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Interesting Chinese/Hungarian similarity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6333 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 33 of 97 04 September 2007 at 1:37am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm also eager to find a conclusive demonstration about the common origin of both languages. I'm definitely not an expert of these two languages, though I've studied them and can read more or less in Hungarian. A part from the fact that I can't find many ressemblances, my question is, what are all these similarities? Some similar words here, some common phonemes there? Is that all? Personally I think there can be links between Japanese and Hungarian as there can between tagalo and Zulu, I mean, as long as there´s no a serious study backing this or other possibilities, everything is possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 34 of 97 04 September 2007 at 3:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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The link's been posted here before, but Wikipedia's excellent Comparative Method article gives you all the tools you need to look for a relationship. :)
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| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 35 of 97 04 September 2007 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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An interesting read:-)
So I have two small conclusions based on what I read. I know close to nothing about comparative linguistics, so they are only based on what I know about Hungarian and Mandarin right now (very little in the second case) and this article: Quote from article: 'The definition of relatedness implies that even if two languages are quite similar in their vocabularies, they are not necessarily closely related. As a result of heavy borrowing over the years from Arabic into Persian, Modern Persian in fact takes more of its vocabulary from Arabic than from its direct ancestor, Proto-Indo-Iranian.[4]. But under the definition just given, Persian is considered to be descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian, and not from Arabic' So this just about nailed my theory about Mandarin Hungarian relation based on the similarity of one word :-) But: Wiki article quote nr. 2: 'Caution needs to be exercised to avoid including borrowings or false cognates in the list, which could skew or obscure the correct data.[17] For example, there is a similarity between English taboo ([tæbu]) and the five Polynesian forms. Though this may seem to be a cognate, showing that English is genetically related to the Polynesian languages, it is not, as the similarity is due to the fact that English borrowed the word from Tongan.[18] This problem can usually be overcome by using basic vocabulary such as kinship terms, numbers, body parts, pronouns, and other basic terms ' Nő/nű3/Woman is a very basic term..but for it to be preserved in such an unchanged manner it would be very very strange indeed..but still, there was at least something in this article, that doesn't prove me wrong. what do you guys think? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6333 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 36 of 97 04 September 2007 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sure, it's a possibility based on what you write right before about taking kinship terms and so on. But although kinship terms are normally not borrowed, they are indeed, and this doesn't imply a relationship. Take for example the words for 'brother' in the romance languages of the Iberian peninsula, namely Spanish, Portuguese, Galician and Catalan. Curiously they don't come from the Latin root 'frater' (frère, frate, fratello...) but from the word 'German-': Spanish: hermano (silent h) Portuguese: irmão Galician: irmán Catalan: germà If you take this word isolatedly you could infer that any of these languages is not romance but any other thing, who knows (the etymology of German is not yet known). We soon can demonstrate that that´s not true because of the wealth of other words that are cognates to Latin roots in these four languages, alongside structure. But if you only take some words like Nő/nű3, even if they are kinship terms, then you run the risk to jump to similar wrong conclusions. The same for number two in Indonesian, 'dua', does this prove that Indonesian is related to Indoeuropean (two English/dos Spanish/deux French/do Farsi...)? After such a long time after the separation, languages can not be compared only by taking some words and expect to find similarities, but a more thorough and complete set of data must be taken into account (linguistic, archaeology, history) to reach any reasonable conclusion. Edited by joan.carles on 04 September 2007 at 2:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 37 of 97 04 September 2007 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find that the problem is more a reflection of the egos of linguists nowadays. I think that the best way is to be balanced about things.
On one hand, I don't advocate the full reclassification of all languages as espoused by Greenberg, Ruhlen and the Nostraticists. On the other hand, I find that the skepticism of most other linguists (i.e. their opponents) to be strange. Why are the "splitters" (i.e. those who want to separate languages into as many families as possible) so resistant to looking into the claims of the "lumpers" (i.e. those who want to group languages into as few families as possible.) Would be it so harmful for the "splitters" to indeed investigate the findings of the "lumpers"? If the "lumpers'" hypotheses can be proven incorrect, so then they're wrong. But immediate dismissal and skepticism doesn't do much. On one hand, the splitters insist on rigorous "proof" that macro-families exist, but then don't seem to insist on such rigorous "proof" when dismissing the findings of the lumpers who suggest differently. It seems a bit hypocritical. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| breckes Triglot Groupie Belgium Joined 6799 days ago 84 posts - 89 votes Speaks: French*, English, Russian Studies: Italian, Dutch, Swedish | Message 38 of 97 04 September 2007 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What the "splitters" dismiss is the proof of the existence of the macro-families, not the existence itself. And usually they do provide arguments against these "proofs". I assume that most of them would agree to say that there are known families of languages that are related, but there is still no satisfying proof of these relations.
To establish such relations, you have to compare reconstructed proto-languages for these families, since if two modern languages of different families are related, the proto-languages of their families must be related more closely than the modern languages. So the problem is first to reconstruct proto-languages of known families, and then to find regular correspondences between the proto-languages. The critiques against proofs of macro-families are often among 1) that the comparison is between modern languages and not proto-languages; 2) that the proto-languages have not yet been (or cannot be) sufficiently well studied; 3) that the found correspondences are not regular. For example, the similarity of nő and nü3 cannot prove a relation between Hungarian and Mandarin, because of 1) (we should look at the proto-languages : ?? for Finno-Ugrian languages and *nraʔ for Chinese) and 3) (we should look at more than one word, and find regular correspondences). Edited by breckes on 04 September 2007 at 4:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 39 of 97 04 September 2007 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The Nostraticists do take the established families and their proto-languages and proceed from there. In other words, they're trying to play by the same rules as the "splitters" and trying to find regular correspondences in different families based on what is already attested and reliably reconstructed. Admittedly, Nostrastic studies only began in the 20th century and haven't been around as long as studies into smaller but established families such as Indo-European (18th century), Uralic (18th century) or Afro-Asiatic (19th century).
Greenberg and Ruhlen look at the modern languages and then do mass lexical comparisons. They spend much less time with using the proto-forms, and thus aren't playing by the same rules as the "splitters" So far, the research isn't conclusive, but constant dismissal of the proof every step of the way seems a bit hypocritical. Indo-European study itself took a few centuries to develop and indeed is still evolving. Who knows where the "lumpers'" research will lead? Yet to dismiss it as a dead-end from the outset seems presumptious. I say let the lumpers do their work, and if it leads nowhere, so what? We'll still have the splitters' classifications out there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 40 of 97 05 September 2007 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, the difference to me is that the "lumpers" and the "splitters" are not on even terms when it comes to some situations. Chinese (or Japanese) and Hungarian are very different, linguistically, ethnically, and historically. The burden of proof would lie with the lumpers then. Just like if you excavated two different villages with different architecture and pottery styles in two different parts of the world, there'd be a certain burden of proof required to satisfactorily claim they belonged to the same civilization. Of course, any genuine discovery of a linkage is worth noting. :)
Yes, the "establish correspondence sets" is a crucial second step once you've found some possible cognates. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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