Ah-bin wrote:if they all sprang from the same root then all Chinese languages are just as ancient as each other. Is is just that some have changed more than others. Mandarin has diverged more from its ancestral language than Hokkien has, that's all. if Mandarin had actually developed from Hokkien, then you could say that it was more ancient, but that is not how Hokkien developed.
It is more accurate to say, I think, that Hokkien preserves more features of Middle Chinese than other varieties but even this is debatable since it has merged many of the old initials and (in the Amoy variety) no longer has a distinct 陰上 and 陽上 like Cantonese does.
The tree I have in 臺灣的客家話 actually puts the Wu dialects first, since they preserve the most initial sounds. They have simplified all entering tone endings to a glottal stop, but then again, so did Hokkien, until it began to borrow words from the Chinese of the T'ang capital.
Then, what do we count as the stability of sounds over time? Hokkien has lost the voicing in the initial [p] in 飯, where Soochow has kept the voicing (old feature) but made it a fricative [vE]. In Hokkien the sound became the same as that of 分 [pun] when the initials were distinct in Old Chinese. They are still distinct in Soochow (分 has an [f] initial). So do we count the distinction in Soochow as the older feature or the lack of a fricative in Hokkien as the older feature?
Ah-bin wrote:Or perhaps the speakers of old Hokkien were very conscious about getting things correct when they read out texts (the origin of the literary stratum) because they felt a bit rustic and had a need to emulate the cultured behaviour of the capital, whereas people who lived close to the old Capital saw themselves as cultured people to begin with, and expected the provinces to follow their fashion, if they thought of it at all. Kind of like Malaysian Cantonese getting obsessed with talking like people from Hong Kong, even though HK people get their n's and l's mixed up and drop ng's all over the place. In Hong Kong hardly anyone seems to get obsessed about speaking correct Cantonese
Ah-bin wrote:in Malaysia....well we all know someone who can't accept that there are differences in Hokkien, and I've seen similar posts of his about Cantonese too.
niuc wrote:Ah-bin, would it be (more) correct if we say Min (including Hokkien) is the most ancient among current Chinese languages?
All other Sinitic languages
Users browsing this forum: Bing [Bot], Google [Bot] and 0 guests