but the lack of complexity there is made up for in other areas). It is also not true that all dialects have the same grammar. There are many word order differences between the dialects.
Also, I added an outline of the description of different characters.
Made some more changes. Added an outline of material to be filled in. I changed the classification of dialects. The five part classification I've used is the standard one which I got from "languages of China" by the Princeton University Press.
I removed some of the material regarding the tones and multi-syllabication of Chinese because it was wrong. First of the all the paragraph implied that tones developed in ancient Chinese due to lack of syllables and we don't know that. We do know that tones existed in middle Chinese. Also, (ironically) the multi-syllabication of Chinese words is something that is happening only in Mandarin due to loss of tones. Southern dialects are still mostly mono-syllable. So I moved that section under Mandarin.
I am english (learning Putonghua, slowly, but anyway...). I have corrected some grammer in the second paragraph, hope i didn't mess up any facts. Plus I have spotted something i am not sure how to correct: in the 2nd paragraph "wen yen" is mentioned, by the 3rd, it has become "wen yan". i assume this is a spelling mistake, but i could be wrong. If so, then maybe some clarification of the distinction should be made. cheers -- AW
Moved to talk
- Hence one could say that the characters are what makes the Chinese language an entity. If some day an alphabetic system should supplant them, "the Chinese language" would cease to exist.
Actually what makes the Chinese language an entity is that Chinese people think of it as such. Within Chinese there are many sets of unintelligible character sets.
- To ensure the acceptance of simplified characters, the PRC government forbid the use of traditional characters in mainland China. It is a huge success, but occasionally challenged by the invasion of pop cultures from Hong Kong and Taiwan--up to a point that People's Daily once called for a fight against the use of foreign characters: the traditional Chinese characters!!!
Two problems
1) As far as I know, the use of traditional characters is not banned in the PRC. People don't generally use them, but there isn't an official ban. Indeed, I have seen editions of the People's Daily printed in traditional characters.
2) The quote from the People's Daily needs far more context. It makes a big difference if the quote is from 1955, 1965 or 2000.
- Hmm. If there is no official ban, then it is quite a common misconception. People Daily in traditional characters is not available within mainland China. The quote is from some time between 1980 and 2000, sure an extensive search is needed to confirm the exact date and quote. Wshun
Nailed dead
- The notion of a "Chinese language" may seem at first to be a fiction. The term "Chinese" is employed for the classical written language known as "wen2 yan2 (文言 "literary language")" which was used by Confucius, as well as the modern standard known as "bai2 hua4 (白話 [白话] "vernacular")". It includes many different spoken variations which may be mutually unintelligible. The spoken language of Beijing is for example very different from Cantonese, the conversational language of Hong Kong.
- Nevertheless, there are good reasons for using a collective name. The most important one is that Chinese themselves consider the language to be unified entity, and there are good reasons for treating it as such. [emphasis added]
I take exception to these statements. This is not NPOV -- it nails dead that 'Chinese language' (singular) is a fact, when it is instead still a controversial topic (see, for example, the two books I put in the References. Many linguists will still disagree and will say 'Chinese languages' (plural) is the correct description. The article, as it stands now, allows no such dissent.
And, I hope that one should realize they are representing more than 1 billion people when they say 'the Chinese [people] themselves consider ...', leaving no space for diversity of thought. --Kaihsu Tai 19:03, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Also, should we move the article to Chinese (linguistics)? I will speak no more. --Kaihsu Tai 19:05, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- The discrepancy is over whether to call it "Chinese language" or "Chinese languages" (plural). Is there a better way of doing this? The current form is commonest. --Jiang 21:40, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- I've rewritten the article a bit to try to solve this problem by "giving equal airtime" to both views, so to speak. I suggest leaving it as "Chinese language", but put the actual Wiki template into the actual language / dialect groups: Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. -- Ran 07:24, 11 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Rewrite needed
The current article is a complete mess. I see no reason to separate "Chinese written language" from here as the content for both fits on one page. Not only is it unprecedented, it is unconvenient and illogicial - the Chinese language (singular) exists mainly because of its written language. Besides, the written language article repeats a whole lot of information either here or at Chinese character. If we're going to be redundant, please do it on fewer pages. I have posted a reorganized version at [User:Jiang/Sandbox]. I tried unsuccessfully to trim some of the fluff in the history section. IMHO this article is a disgrace to brilliant prose (it's listed there).
Ultimately, the template for Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages needs to be applied here. In addition, the information on Chinese romanization is spread over several pages. I've copied some of the text to User:Jiang/Scratch pad for anyone interested in making a comprehensive article. At the bottom of that article is also text copied from the Mandarin article that could appropriately be moved here or to the Chinese dialect page. --Jiang 13:45, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- Since we're going have articles for both "Chinese language" as well as "Mandarin language", "Cantonese language", etc. I propose that we use the Wiki template for only Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. and not Chinese. In any case, the "Chinese language" is more a philosophical and cultural reality than a linguistic one -- and should be written as such. -- Ran 07:23, 11 Jan 2004 (UTC)
- I disagree with that statement about linguistic reality. First of all, as far as writing is concerned, there is a large amount of mutual intelligiblity. I know of people who can't speak a word of Mandarin, but who can read and write Chinese just fine.
- The basic issue is that the way Chinese model language is just different from the way that it is done in Europe.
- Maybe we ought to have a new WikiProject for Chinese dialects. Something to keep in mind that among speakers, the notion that all of these are just dialects of one language is controversial in one case that I know of (i.e. Taiwanese). With every other dialect, there isn't any objection to calling these variations, dialects of a single language.
- In addition to the above, there are a number of other issues. First, there are hundreds, if not thousands of recognizable variations of Chinese (i.e. practically every county in south China has it's own dialect). The second problem, is that with a very few exceptions, these variations have not been systematically categorized.
