Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia (2013)
pnas.org
pnas.org
Here's another relevant post at Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4634. (Before anyone gets too excited, notice the "filed under" terms.)
For me, ancient Chinese civilization is so interesting in large part because of how isolated it is. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and even India were in regular communication with each other. Empires such as the Persians and Alexander the Great fought across all these civilizations. The Romans had direct trade with India via the Indian Ocean.
However, Chinese civilization is located far away from those ones. I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer.
At the same time, even though it was so distant, China still had a very advanced civilization (and in many ways was more advanced than those of the Middle East and Europe for much of history)
It did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCshu
China has had enough cultural continuity to maintain its own writing system over time.
But for example, there is a period in Egyptian history when royal inscriptions start being written exclusively in vernacular Egyptian rather than the (incredibly old) classical form. And that period just happens to be when the Egyptian throne is taken over by Libyans.
Cultural continuity is questionable, even old texts in European languages often need to be adapted for contemporary readers.
All that said, Chinese ideograms are incredibly cool so maybe that is a good reason to keep them.
I have heard that a contemporary objection to Hangul was that it would allow anyone to learn to read. I don't know all that much about it either -- in particular, I don't know how much force that objection ended up having compared to other objections -- but it certainly supports your view.
There are two conflicting principles here, which we can observe within the Western European tradition:
- The elites are interested in keeping the masses under control.
- The elites are interested in ensuring that the masses' idea of virtue matches that of the elites.
Education promotes that second goal while arguably undermining the first one. So e.g. we see some Christian traditions that perform religious services in Latin and some that perform them in the local vernacular; we see some traditions that perform services in the vernacular but discourage reading the Bible; and so forth. There is a tension that different traditions resolve in different ways.
But writing systems are mostly about conservatism. To change the writing system, you need an explicit reform effort to succeed. Otherwise it will just keep going the way it is for no other reason than that that's how you write.
> Chinese ideograms
As a side note, Japanese kanji are much closer to being ideograms than Chinese characters are. The first and most important thing you can know about a Chinese character is its pronunciation. The semantics are present to a much greater degree than in most other languages, but they are not dominant. In Japanese, a character doesn't really have a pronunciation by itself, only readings that are specific to particular words.
Literate masses are more likely to challenge the dominance of the educated elites. In Korea, for example, the yangban pushed back against Hangul primarily for this reason.
An example of an actual ideogram is the exit sign (you know, a green man running out of a door) - it conveys the idea without having a canonical associated word.
You could make a pretty good case that the associated word is "EXIT".
To me, an exit sign is mounted on the ceiling and just says "EXIT".
As far as I (a non-linguist, although I've read a bit) know, there are roughly three ways of writing: alphabets, syllabaries, and whatever Chinese is (logosyllabic?).
Alphabets have one grapheme per (roughly) phoneme and have(AFAIK) developed once: Proto-Siniatic, which led to Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), Phoenician (which developed into Greek, Latin, etc.) and a few others. Every other alphabet is a direct or indirect descendant. They typically have <50 graphemes.
Chinese is kinda-sorta syllabic, but the language has a great many one syllable words which have a grapheme mapped directly to that use. On the other hand there's things like "coral" (IIRC) which is two syllables and is written with two characters each of which are not used anywhere else. It, its descendants, and any other similar languages if there are any, has some many thousands of graphemes.
Syllabaries have one grapheme per syllable and are the most common form of writing, to the extent that it's pretty clear that they're the normal version of human writing. They typically have a few hundred graphemes.
Mayan and cuneiform are a couple of weird cases. They (AFAIK) are mostly syllabic, but with some logographic-ish parts like Chinese. But the number of graphemes are pretty firmly in the syllabary range.
Tl;dr: Writing is weird and the writing I'm doing now is very much so.
I don’t know a single word of Chinese, but I followed a link in a sibling post and came across this: 女書 - which my meager knowledge of Japanese allowed me to understand that it means “women’s writing”.
What is the proper name for the ability to read text without knowing how to pronounce it?
"literate". A person can be literate in a language without being able to speak it or understand the spoken form, it's the ability to read or write.
The development of writing systems seems to be pretty clear, especially because we can use Sequoyah's documented development of Cherokee script as a check. Writing seems to start as logographic: each character starts out as representing a word, often as a stylized representation of that word (for example, draw an eye to represent the word 'eye'). To represent words that don't have easy representation, a rebus system develops: you use homophonic puns (so an eye might also stand for 'I'). This lends itself to a simplification to a syllabic representation, one word for each possible syllable. And usually, it stops there (although note that 'syllable' usually comes out in writing as a consonant-vowel pair, rather than a full syllable).
It's with the Semitic languages that things took an interesting turn. Semitic languages have an interesting feature in that you can get most of the sense of a word even if you drop the vowels. And the writing ended up switching from consonant-vowel pairs to just consonants (what we now call an 'abjad'). Greek opted to adapt this by adding letters for vowels and formed the first 'true alphabet'. Sanskrit opted instead to use reliable markings on consonants to make an 'abugida'.
Chinese never developed their logographic system into a syllabary, although this was probably partially driven by the fact that Chinese itself had most of its words become monosyllabic at the same time. Japanese did continue Chinese script into two full syllabaries.
Korean is the other independent invention of an alphabet: Hangul. Although Hangul is arranged as a succession of blocks representing full syllables, so it can also be viewed as a systemic construction of a syllabary rather than an alphabet.
