From: chou@cs.washington.edu (Pai Hsiang Chou)
Subject: Re: Language
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 21:28:15 GMT

In article <Btv66F.C14@acsu.buffalo.edu> v999qx29@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Yun-Liang Soo) writes:
>It seems to me that there were no simple words like those for colors and 
>numbers in the abriginal Fujen language if H"ol"o is indeed a hybrid of
>ancient Han and abriginal language.  Your model is quite interesting. But
>, is it the only model of the evolution of H"ol"o? I read from other sources
>that the abriginal words in your list are actually from ancient Han dialect
>which have been lost in other modern Han dialects.


There are several theories about the origin of the H"ol"o people.
Some are more plausible than others.  First, what are the Hanzi
for H"ol"o?  There are at least 5, 6 different ways of writing
them.  The earliest historical record wrote it using two characters
with the "cat" radical, meaning something like a wolf.
Cantonese use a bird's name.  Who is right?

This really means there's no "correct" character for this name.
All the Hanzi used were only transliteration (like "grape teeth"
for Purtugal, "west class teeth" for "Spain").
And the fact that animal radicals were used suggested that
Han people regarded H"ol"o as some barbarians/animal-like.

Some people (in particular, some book published in China)
formed their theory based on a particular transliterated
Hanzi, for example "river" + "Lo" (as in Loyang), and claim
that the name must mean these people originated in Honan and
Loyang, and migrated to Fujian.  If this is their only basis,
then to me this is as ridiculous as making any association with
grapes and Portugal, or thinking somehow Portugese must love to
eat grapes.

In terms of geography, southern China is mountenous and very
difficult to travel, and Han people were slow to reach these
areas.

But most important factor is the grammar.  H"ol"o is the only
one that's grammatically toned.  In contrast, Sino-Tibetan
languages are _lexically_ toned.  The sandhi tone serves the
adjectival inflection purpose (like Japanese -i or Indo-European
adjectival suffixes) but other Sino-Tibetan languages either use just
juxtaposition (not tone change) or derivational suffix (-de).
The sandhi tone is also used at the phrase level to group
words into phrasal units.  H"ol"o pronouns can either take
the sandhi tone or a neutral tone.  In the case of neutral
tone, it turns the pronoun into the dative case (as in German),
but no Sino-Tibetan languages have the dative case.
If it was the ancient Han language, then why none of the other
languages have this feature?  Something like this is so fundamental
to a language that it is extremely unlikely to be a recent
mutation or some evolution from a lexically-toned language.


In any case, we can only talk about theories by interpreting
the facts/historical records, and conclude what is plausible.



>The other question is "Are family names of H"ol"o people all fake?" With
>family books many H"ol"o people can trace their ancestors back to a big
>immigrant wave from Honan in Tang Dynasty led by a man called Wang sen zhi.
>
>I read from history textbook of Cheng Kung Univ. that in Han Dynasty all
>abriginal people of Fujen(Min Yue) were forced to move to the "Long River" vicinities
>after being defeated by the abriginal people of Jejiang( O Yue), who were
>supported by the Han empire and left an empty Fujen for the Han settlers to 
>take over later.

I have not read this, so I can't comment on this.  sorry. 



>I believe intermarriage is a very natural process. But are Mandarine people
>purer than H"ol"o people?

Not always a natural process.  Ch`in emperor dispatched 500,000
soldiers to assimilate barbarians, and later it has been done
several times by other emperors.  There is nothing natural
about that.

I don't think "purity" is something that can be quantified easily.
Perhaps a different question to ask is, who is considered mainstream
and who is not?  Somehow people associate mainstream-ness with
purity.  Taiwanese H"ol"o is "impure" because the language
has many Japanese loan words, and therefore it cannot be used as
a mainstream language according to the mainstream principle.

In actuality, the Mandarin language was also quite "impure"
but they may not be the reasonable ways of measuring "purity."
First, East Asian languages (H"ol"o, Japanese, Korean, and
ancient Han) did not have the F sound.  Even today H"ol"o,
Japanese, and Korean still don't, but Mandarin, Cantonese, ...
all have.  Can this be taken to mean Mandarin is more impure?
Also, Mandarin has many words (including non-Han) that had no
corresponding Hanzi for them.  New characters were invented to
fill these gaps during the language standardization.  Today some
people think Mandarin is "purer" because it has Hanzi for everything.
This is really the wrong impression.  It is institutionalized to
be mainstream.


English is probably the most "impure" language, yet this "impurity"
is its greatest strength.

Pai