East Asian Linguistics

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>>2864872
For reasons nobody really understands, a lot of different languages developed among the hunter-gatherers and pastoralists of the Northeast Asian steppe. We saw an apparently independent creation of genetically unrelated language families (Mongolic, Tunguscic, Korean, and probably Japonic) in the inhospitable region stretching from modern-day Mongolia to the Pacific. You're not the first person to point out this weird diversity. Such stretchen of barren land usually lead to linguistic homogeneity. This mystery, of the Northeast Asian Sprachbund (language area) has puzzled linguists and historians for decades.

For a long time, it was believed that all those Northeast Asian languages (as well as Turkic, which developed a few hundred miles west of Mongolia) were part of one Altaic family. Now, most scholars believe that these languages all developed independently very long ago but somehow survived to the present day. Coexistence over thousands of years led to a similarity in not only vocabulary but also grammar and voicing. Most likely, different tribes migrated around Northeast Asia and eventually established the societies we know call Ainu, Mongol, Manchu, Siberian, and Korean. Current consensus is that Japanese was spoken in Southern Korea before its speakers migrated to what we know call Japan.

Chinese developed thousands of miles away around northern Burma/southeast China. Descendants of the Proto-Sino-Tibetan-Burman people migrated to the North China Plain where, by roughly 1500 BC, they had established a settled agricultural society that we now consider China. This culture, at the time probably called "Huaxia" by its inhabitants, was bordered to the north by the Northeast Asian Sprachbund.

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>>2864872
>>2865018
For most of their history, the Huaxia people only inhabited a small territory. Other Chinese languages, which are still spoken today, developed throughout modern China. Usually called dialects, these languages are generally as different as Spanish and French. The most famous example is Yue, or Cantonese, due to its presence among immigrants to the New World. Many languages, like the Ba-Shu Chinese of Sichuan, were totally replaced by Mandarin over the centuries.

But Chinese languages weren't always so widespread! Non-Sinic speakers once populated much of southern China. Languages related to Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Hmong were and are spoken throughout the region. Chinese migrations, that long preceded the expansion of the Chinese state to this area, led to the creation of new Chinese languages usually with some influence from the indigenous non-Sinic languages that would slowly die off.

Taiwan is also a clusterfuck. Thanks to multiple migrations from the mainland, they speak three different unintelligible Chinese languages (Min, Hakka, and now Mandarin) as well as a half dozen tiny indigenous Austronesian languages distantly related to Malagasy, Maori, Malay, and Hawaiian. In fact, Taiwan was the origin of the Austronesian people. Pretty much every Pacific Islander can trace their heritage to that little rock off the coast of China.

muh chinh chong bing bong

>>2864872
>Finno-uralic

Lies spread by finns to mask their defeat in the hyperwar

>>2865018
>>2865119

Different anon here.

While multiple languages often develop independently and coexist, writing has only been created about 4-5 times in the history of mankind, and all the hundreds of languages have adopted some descendant of those 3-4 writing systems. Disparate languages often share an alphabet/characters due to the power of writing when it was introduced to languages that did not yet have a writing system.

>>2865257
>writing has only been created about 4-5 times in the history of mankind
Are you serious?

>>2866166
I think they mean independent writing systems that developed in civilizations.

>>2865119
>Ba-Shu Chinese of Sichuan, were totally replaced by Mandarin over the centuries.

Actually people still argue on whether the Minjiang dialect should be classified as Mandarin or Ba-Shu

>>2864872
>>similar syntax to japanese

Not just similar, the number of similarities is extremely striking and they share many features that no other languages on Earth share. on the other hand, they share almost zero vocabulary, suggesting that they separated a very long time ago and had very little interaction since, but there's no doubt they are closely related.

>>2866166

Not that faggot but yes he's serious, 4-5 might be a little low but there are fewer than 10 unique writing systems, nearly everyone who learns who to write does so by copying another culture's writing system.

Japanese/Tibetan kana system is based on Indian brahmic script brought over by the Buddhist monks.

Koreans writing has some small basis in the brahmic script too I believe.

>>2866183
I'm certain there are more than 5 though.

>>2864872
I think the syntactical similarities between korean and japanese are far too strong to be just neighborly influence. The fact that they both use a particle system, some of which are almost the exact same particles, should be evidence enough.

>>2866241

Name them.

>>2866241
>Egyptian
>Cuneiform
>Chinese
>Olmec
>Indus Valley Script

And that's it. You could add the Vinča symbols maybe but aside from that you're looking at not-really-scripts like Ogham and Rongo-Rongo.

>>2866248
What about Cretan hieroglyphs?

>>2866278

Descended from either Egyptian glyphs or Vinca signs.

>>2866273
Well, we aren't exactly sure what Rongorongo is supposed to be.

>>2866294

Exactly. Even if you count it as writing, that's still only 6 or 7 times writing has been invented, period, and Rongo-Rongo was certainly /inspired/ by European writing so it only half counts even if it is a writing system.

>>2866293
No, some people think its parent system is a lost script.