I mentioned Sequoyah's development of Cherokee script: he knew of writing from the Americans at the time, and even had access to a Bible (although he couldn't read it at all). And his own documentation of his development does expressly indicate that he started trying to build a logography, realized that there were too many symbols that had to be created, and instead simplified it into a syllabary, which was much more conservative in its character count. (And the influence of several character shapes came from that Bible, which is why Cherokee script looks like someone started with Latin script but had no idea had it worked--here is its character set: ᎠᎡᎢᎣᎤᎥᎦᎧᎨᎩᎪᎫᎬᎭᎮᎯᎰᎱᎲᎳᎴᎵᎶᎷᎸᎹᎺᎻᎼᎽᎾᎿᏀᏁᏂᏃᏄᏅᏆᏇᏈᏉᏊᏋᏌᏍᏎᏏᏐᏑᏒᏓᏔᏕᏖᏗᏘᏙᏚᏛᏜᏝᏞᏟᏠᏡᏢᏣᏤᏥᏦᏧᏨᏩᏪᏫᏬᏭᏮᏯᏰᏱᏲᏳᏴᏵᏸᏹᏺᏻᏼᏽ)
For the Europeans this might be true, but not for the Indians. There was lot of exchange between Indus and Chinese civilisations. How do you think Buddhism reached China?
Bodhidharma, iirc.
Iceland? :)
The Persians ruling over Egypt, the Punjab, and Mesopotamia was 509 years before that.
And a 1000 years before that (1500 BC) the Mittani who had very similars gods and royal names that are very similar to Sanskrit had an Empire in the Middle East.
Also, the Maury Empire had close links with the Seleucid Empire (the war elephants used in many of the Seleucid campaigns came from India)
The Indo-Chinese links as can be seen from history are not nearly as old or as well attested.
> I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer.
I'm not aware of a theory that says Chinese writing was influenced by Sumer. It's generally felt to be its own thing. (Though note that Sumerian is about 2,000 years earlier than our oldest Chinese records, so as a theoretical matter there's no real way to rule it out. There just isn't any evidence of influence.)
When you find yourself in a binary quandary, you are nearly always going to be arguing yourself into complete twaddle. Think: East:West, Black:White, North:South, Man:Woman, "Normal": ... . That way lies madness.
It is trivial to slide into exclusiveness. I try to be inclusive. Back in the day I was the fat child left on the sidelines when picking footie teams. Then I went to a different school that also offered rugby as well as football. That's an odd form of inclusivity but I found my place for a while: I had quite a lot of extra inertia and kinetic energy and discovered how to apply it quite efficiently.
Back to your comment, which I don't think needs down votes but questioning. Where do you perceive East and West colliding? Turkey?
Perhaps. I think a clearer understanding could also give us a better appreciation of our common values and unique differences. There is something we all share in common: a desire for peace, order, stability. And there is something qualitatively different between how Eastern and Western societies are structured to achieve those goals. By studying our historical differences, we can build a better understanding of how our societies are uniquely equipped to handle future challenges.
> I had quite a lot of extra inertia and kinetic energy.
That is an interesting story, thank you for sharing! I agree with you that physical differences are definitely worth celebrating. Fat people have an advantage in many arenas (can survive much longer in famine and are good at physical sports like rugby), just like people who live in high altitudes or chase food to survive. More importantly, humans also have ideological differences and it would seem those differences, real or perceived, are the source of our current tensions.
> Where do you perceive East and West colliding?
Historically, friction has arisen in two places: the Middle East, and the Pacific. The first seems more religiously motivated, which could be a reflection of different cultural values but I think those waters are too muddy to tell. The recent cross-Pacific tension seems like a more direct clash between individualism and collectivism. Studying the environmental factors that gave rise to our differences could help us navigate where each society is better adapted, or how they can complement each other to achieve our common goals.
Hardly. There's no discernable relationship in that respect between China and the Near East. As far as anybody's aware, China's writing is indigeneous.
If you want a real isolated and independent civilisation core, look at central America.
Fun fact: most writing systems in use today are descended from Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
I am personally quite sceptical of this study. The methodology seems somewhat arbitrary and I doubt that the signal is there for what they are inferring from the data. I suspect this is a case of finding what you want to find.
General examples being, some sea faring civilization A far in the past sailed 2000 miles, mixed with some other civilization B, which catalyzed notable events there, which are now attributed to that civilizations B greatness. In schools the children are taught of those events, but evidence supporting a root in civilization A is suppressed or even destroyed.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-u...
Interestingly the arrival of horses, chariots and advanced metallurgy in China did not leave much of an impression on the gene pool, at least not detected (detectable?) by current data/methods.
Hungarian also has a few loan words from Latin mostly from the last couple Hundred years, but I'd be fascinated to learn about any connections between Hungarian and Latin via some shared ancestral roots.
Using statistics in this way to explain the quantifiable phenomena in language evolution makes for a milestone of the field.
There's a good page on zompist discussing the question of "just how likely is it that all these similar words are nothing but coincidence?"
like the word for mother in most of the languages is based on the sound consisting of "a" and "m" what the child makes while suckling
https://www.proflowers.com/blog/56-different-ways-to-say-mom...
(As an aside, in my native language Finnish the most common word for mother, äiti, is notably not a "ma" word. It's apparently a loan from some Proto-Germanic word that has itself disappeared from extant Germanic languages. However, Finnish does have its own ancient "ma" word that means "mother": emä or emo, which is still in use when referred to non-human animal mothers, in poetry, and in a figurative sense in compound words such as emolevy "motherboard" or emäalus "mothership".)