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Interesting Chinese/Hungarian similarity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| 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 1 of 97 24 August 2007 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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I realised a strange coincidence the other day, that the Hungarian and Mandarin word for 'woman' has almost the same sound.
Hungarian : nő Mandarin : nü3 (ren2) It might be a coincidence, and I'm not very familiar with the history of Hunagarian tribes while they were still in Asia, so I just wanted to know if anyone has some more information on this.. whether the influence could be possible. Also, would anyone know what the respective words for 'woman' would be in Khanty and Mansi languages aswel as Mongolian maybe? Just out of sheer interest. There are some other similarities between Mandarin and Hungarian that I noticed, but this one is the most interesting one. 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 2 of 97 24 August 2007 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Synchronicity is always fun, but don't get too excited. You can find coincidental similarities between any two languages.
By the way, here's an article on a bilingual Chinese-Hungarian school that's opened in Budapest. :).http://english.hanban.edu.cn/market/HanBanE/411953.htm 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 3 of 97 24 August 2007 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, as Captain Haddock says, there are lots of coincidences across many different languages, but that's all. As the word "bad" that one Australian language has to mean precisely "bad".
I've studied both languages and I never got the feeling that, beyond some coincidences, they have much in common. Instead, there's a book I bought some time ago from Amazon about the similarities and possible relationship between Hungarian and Malay, and here the author gives many similar roots to support his theory of a common ancestor. To tell the truth, I still haven't read, but its title says something about the "Barang people" and the similarities between Indonesian/Malay and Hungarian. Others tried to find a link between Sumerian and Hungarian (see some articles by Fred Hamori on the network, I read them some years ago). And then there's the most solid link between Hungarian (and the whole Finno-Ugric stock) and Altaic (ie, Turkish and others). 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 4 of 97 24 August 2007 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's more likely to be coincidence as the others have posted, but ultimately all of may be wrong anyway regardless of what comparative linguists know so far.
All that we have in some spheres of comparative linguistics are educated guesses and it's hard to pinpoint things that aren't obvious because of lack of records of old languages. Proto-languages by definition are made up of educated guesses based on certain assumptions and patterns observed in what are believed to be cognate daughter languages. Sometimes the trouble becomes a point of determining which languages should be cognate (and therefore their characteristics should be included in the analysis) and which ones shouldn't be. If you're interested, I found this information about nő from the etymological database of Sergei Starostin. LINK: http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?root=config He was part of a Russian school of comparative linguists who do research into Nostratic and other "super-families" of languages. Their research runs counter to the traditional families put forth by linguists who believe it to be unprovable we could demonstrate the genetic relationship between language groups such as Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, etc. URALIC ńi "woman" (Ezra Mordvin) ni "woman" (Khanty) nē "woman" (Mansi - dialectal) ńe "woman" (Nenets - Obdorsk dialect) neä "woman" (Selkup) ALTAIC žeŋge "elder brother's wife" (Kazakh) yenge "aunt" (Turkish) saŋas "elder brother's wofe" (Yakut) nagsa, nagasxaj "maternal relative" (Buryat) nagac "maternal relative" (Khalkha - standard Mongolian) neŋńe "sweetheart" (Ewen) non "younger brother or sister" (Literary Manchu) nui "sister" (Korean) INDO-EUROPEAN yātar "wife of the husband's brother" (Old Indian) jente "wife of the husband's brother" (Lithuanian) jątrew "wife of the husband's brother" (Polish - obsolete as of 16th or 17th century) DRAVIDIAN nānjo "wife's younger sister" (Kuwi) nāsgo "elder brother's wife" (Kurukh) It seems that the common thread is that it denotes a female relative, rather than the general word "woman" By the way the word for "woman" in Turkish and Mongolian are: kadın (Turkish) emegtey khün "woman" (literally - female man); okhin "girl", "young woman" (Khalkha - N.B. My Roman transcription of Mongolian Cyrillic) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 5 of 97 24 August 2007 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Great post Chung. As allways.
Thanks for the link aswell. It is a very interesting read. The similarities in this case between Mansi, Khanty and Hungarian are quite striking. From what you know now about these three languages, would Hungarians be able to communicate at least to some degree with the speakers of these 2 languages? As to the Mandarin/Hungarian coincidence. When the words nő/nü3 are written it might seem like a coincidence, but when you pronounce them they do sound incredibly close given the fact how far apart the two languages are. What do you personally think..could this be a common distant link? as I said..this is not the only coincidence I found between these two languages. I noticed at least one more and I hope to find more, when I start studying Mandarin seriously as this is an unexpected discovery :-) Again out of interest, where out of Asia did the Hungarian tribes come from? 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 6 of 97 24 August 2007 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually, if you look in an etymological dictionary of Mandarin or Hungarian, you will see old forms of these words and they'll be most certainly different. I found an etymology for the Mandarin word (in this thesis: *nraʔ > nrjoX > nü3 ‘woman’ . You see that it doesn't look so much like the Hungarian word anymore. 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 7 of 97 24 August 2007 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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The risk of Starostin's or Ruhlen's methods of comparing hundreds of languages at the same time but just taking sound and semantic similarities is that you can also use the same process to demonstrate links between any language. In the end, we're dealing with a limited set of sounds, considering all the languages of the world, and then try with different meanings. No matter which one because you can always jump to other related meaning: mother > aunt > sister of the aunt > sister > brother > friend > neighbour > ...
I don't mean all the work done by these authors is just nonsense, just that it's very difficult to know if that's how really happened. As breck says, if the sounds are too similar, then it's probably not due to common origin. But if it's very different, how do you know it's real or not. Besides, we must keep in mind the areal diffusion which disseminates words, grammar and phonology across many different languages. That's why there's such a concentration of tonal languages in Asia, probably not due to common ancestry. More reflexions... Why is it that we can find so many common words and instead syntax is so different across these languages. Isn't syntax less prone to diverge compared to vocabulary and phonology? Just compare Indoeuropean languages (for instance, mostly flexive), Altaic (mostly agglutinative), Sino-tibetan (sinic are mostly isolating). Ok, these are traits that evolve and what today is a language with preference for agglutination, tomorrow can evolve into isolation. But why can't we find these remotely related languages also in the same stage? Edited by joan.carles on 24 August 2007 at 5:33pm 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 8 of 97 25 August 2007 at 1:51am | IP Logged | ||
I think Breckes hits it on the nose here. Most languages that have diverged from a common ancient ancestor do not resemble each other in their modern forms. However, by applying consistent phonology shifts to words, in the ways languages are known to actually change, you can trace much or most of the two language's vocabulary back to a single source (and not just a word here and there). For example, Hindi doesn't much look like English at all. However, through a long series of consistent sound and morphology changes, you can trace the core vocabulary of English through its Germanic and Latin roots back to Proto-Indo-European. You can then trace Hindi words through their Indo-Aryan roots all the way back to the very same Proto-Indo-European words. Obviously, demonstrating a connection between two languages can be a lot of work, and the modern forms of languages provide more coincidences than clues. :) Edited by Captain Haddock on 25 August 2007 at 1:53am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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