Of course, Chinese written language can be revived if there's more to add, but I'm really looking for an article for Hanzi: Talk:Chinese_character#Boohoo. It should redirect to Hanzi once the text is transferred/written. --Jiang 06:29, 8 Jan 2004 (UTC)
POV issues
P0M: Point of view questions seem to be popping up. Recently an unidentified user added the following
- Note that Dungan is not shown, and this is an interesting case because even thought Dungan is very closely related to Mandarin, no one considers it "Chinese" because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people outside of China who are not considered Chinese in any sense.
P0M:Whenever you say "everyone" or "nobody", you are taking on an enormous burden of proof. The charts given at:
http://www.chinesedc.com/4WenYi/Language/sino-tibetan1.htm
include Dungan, and minority languages as well.
- Right, and that chart illustrates my point since many of the languages in the chart are clearly not part of the Chinese language. No one considers Burmese, Karen or Tibetan to be Chinese. Dungan is a very interesting case because while it is a Sintic language very closely related to Mandarin, but no one considers it a Chinese language. (They probably would if the Dungan lived in China or used Chinese characters, but they live in Kyghizstan and use Cyrillic.)
- My point is that the social classification system that people use are not tightly connected to the linguistic classification system. So Cantonese is considered Chinese while Dungan isn't.
P0M: I think what you say is rather wu3 duan4, if you will forgive me for saying so. -- Maybe I am a little snippy feeling because you are making me into a "nobody", or at least a "no one."
- Just "editing boldly". Don't take it personally. One thing to keep in mind is that the conceptualization of the Chinese language is a remarkably emotional topic.
Sorry if I sound snippy myself.
P0M: It makes sense to discuss English as a member of the Indo-European language system, and I think it makes sense to discuss Chinese in its larger context too. But in an article on Chinese it would not make much linguistic sense to talk about Tibetan. That's not because they are unconnected, but because they are connected closer to the root. So maybe we need another article to take care of the "taproot" of the Chinese language family and of the related languages families at that basic level.
- Agreed.
P0M: I just had another look at the first paragraph of the Chinese Language article. Whoever conceived the title created a conceptual problem by making it a singular term.
- It's a singular term, because with one exception, Chinese think of it as a singular term.
It would be better if the general reader were to be introduced from the very beginning that what we are really talking about is a kind of a tree that has grown from one ancient root and has branched many times. I think that most Western people with an average level of education know what the Romance languages are, so that makes a very convenient way of explaining how Cantonese is related to Taiwanese is related to.... Western people also understand how difficult it can be for people who speak Australian English to communicate with people who speak Indian English, so the idea of ci4 fang1 yan2 (or whatever you want to call it in Chinese) should not be hard to grasp.
- One of my concerns is that in doing so, one presents the European way of classifying things as "normal" and the very different Chinese way as "abnormal."
- P0M:I would rather have a set of vocabulary to go along with an objective measure of how "far apart" any two speakers are, and a fairly accurate idea of how things came to be as they are. At the very least, given what you said above, the two of us should be able to agree that the word "dialect" misguides things about as perfectly as ever they could be misguided. It's really frustrating when some people are speaking of, e.g., Beijing hua and Sichuan hua as "dialects" and somebody else is speaking of Cantonese and Hakka as "dialects." Nobody is going to get a clear picture if our vocabulary is that sloppy.
- A closely related problem is that one has to be careful to make sure to present things in a way that isn't misleading. The problem with comparing Chinese to the Romance languages is that it gives the somewhat misleading idea that Shanghainese speakers think about Shanghainese in the same way that Spanish speakers think about Spanish, which isn't the case at all. Not to say that one shouldn't compare Chinese to the Romance languages. What I'm saying is that you need to be very explicit in the analogies, Chinese is like the Romance languages in one way, but not in others.
- One analogy that is useful is that had the Roman Empire survived, we wouldn't be talking about Spanish, but rather the Spanish dialect of Romance.
P0M: I don't know what "linguistic consciousness" means, but besides clearing that up perhaps you can explain why Hakka speakers, Wu2 yu3 speakers, etc., have less of it than the Cantonese and Taiwanese.
P0M: One other thing that needs to be made clear to the general reader is that the Chinese written language not only unites the people spread over broad geographical expanses, but also makes available to people, at very little cost, the written heritage of China going back to very early times.
- Like everything else, this is complex.
Reword. Need to emphasize that between Chinese and Tibeto-Burmese is much more murky and a topic of research than the original text appeared to suggest. Roadrunner
P0M: I don't understand what you mean. People have been studying the ancient forms of Chinese and where it came from for decades. Bernard Karlgren was one of the early people who worked in this area and the outline of how Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese are rooted in some earlier language probably got worked out quite some time ago. I can get more information on the subject, but I think most of my books are not at home with me now.
- What I'm trying to say is that Sino-Tibetan is nowhere as well worked out as IE languages and
- P0M: You may be correct. On the other hand, I'd like to see some evidence for that assertion.
Question. What is the source of evolutionary tree? It's radically different from the schema that I'm familar with. Roadrunner
P0M: Do you mean the evolutionary tree that is included in the URL I quoted above? That URL has several bibliographical references right on that page. I would have to copy out the source code for the page to figure some of them out because they have made the Chinese characters show up in such a small size. What evolutionary schema are you familiar with?
- Most of the trees I've seen have Min split off very early in 300 AD and then everyone else start spliting off between 500-700 AD. Also, I've never seen anyone try to associate current spoken variations with ancient ones.
P0M: Where are the trees that you have seen? If somebody else is making a tree that has Men split off in 300 A.D. then how can they not be associating current Min (and its divisions) with ancient Min?