> You are single-handedly dismissing the whole body of research that has allowed us to arrive at the realisation and evidence of the historical progression of Chinese languages (please do note the use of plural) in the first place.

PART 1:

Oof. Fighting words. Nothing I've said here is outside the bounds of mainstream Sinology. Now that I'm in front of my computer and bookshelf I can break out the citations.

Let's restate my original assertion about MC. MC (as traditionally represented by the Qieyun System/QYS) is a convenient analytic fiction, which provides a useful and comprehensive set of categories to study the history of various Sinitic families. However, MC itself was unlikely to ever exist as a real, synchronic language spoken by anyone and likewise any talk of a genetic linguistic relationship in the classical root-stem linguistic sense between non-Min Sinitic families and MC is also a convenient analytic fiction. The idea that MC was a real spoken language and represented a true linguistic ancestor of today's non-Min Sinitic families was an idea championed by Karlgen in the 19th century but has fallen out of favor in the last 50 years.

So let's begin with the citations from various giants in the field of Sinology.

First, Baxter in his treatment of Middle Chinese explicitly calls this out:

> I emphasize again that the Middle Chinese transcription proposed here is not intended as a reconstruction of any synchronic state of the Chinese language. A number of its notations are merely representations, more or less arbitrary, of distinctions which are preserved in the Chinese phonological tradition. Indeed, given the fact that the Qieyun probably represented more distinctions than were preserved in any single dialect, it may be that no true linguistic reconstruction should include all of its distinctions. [Baxter, "A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology", 2010, pg. 30]

What of the notion that there exists a true, traditional root-stem genetic relationship between non-Min Sinitic families and MC in a similar sense of Latin and the Romance languages? Pulleyblank and Hashimoto basically reject the idea that thinking of a genetic relationship is productive at all, or that at least it should be tempered with extreme caution. Even authors who try to study genetic relationships will acknowledge that it is an analytic convenience to think of some entity known as MC as the genetic ancestor and that on closer inspection, the genetic relationship often goes back to OC or further.

From Pulleyblank:

> This [various influences of Old Chinese] suggests that the effort to delimit clear boundaries between proto-Min, proto-Wu, proto-Yue, etc., to which several of the conference papers address themselves may be misguided. I agree with Mantaro Hashimoto that a strict Stammbaum model [i.e. genetic model] is quite inappropriate for studying the history of Chinese dialects. Some kind of network model, with provincial and regional centers of influence as well as successive national centers of influence in the form of standard languages based on imperial capitals, seems to be called for. [Pulleyblank, "Chinese Dialect Studies," 1991]

Ballard goes further and says to the extent that you can apply the genetic model, the various Sinitic families are best thought of as descending from proto-Sinitic, not anything at all in the vicinity of Middle Chinese.

> Thus, Wu, Cantonese, Chu, and Min, traditionally regarded as being divergent dialects derived from Ancient Chinese [Middle Chinese] (Archaic [Old Chinese] in the case of Min) actually represent separate linguistic traditions that have incorporated much Chinese material. [Ballard, "Aspects of the Linguistic History of South China", 1981]

Indeed to the extent that people are willing to talk about genetic relationships, it is a much more confused and crazy story than "non-Min languages are descended from MC." Sagart claims that Wu, Xiang, Yue, and Gan predate Min. Chappell claims that Wu and Min split in the Han Dynasty, but the other families split in the Sui-Tang. (Going off memory, I don't have the time to look them up at the moment, but I can if you're interested) I'm inclined to agree with Pulleyblank and Hashimoto here and say that a genetic model is simply inadequate and obscures more than it clarifies, all the more so because we don't believe anyone actually spoke MC!

I'm going to stop there because I hit the comment length and then return to the question of whether the standard Song vernacular is justifiably called Mandarin.