Altaic Influnce on Mandarin, What is your opinion? Options

[toothlog]

I found these on googles so here goes.....


http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/me...4HF-pIMeKB.html

> I was wondering which of the two languages, Mandarin (Putonghua) and Cantonese (Guangdonghua), actually comes from ancient Chinese?

As far as I know, Cantonese is not the one. It still contains underlying Daic vocabulary because southern Chinese people didn't speak Chinese and adopted it as civilized language later, like Japanese did. Similarly, most northern Chinese people are descendants of Altaic conquerers and Mandarin is strongly influenced by Altaic languages grammatically and phonetically. The historical change from ancient Chinese to Mandarin is traceable, however.

You might be interested in the following articles:
kanji difference
Chinese and Japanese

As I have written in the upper article, Cantonese preserves ancient Chinese vocabulary much better than Mandarin does, and it also preserves codas (syllable-final consonants) well, but these facts don't mean it comes directly from ancient Chinese.

The oldest Chinese language seems purely head-first. Compare the legendary king 帝堯 (title + name, head-first) and Hàn's 武帝 (name + title, head-last), for example. This difference is still observed in Cantonese and Mandarin, such as 鷄公 and 人客 (head-first) in Cantonese and 公鷄 and 客人 (head-last) in Mandarin.









http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/me...tBEtHzlAID.html


> > In addition, linguists don't count loanwords, which help us study foreign languages. Korean and Vietnamese have more Chinese-origin words than Japanese because of thier proximity to China, but all of them have lots of Japanese-made Chinese words such as 経済 (けいざい), 科学 (かがく), and 民主主義 (みんしゅしゅぎ).
>
> So all of those words were Japanese made?

Yes. There are about ten thousand Japanese-made words in Chinese.

> Japanese doesn't even use Japanese numbers anymore.

It was good to throw away the ancient Japanese number system and adopt the Chinese number system because it is one of the best in the world. Why don't you English speakers stop using irregular words such as eleven and twenty and use ten-one and two-ten instead?

> In Korean at least the Korean number system is fully alive and is useable alongside the system borrowed from Chinese.

They can count only up to 99 with native Korean words, and they know the Chinese number system is much better as well as Japanese do.

> How is it justified to say Vietnamese/Korean use more Chinese than Japanese?

About 45% of words in Japanese are Chinese words, both Chinese-made and Japanese-made. I don't mean the number of words in a dictionary, I mean the word counts in a Japanese text. I've read this ratio is 60% or so in Korean. This percentage is decreasing, though, because Koreans are de-Sinicizing their language.

> In anything I've read in Japanese that was a fantasy work, or a record of daily conversation I've seen nothing but onyomi kanji compounds which are all Chinese.

As I have written, there are many Japanese-made Chinese words in Japanese and in Chinese, and it's not very easy to spot them. Some words are very clear because they are based on kun-readings, such as 取消 and 手続. A funny example is 中華人民共和国 (People's Republic of China). 中華 is a native Chinese word, but 人民 and 共和国 are Japanese-made words. It's true, however, that Japanese has imported many Chinese words - but so what? I'm sure no one can write a thesis in English without Latin- or French-origin words.

> I think Japanese is dominated by Chinese language and culture.

I don't blame you. Not many Westerners can distinguish China and Japan. ;-) Having lots of Japanese-made Chinese words, Japanese is not dominated by Chinese as you think. It's no wonder Japan is culturally close to China because they are geographically close, but the difference between China and Japan is bigger than that between, say, Italy and England.

There are many differences in religion, foods, family system, social system, etc. For instance, Chinese are atheists/Confucianists/Taoists, and Japanese are animists/Buddhists/Shintoists. I'd like to focus on art here.

The biggest impact Japan made before World War II was on paintings. Japonism appeared in the mid-19th century when Japan opened its ports and began exporting artistic products to the West, and you should never underrate this movement, which has completely changed the history of art. This has nothing to do with Chinese art. Japonism broke the limitations of Western art that few Western painters could notice - realism, symmetry, orthogonality, and Christianity - and produced Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Secessionism, and so on. Japan is still good at visual art, such as manga and anime. They have nothing to do with China, either.

You might be interested in comparing Western crests and Japanese crests. It's clearly the latter that are cool and modern. Have a look at Louis Vuitton for example.

> I know Manchu is similar to Altaic languages because it's spoken by Mongolians who were absorbed into China

Manchus are not Mongolians, but both of them are Altaic people. China didn't absorb Altaic people actually; Ancient Chinese were wiped out and Altaic people just conquered northern China. In other words, northern Chinese people are Sinicized Altaic people.

> but I've never heard that Mandarin Chinese has any connection with Altaic languages?

The Mandarin word order is strongly influenced by Altaic languages. Daic languages and ancient Chinese are head-first, while Altaic languages are head-last. Southern Chinese languages are head-first with some head-last rules, and Mandarin is a mixture of head-first and head-last. Read HASHIMOTO Mantarô's works if available.

[jfung79]

What does it mean if something is a "Japanese-made word"? Also, what do they mean by "head-first" and "head-last"?

[Adee]

What does it mean if something is a "Japanese-made word"?  Also, what do they mean by "head-first" and "head-last"?

From the excerpt I think it means words that are Chinese words or vocabularies that were loan from the Japanese.

As far as I know, Cantonese is not the one. It still contains underlying Daic vocabulary because southern Chinese people didn't speak Chinese and adopted it as civilized language later, like Japanese did. Similarly, most northern Chinese people are descendants of Altaic conquerers and Mandarin is strongly influenced by Altaic languages grammatically and phonetically.

What a load of BS....infact all of the excerpt are BS, obviously the person written this doesn't know what he's talking about. (IMG:http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/sure.gif)

BTW your links are not working.

[toothlog]

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/me...4HF-pIMeKB.html

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/me...tBEtHzlAID.html

[whoareyou]

northern chinese could not have been wiped out
study the primary texts. what else are you going to base it on, imagination? artifacts perhaps i suppose, but those lean toward chinese population continuity as well - hahaha

wishful thinking

[simon_86]

thats interesting

[whoareyou]

also, the 1st 1st dude, the leader of all the tribe, the one who gave us our identity, huang di, is head last

explain plz otherwise i think it's a gg

actually that might also exist under a head first system, i don't know chinese or linguistics well enough

but about qin shi huangdi

at first i thot the imperial huangdi is suspect but is it? (fyi huangdi the progenitor of our tribe is 'yellow' di, not the same as the imperial huang di)

explain, as this is from Qin

perhaps we should look at titles from Zhou records. or even Shang records. it could be that Chinese was always head-last, for the frame of reference referred to by the author, and that only in the south was it reversed probaly because of contact with non Chinese

If originally head last, Chinese could even be Altaic, in which case those who were killed in the north, if there ever were, would not even be Chinese, and from the start Chinese have been an Altaic people, and this Altaic chauvinist nonsense is quite ironic misplaced and laughable

the only ethnic massacres enough to be genocidal in north China have been against non Chinese, for better or worse. thanks, and unless you claim han to be altaic, i think it rather hard to annihilate the population in order to replace with altaic, seeing as Chinese are originally in the north, and did not establish a large southern population base until well into the Tang

sry for bits and pieces, tired, but this seems quite, quite full of bull$hit

This post has been edited by whoareyou: Mar 1 2005, 07:53 PM