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Interesting Chinese/Hungarian similarity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| 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 9 of 97 25 August 2007 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In general, I don't dismiss Starostin's findings outright. What I find interesting is that when "Indo-European" first came about, no one in particular was looking for "Indo-European." It began when a judge (can't remember his name) in India noticed than certain words in Sanskrit and Greek or Latin showed noticeable similarities.
In other words, he just noted down similarities as a non-linguist. It was only through continued work by linguists that something coherent called Proto-Indo-European came about, based originally on those first set of patterns/similarities noted by the judge. In a way it reminds me of what Starostin and Greenberg did. The only difference is that their research happened when there's an established view that certain language families exist. Naturally, the implications of Starostin's and Greenberg's research run counter to findings of other linguists, so there's always an argument. For me it seems to be more a battle about personal turf and egos, than about linguistics. Realistically, the classification of languages doesn't change the character or usage of its language. It's just a way to group languages. With such things being rather entrenched in comparative linguistics, it's not surprising that linguists such as Starostin and Greenberg are criticized by others. No expert likes to have his/her theory or life's work challenged. However, I do agree with joan.carles' point that it can be hard to show that languages evolved in a certain way. On the other hand, I think that it seems a little odd that we're taught that the established view is the way to go, and that other interpretations or approaches must be treated very skeptically or even discarded out of hand. That seems a little hasty to me when it comes to comparative linguistics, since much of it is educated guesswork to begin with. ****** Vlad, From what I have read, a modern Hungarian would have difficulty communicating with a native speaker of Khanty or Mansi if each person speaks only his or her native dialect. On the other hand, a Hungarian would have an easier time learning Khanty or Mansi than anyone else because of similarities in vocabulary and grammar. I guess that it's possible that the Hungarian and Mandarin words for woman are distantly related, but it's very unlikely. Personally, what would it matter if they were? I don't mean this in a mean way, but ultimately, we're all human beings who likely evolved from some sort of primate. We may speak different languages, but that doesn't really change the rest of the human makeup that much. From what I have gathered, the Hungarian tribes were a real mix. Conventionally, it is assumed that Hungarians are Finno-Ugrian because of the characteristics of the language. They must have originated as a distinct Finno-Ugrian people around the southern Urals or the junction of the Volga and Kama rivers. However, Eurasia is a big piece of land, and when you break it down, what would happen if a Scythian or Turko-Mongolian tribesman fell for a Finno-Ugrian tribeswoman or vice-versa? Nor do characteristics of a language necessarily explain if tribe X got absorbed by tribe Y. It's quite probable that ancient Hungarians had elements of Finno-Ugrian, Turkic, Iranian and Mongolian ethnic groups, but their language for one reason or another was much to closer to a Finno-Ugric one than anything else. Another way that I look at it is that in North America people are descendants of immigrants. Just because most of them speak a form of American or Canadian English, it does now mean that each North American shares an ethnic link with Britons who spoke older forms of English. In much the same way with Hungarians, just because they speak a tongue that is Finno-Ugric, it doesn't mean that we must assume that the ancestors of Hungarians didn't include people of ethnic groups who didn't speak Finno-Ugric languages. 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 10 of 97 26 August 2007 at 4:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's one of the things I had in mind..basically whether our ancestors had developed one way of oral communication and then spread to the rest of the world (with the 'proto' language then mutating on the way), or have spread to the world and at some point in different places autonomous languages started to develop. I personally think the former is more probable. It's quite difficult for the higher primates (not sure whether this is the word) to develop a consistent oral language as such.. To develop several different languages in different parts of the world almost simultaneously is less probable in my eyes. Did you read anything on this topic? I know that the links between some languages are so distant that most of them have to be traced way back to even see a hint of connection (the mentioned Hindi - Greek example), but some connections are very obvious. For instance the word for 'mother' can have the form 'Mama' in English, German, Slovak, Russian, Italian, Mandarin and so on.. Some words change very quickly and some words don't change at all. (taking Chung's nice example of AAAA > AAAB > AABB > ABBB > BBBB as an explanation for the change). For instance the personal pronouns in Czech, Slovak, Polish and Russian languages (Ja, Ty, On, Ona, My, Vy, Oni) are absolutely the same even after so many years of separation. Now of course they belong to the same language family, but to me it seems at least interesting that the pronouns didn't even 'flinch' after such a long time, where other words have altered so much. So I say..There is a chance, that the Hungarian (and Mansi and Khanty) sounds for 'woman' could be related to the Mandarin sound for 'woman'. It could be a coincidence as hell, but it also doesn't have to be. The other small similarities (very small actually and I would not notice them at all if it wasn't for the rest I found...but three small similarities make up one ok similarity in my eyes:-)) that I noticed