>>2866297

Some people are idiots then. It dates to after the Cretans started trading with Egypt, and it's most visually similar to Vinca symbols, so it's a daughter of one of those.

>>2866166
They mean independent creations of language. I was told (albeit, in an intro class) that every known writing system comes from traditions based out of Iraq, China, and Mexico. Every other system is an offshoot from one of those.

>>2866273
Only one of these writing systems is still in use. Everything else is a derivative.

>>2866391

Chinese is still in use, so that's two.

>>2865018
>This mystery, of the Northeast Asian Sprachbund (language area) has puzzled linguists and historians for decades.
Most likely a bronze age expansion of pastoralists with typological influences on Koreanic/Japonic. Though the agropastoralists that roamed the region were originally quite similar to northern Chinese cultures(millet,pig farming etc.)

Japonic may even have a continental origin in the far past.
http://www.academia.edu/7869241/Out_of_Southern_China

>Ainu
Ainu is probably a remnant of the Jomonic that was displaced by Japonic.

>Siberian
Paleo-Siberians were replaced by Tungusics.

>Chinese developed thousands of miles away around northern Burma/southeast China.
There's no linguistic consensus where Sinitic originated,when and how it displaced languages in northern China and its relationship as whole to the Sino-Tibetan(see Sinitic's relationship with Bai and Tujia).

The earliest usage of Sinitic is attested by Shang oracle bones where it served as a liturgical/administrative language of the elites.

>This culture, at the time probably called "Huaxia" by its inhabitants
"Hua" and "Xia" are Zhou era anachronisms,they do not apply to the Shang.

>>2865119
>For most of their history, the Huaxia people only inhabited a small territory.
Huaxia is a misnomer,rooted in Western Zhou concepts of Hua(originally a toponym or an elite ethnonym) and Xia(political descent from the mythical Xia dynasty).

There isn't enough to data to say how widespread Sinitic was prior to Shang/Zhou hegemony as well as the possibility of neighboring polities such as the Rong-Di having Sino-Tibetan origins(Pulleyblank).

>Languages related to Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Hmong were and are spoken throughout the region.
Only Tai-Kadai and Hmong Mien have merit(see Chu/Wu/Yue lexicon). Austroasiatic has been debunked by Sagart while pre-Austronesian is completely speculative.

Save for Min,most Sinitic topolects are derived from Middle Chinese.

>Ainu
Ainu is probably a remnant of the Jomonic that was displaced by Japonic.

ainu immigrated from mainland somewhere from the north where jomon were thought to be more australoid/australasiatic, i cant rememeber which one came from along the silk road to the river to eventually displace the jomon

i also remember reading that jomon used hemp fibre

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>>2866842
>ainu immigrated from mainland somewhere from the north where jomon were thought to be more australoid/australasiatic
Ainu are a mix of basal East Asians(Jomon) and Paleosiberian like peoples(Okhotsk culture). Given that Japonic languages have loanwords that appear Ainuic it is far more likely that their language belonged to Jomonic not Paleosiberian.

Jomon despite being morphologically "Australoid" have more in common with the ancestors of East Asian highlanders(Sherpa) and lowlanders(Dai)
http://www.genetics.org/content/genetics/202/1/261.full.pdf
http://www.nature.com/jhg/journal/v62/n2/full/jhg2016110a.html

>>2866229
What's most interesting is that koreans/Chinese/japanese/northern vietnamese share enormous genetic similairites, while they are not very close to their ancient language families. It is why ARR ROOK SAME, but their languages are significanty different.

>>2867133

Shouldn't be surprising, genetic information changes more slowly than cultural information.

For people to be come genetically different there has to be many generations and enough selective pressure to force them to change from what they are.

For a language to change, you just have to leave a group of people who have a language alone and let them speak it among themselves. It changes even faster if the language has no writing system to maintain a standard from one generation of people to the next, so it comes down to flawed human brains to remember the details of a language and pass it down to the next generation.

Just look at English. English speakers in the 20th century can't read or understand Middle English except for the most commonly used words. That's only 700 years ago, and middle english had the benefit of writing and a dictionary to codify the language. It just naturally drifted over time. However, the genetic differences between modern Englishmen and 1300's Englishmen are not that big.

>>2868123
This is untrue. Genetic changes can and often do happen rapidly. The HG or subsistence farming natives of a region can absorbed by a much larger, faster growing agrarian colonist population.

>>2864872
The problem with studying korean is that korean and japanese are nearly the same language just with some consonant shifts and different sets of chinese loanwords, but neither korean nor japanese people will acknowledge that because of their retarded concepts of pride and hating each other.

>>2867133
>What's most interesting is that koreans/Chinese/japanese/northern vietnamese share enormous genetic similairites
The ancestors of East Asians simply aren't that diverse,going by uniparentals East Asians are descended from agriculturalists that lived in Southern China/Southeast Asia.

