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Genesis of Chinese language? | ||
Tags: Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| xtam1 Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 4861 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 1 of 7 06 October 2013 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just out of curiosity.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) and: http://wals.info/feature/13A?tg_format=map&v1=cfff&v2=cf6f&v 3=cd00 most of languages in the world have no tonal system, or simple. Rest of them use complex tonal system, where tone literally have a strong importance, required for understanding. Like mandarin. So i would like to know exactly why? How it happened? When? For example 3000 (or in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#Xia_Dynasty_.2 8c._2100_.E2.80.93_c._1600_ BC.29) years ago mandarin also was tonal language? What happened that they decided to use tones and not for example more words to distinguish meaning? What happened that they choose pictographs, ideograms instead of any other form? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5605 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes  | Message 2 of 7 06 October 2013 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the usual explanation is that Chinese was 3000 years ago non-tonal, but when the syllables lost its final consonants, they left an echo, namely tones, because it makes a difference for the vowels whether they were for example followed by a voiced or unvoiced consonant.
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| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 4109 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 7 23 October 2013 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Pictographs were used during the Shang Dynasty, however, there is evidence of carvings that have a resemblance
dating to perhaps 6000 BC-ish, but there are no discovered transitions of them to the Shang era so the evidence is shaky. The language lacking any inflections and being nearly purely isolating meant that pictographs could be used as marking word endings and vowel changes would require a much more complex system. Tones appeared as the above member mentioned, but how they came to be used in other languages nearby is an effect of cultural diffusion or convergent evolution. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 7 24 October 2013 at 7:17am | IP Logged | ||
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It's a common misconception that Chinese characters are "pictographs" or "ideographs". Neither is true. With very few exceptions, they are not images of things, and they don't represent ideas. They represent morphemes or syllables. So they're morphosyllabic.
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| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4450 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 7 04 November 2013 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am not a linguist or a historian of languages but it is always a fascinating subject to research how languages
originated. There are many languages that originally have no writing systems until closer to the 20th century. A lot of African languages started out as verbal until the English, French and other Europeans introduced the Latin alphabet. The earliest writing system is probably the Sumerian cuneiform. It is a language with an alphabet. The Europeans starting with the Greeks, Minoans, Romans, etc. all had an alphabet. Into S. Asia the Indians languages had an alphabet as the languages of S-E Asia (Thai, Cambodian, Burmese). Some languages like the Mayans & Egyptians had a mixture of alphabet and pictograms. The Vietnamese switched from using Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet but remain as a tonal language. Without a recording device it would be impossible to tell what a language would have sounded like in the past. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 7 05 November 2013 at 6:57am | IP Logged | ||
While it's true that we can never know for sure, there are many talented scientists that work on reconstructing old pronunciations and we can make some very good guesses. Things like ancient rhyming poems, loan words, spelling mistakes, onomatopoetic expressions, linguistic laws of sound change and descendant languages are all tools that can be used to reconstruct past pronunciations. Here is a poem by 李商隱 read in reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5312 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 7 of 7 07 November 2013 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Norwegian and Swedish have either a law tune or a falling tune on the accented syllable, while the other syllables have high tune. This difference is phonemic. The words with law tune were originally monosyllabic and the others had two or more syllables. But why monosyllabic words were spoken with a different tune is not explained.
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