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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 89 of 97 21 December 2008 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello everyone.
Even though my original theory was and is very improbable, I'm happy that this thread is still going on. Trying to prove that Hungarian and Standard Mandarin have the same ancestor based on the similarity of one word is a very difficult thing and it is more of a small research for me than an actual advocacy. It is however quite interesting to see, which words, if any, did Hungarian borrow from Chinese and vice-versa. Hungarian is an agglutinating language and Standard mandarin (as I can't speak for the rest of the Chinese languages) is an isolating language. Chinese has some small agglutinating features and maybe Hungarian has some features of isolating character, but one is mainly isolating and the other mainly agglutinative. This puts these two languages almost into structural opposition and makes a possible ancestry (within a reasonable time distance) even less probable. In my humble opinion, the grammar structure of a language undergoes changes slower than the change in vocabulary, so as it has been mentioned before, if the Hungarian and Mandarin words for 'woman' at present resemble so much, it is highly probable, that it is a coincidence. However:) I have noticed another similarity, which I would be glad to discuss if anyone would be interested: I am by no means an expert, but Cantonese is considered to be a very conservative Chinese language, which has retained the full tonal split of the 4 Middle Chinese tones into 8, and the -p -t -k syllable endings, which were also present in Middle Chinese. So by analyzing Cantonese we are much closer in time to the possible Sino-Hungarian influence. I have asked Cantonese speakers out of sheer interest, what the word for 'woman' is and they said: neoi5 jan4*2 which when written does not look like much, but when pronounced it sounded familiar and when I re-read this thread, I remembered why. Because Serpent wrote, that the Finnish word for 'woman' is 'nainen' which when pronounced sounds very close to the Cantonese pronunciation. I speak no Cantonese, but any Cantonese speaker here can confirm this. So now for me the question is, how is it possible, that there are two similarities of the same word in these languages that are so distant in their structure. If it would be a similarity of two different words it would be again a probable coincidence, but since it is the same word again (and as I mentioned before, it is not just an ordinary word, but a word that slowly undergoes changes) I find it very interesting. I also wanted to know, which of the two is more conservative (which resembles more to the proto-ugrofinnic language) Finnish or Hungarian? I also had a discussion with one professor, where he told me, that there is actually a word of Slavic origin, which can be traced into a lot of languages, including Mandarin, Hungarian, Cantonese. It is 'med' in Slovak, which stands for 'Honey': Slovak (all Slavic languages that I know have more or less the same pronunciation)- med Hungarian - méz Mandarin - mi4 Cantonese - mat6 Italian - mele French - miel Spanish - miel Portuguese - mel Latin - mel In Vietnamese I can't find the translation but I remember it was something like 'mật' In English it is of course honey, but there is also the word 'mead' which means something else, but is made out of honey :-) Same thing in German where it is called 'der Met'. But another professor told me, that it was actually the other way around. He said that it was us, who took the word from Chinese. If it was indeed the other way around, my question is, who brought the word (and the craft) into Europe. Because it seems to be a very well known word, I'd be more inclined to say, that it was a tribe or a group of tribes after the first barbarian tribes came to Europe around 375. But I would also like to know, where were did the Hungarians learn it, since they obviously know the word too. They came into Europe much later and probably learned the word from the Slavs living in this area since 'méz' resembles the Slavic word for honey 'med' quite a lot. But then again, there is a change from '-d' to '-z' where some of the other Slavic words did not change at all or barely when they entered the Hungarian language, so they might have indeed learned the word while they were still in Asia again posing the question who did they learn it from. I'm sorry, if this last paragraph was slightly off topic, but I found this link very interesting. 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 90 of 97 21 December 2008 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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According to Starostin's etymological database, the reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric ancestor of Finnish "nainen" is *naje. (cf. Hungarian "nász" - NOT "nõ").
