From: chou@cs.washington.edu (Pai Hsiang Chou)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.taiwan
Subject: Re: Language
Date: 30 Aug 92 23:04:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: beaver.1992Aug30.230459.2115
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle

In article <1992Aug30.193011.22704@wuecl.wustl.edu> anw1@cec1.wustl.edu (Aaron Wong) writes:
>
>Holo and Mandarin (and all the other Chinese languages) are derived from some
>ancient Chinese. No one speaks ancient Chinese now. Efforts have been made to 
>re-construct the old language but we can never be exactly sure of how it used
>to sound like. This is because the written language is not phonetic. No big
>loss, since we retained the meaning of the literatures.
>
>In other words, Mandarin, Holo, Cantonese, Hakka.... are all siblings of the
>same deviation tree. Language development is too gradual for us to say exactly
>which one is older and one is younger.


No, they are not all derived the same way.
The Mandarin family is a mixture of Han and their northern
neighbors.  The ruler gets to decide the "standard"
pronunciation -- often eliminate the sounds they can't
pronounce, adjust the pronunciation to suit their own accents,
and add words from their own language.
For example, zan2men0 "we (including the addressee)" came
from Manchurian.

The southern languages like Cantonese and H"ol"o are multiply
sinitized languages.   That is, the northern influx is one-way.

H"ol"o and Cantonese both fossilize sounds from the north
in different eras.  That is, there are multiple pronunciations
for the same Han character, or it could be different words for
the same meaning, usually "colloquial" vs. "academic" contrasts.
The colloquial reading is from an earlier era, and
the academic reading is from a more recent era.  The Mandarin
family, on the other hand, only has puo4yin1zi4 -- different
words and different pronunciations written using the same Hanzi,
but not multiple fossilized sounds written with the same Hanzi.


Some contrasts of pronunciations from different era:

___________|__________colloquial_vocab____|___academic_reading___|
Word         original H"ol"o     Jin         Song
"male"        [=da-bo]([=ja])                [/lam]
"female"      [=ja\vo]                       [\lu]
"husband"     [-ang]                         [-qong]
"wife"        [\vo]                          [-ce]
"three"                        [-sna]        [-san]
"eight"                        [,bue]        [,bal]
"mountain"                     [-snua]       [-san]
"open"                         [-kui]        [-kai]
"flower"                       [-hue]        [-hua]
"person"      [/lang]                        [/lin]([/zin])
"flow"                         [/lau]        [/liu]
"white"                        ['be]         [,bieg]
"snow"                         [,se]         [,sual]
"rain"        [=ho]                          [\u]
"red"                          [/ang]        [/hong]
"kill"        [/tai]                         [,sal]
"beat, hit"   [,pa]                          [\da]


In English, for example, words like "sweat" and "perspiration"
both exist, but the former is a colloquial word while the
latter is an academic word.  Both original H"ol"o and Jin
are in the colloquial vocabulary; the Song ones are in
the academic vocabulary.