are: The Chinese character for 'Day' is a pictograph of a sun. The Hungarian word for 'day' is 'nap' which has the meaning of 'sun' or 'day' The Chinese character for 'tomorrow' is a pictograph of Sun and Moon. The Hungarian word for tomorrow is 'Holnap' which if you take apart consists of the words Hol(d) - nap Hold - moon Nap - sun I think there are several languages that use the expression 'Sun' for 'Day' and 'Moon' for 'Month' in one way or the other, so I'm not thrilled..weren't it for the other similarities. I am not a linguist and I know very little about Mandarin. I know I might be terribly wrong in what I write, but I just share my observations. Starting October I will be studying Mandarin full time at the Charles univ. in Prague, so maybe I will come across more things. As for the Hungarian tribes: I read somewhere about Hungarians and the Ugro-finnic gene. One study has been done and it said, that present day Hungarians have so many typical Slavic genes in them (no surprise given their present location), that they could technically be considered Slavs. The study actually said that Slovaks have more Ugro-finnic genes in them then the Hungarians themselves, which was very funny, because the Slovak-Hungarian relations aren't the best. So their culture has been preserved over the generations, but the Hungarians genetically have changed a lot. 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 11 of 97 26 August 2007 at 9:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Probable or not, the reason we talk about language families based on unique proto-languages is because that's what the evidence shows. It appears that all the world's languages emerged as unrelated proto-languages around 4000 BC. There's no evidence to suggest otherwise, however reasonable the idea might seem.
This is a bit of a red herring; it's thought that the first nonsense syllables to come out of a baby's mouth are most likely to resemble that sound and be associated with the mother.
It shouldn't be too hard to find out. See what the words are in Old Hungarian and Classical Chinese. Are they more similar? You could go even farther and see what the reconstructed word in Proto-Uralic is. And whatever sound shifts "mansi" has gone through will probably apply to most other Hungarian words, so you can see if those resemble Mandarin words in a systematic way or not.
These are good observations, but as you note, nothing terribly surprising. Pretty much every culture around the world closely associates the sun with the notion of day (for obvious reasons). Edited by Captain Haddock on 27 August 2007 at 3:24am 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 12 of 97 27 August 2007 at 2:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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When it comes to trying to do research about a proto-language, the attitude is often one where the only way it truly exists is if it's demonstrable or provable.
I remember watching a documentary about the arguments over "Proto-World" and one skeptical linguist boiled it down to the point that while it's attractive and perhaps believable that all of the world's languages descended from one language, it's virtually unprovable with current methods. The implication seems to be that its existence is hard to believe because of a lack of proof. This is the crux of the matter. If it can be proven, then it can exist. If it can't be proven, then it can't exist. To me this is the negative side of "science" since sometimes to discover new things, every now and then, one has to take a chance, do research and find out that things can fit even when they didn't seem obvious at the beginning. This attitude reminds me of a police investigation or a lawyer. It's not so much what happened, as much as proving what happened. I think that it responds to a human need to rationalize or confirm the validity of something. The point about the relative lack of change in pronouns is also remarkable to Greenberg and those who support the idea of super-families. I think that if you run a search in Starostin's database looking for words related to "I" and "you", you'll see a general trend emerge within the otherwise unrelated language families. Personally, I lean more to Starostin's position than his opponents since it seems plausible. Moreover it sometimes helps me when studying languages since I start to pick out similarities between the languages that I study or recall things that I've seen before in my earlier studying. However, I also realize that it's related to my esoteric interest in comparative linguistics. In general, the argument over language classification in my view is little more than a form of "filing" the world's languages. Almost an administrative matter. :-P Unless someone is chauvanistic, my language being related to a bunch of poor hunters or a bunch of dominating empire-builders doesn't affect me much one way or another. 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 13 of 97 27 August 2007 at 2:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It shouldn't, all in all, all our ancestors were 'poor hunters' and the first human languages were developed buy these guys long before any empire developed, namely Sumerians or maybe the Indus Valley peoples. Edited by joan.carles on 27 August 2007 at 2:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 14 of 97 30 August 2007 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6342 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 15 of 97 31 August 2007 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In French: Compagnon
In Chinese: Péng yôu Is it a coincidence? Both words almost mean the same thing and their pronounciation are very similar. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Frisco Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6856 days ago 380 posts - 398 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 16 of 97 31 August 2007 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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That would be a bit of a stretch, Asiafeverr.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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