Starostin hypothesizes that Proto-Finno-Ugric *naje possibly came about as compound of a *ana + *je. *Ana (or *ańa) in turn is linked to Hungarian "ángy" ("anya" apparently is a different story and comparative linguists make a fuss among themselves about whether "anya" is related to "ángy" or not). From what little I know of Cantonese, 女人(neoi5 jan4*2) is a compound of "woman" + "person". What do specialists believe to have been the predecessors of 女 and 人? Can one posit a link between *ana + *je (at best it's just educated guesswork in itself) and 女 + 人? 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 91 of 97 21 December 2008 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Again from Starostin et al's database, the reconstruction of "honey" in Indo-European is as follows:
Latin, Welsh: mel Albanian: mjal' French: miel Hittite: milit-n Old English: mil: mil-dēaw = "honey-dew" Armenian: meɫr Old Greek: méli-itos Starostin et al. posit links to Altaic, Dravidian and Finnic e.g. ALTAIC bal (Azeri, Kazakh, Turkish, Tatar) ḿalā- = "to smear with oil" (Mongolian) malaŋGu = "sesame oil", "plant oil" (Literary Manchu) (?) moro-: moromi = "undistilled sake", "soy sauce" (Japanese) DRAVIDIAN māl = "liquor" (Naiki) mēl = "liquor" (Parji) māl (mālv-, mān_r_-) = "to be confused"; "illusion", "delusion", "confusion" (Tamil) FINNIC maito = sap (Finnish - dialectal. N.B. "Maito" in Standard Finnish means "milk") 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 92 of 97 21 December 2008 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lastly, "mead" seems to be unique to Indo-European according to Starostin et al.
Tocharian: mīt "honey" Old Indian (Sanskrit): mádhu Avestan: madu- "berry-wine" Greek: methu "wine" Czech, Slovak: med "honey" Russian: мёд ('mee-yod') "honey" Latvian, Lithuanian: medus "honey" English: mead German: Met Breton: mez The Hungarian word "méz" appears to belong to a distinct Finno-Ugric etymology, according to Starostin et al. However, Collinder, 1977 hints at a link between the Finno-Ugric words below with the Indo-European words above. Proto-Finno-Ugric: *mete Estonian, Finnish: mesi Mordvin: med́ Udmurt: mu Komi: ma Hungarian: méz The Finnish Turkologist, Martti Räsänen believed that there was a connection between the Turkic words for honey (e.g. "bal", "pal", "pil") and the Sanskrit word "madhu" (see my preceding post with some examples of these Turkic words). In the end, the whole situation is confusing with linguists putting forth differing views on the relationship between words for "honey" or "mead" in Eurasiatic languages. Maybe there is a connection, maybe not. What I would like to know is whether it all really matters as this kind of research just seems to be a way to keep comparative linguists employed :-P 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 93 of 97 22 December 2008 at 9:55am | IP Logged | |||||
If I remember correctly comparative linguists have assumed that Balto-Finnic languages (e.g. Estonian, Finnish) are more conservative than Ugric ones. If you look at reconstructions in Proto-Uralic or Proto-Finno-Ugric, the modern forms in Balto-Finnic languages seem more similar than the modern forms in Ugric languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sima Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6054 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English | Message 94 of 97 31 December 2008 at 5:44am | IP Logged | |||||
I would suggest that the similarities between Hungarian and Chinese languages are more of loan words than grammar. An analogue of larger scale is the relation between Chinese and Japanese (agglutinative). Honey was one of the words that I mentioned in an ealier post. Thank Chung for the details. It might be an example of old and basic words. Do you guys have any clue about the other words: vegetables (zoldseg), leather (bor), thank (kosz), thank you (koszonet, koszonom)? I don't speak Hungarian. So I based my interpretation on similar English/French pronunciation, as well as online Hungarian dictionary (with pronunciation). Not so accurate. But matching so many in less than 100 tourist words was a quite high percentage. In the case of honey, you can actually see it is not a coincident. Besides, they are all related to trade and crafts, two areas that words are likely used by another people. For example, later westward-moving Turkish call tea exactly same as Chinese (cha). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gül Baba Triglot Newbie Hungary erikreadingbooks.blo Joined 6659 days ago 17 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, Romanian, English Studies: Turkish | Message 95 of 97 10 January 2009 at 7:33am | IP Logged | |||||
Interestingly Sajnovics who proposed that Hungarian is related to Lappish also stated that Hungarian is related to Chinese :
Some chinese words reading backwords can be identified as a Hungarian one "...seu retrograde legantur, cum Ungaricis prorsus convenire" Also has a list of simmilarities:
According to the author The Hungarian személy comes from szem +élek (eye + I live) Sajnovics is considered the founder of finno-ugric linguistics. Edited by Gül Baba on 10 January 2009 at 7:36am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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