Koreans and Japanese(excluding the Jomon) appear to be descended from a southern component via coastal China and an indigenous Siberian one.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/2/e1601877.full

>>2866229
>there's no doubt they are closely related
There's actually a lot of doubt, hence why they aren't considered to be related to each other at all

>>2866396
Chinese is the only one still in use you mong

>>2868156
Nope, Korean and Japanese have no shared vocabulary that isn't Sinic.

>>2869324
korean for student: haksaeng
japanese for student: gakusei
Are you suggesting that being taught something had to have a chinese loan word?
Also note the korean word for father: abeoji, has oji in it just like the japanese term for older male relatives.
Also, japanese and korean (and basque but that's probably a coincidence) are the only languages that have a suite of connecting words that indicate things like tense and context. Like everyone's favorite, desu.

>>2868470
The Roman alphabet is believed to derive from the Phoenician, which is believed to derive from hieroglyphs.

>>2868470
It isn't like chinese has endured in some magical fashion. The actual symbols used have changed just as much as you'd expect for being thousands of years old. The script just hasn't changed hands because it's not exactly a versatile script. Only a few other confucian countries were nuts enough to try, and only Japan is stubborn enough to keep using it today.

>>2868470

We use the Chinese system, do we? Stupid ponce.

>>2869342

No-one denies that they're related, but they've been separate for so long that there's no real overlap in their vocabulary anymore.

>>2869493
I never said they aren't mutually unintelligible, but they're just about as related to each other as the romance languages are.

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>>2869457

I know this is the accepted chain of transmission but I've never understood why the Phonecians get any credit when their "alphabet" (actually just an abjad) is identical to the Egyptian hieratic abjad. What exactly did the Phonecians contribute? It's like calling the Indian numerals "Arabic".

>>2869508
The hieratic script the Phoenician abjad was based on wasn't the proper writing system of egypt but was a quick simplified scrawl you'd see on shipping manifests and varied from writer to writer - after all, if you're recording 50 shipments an hour, writing it all down in birds and eyes and dudes gesticulating strangely would be a pain in the ass. The phoenicians adopted it as their proper script that they used for everything and standardized it

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>>2866273
Hangul wasn't derived from anything else.

>>2869523

Hieratic had been standardised for 1,000 years before the Phonecians adopted it. And while it wasn't used on monuments, it WAS the ordinary script of the educated class.

>>2869530

Certainly debatable, but it was invented by someone who was already familiar with writing so it barely counts as an example of a truly original script.

>>2869507
>but they're just about as related to each other as the romance languages are.

Nigger please, you can get by in any Romance country with knowledge of only one Romance language, there's no way you could make yourself understood to a Jap if all you speak is Gook. They're about as related as Punjabi and Irish Gaelic.

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>>2868470
To be fair, the Chinese script did undergo loads of Changes.

Im sure the average Chinese speakers nowadays cannot read Oracle Bone or Bird-Bug.

>>2868455

Read a book dumbass.

>>2869457
Correction: I just read the following on wikipedia:
>It is an error to view hieratic as a derivative of hieroglyphic writing. Indeed, the earliest texts from Egypt are produced with ink and brush, with no indication their signs are descendants of hieroglyphs. True monumental hieroglyphs carved in stone did not appear until the 1st Dynasty, well after hieratic had been established as a scribal practice. The two writing systems, therefore, are related, parallel developments, rather than a single linear one

>>2869483
Koreans still have to learn some Hanja in high school and shit, because Hanja was more common than Hangul for a long time in Korean history, so a significant portion of older literature requires Hanja knowledge to read.

I believe Hanja is also used on official document for some reason or another.

>>2869530
It was deliberately created a systemic manner, just like Kana was in Japan. Once the fundamentals of writing is understood, it's not hard to make a new writing system to represent sounds.

>>2869531
I guess the only reason phoenician has any relevance is by reputation then. The Greeks got their version of hieratic and referred to it as phoenician.

>>2869569

Yes, just as we call the Indian numerals "Arabic" because we learned them from the Arabs.

>>2869544

I can't read that bird-worm, but then again, it was an intentionally fancy script used for inscriptions. Same with seal script, which besides being optimized for an artisan to carve into stone, is made deliberately complex in order to be harder to forge.

I can still read Han Dynasty Lishu script with some difficulty, but I'd think that someone from Taiwan would be able to a lot easier.

>>2869530
It looks likes it's pretending to be Chinese.

>>2869342
That's not what shared vocab means.

>>2869541

That's a bit pushing it, but Korean, Chinese, and Japanese speakers can read a bit of each other's older written stuff. The closer to 600AD or so, the easier it is.

>>2869820
Anyone from any language can read something written in another language in chinese characters because chinese characters represent the particular concepts rather than any sound in a particular language.
I mean, it would read pretty weird because of the grammar differences but you'd get the gist of it about as well as a machine translation

>>2868156
[Citation needed]

>>2869342
t. Doesn't know what he's talking about

>>2869507
That's absolute bullshit

As a Portuguese I can understand Spanish and Italian. Japanese and Korean are completely mutually unintelligible. Portuguese and Spanish are not.

>>2869544
Do you even know how they read the Shang Oracle script?

They didn't have a fucking book explaining it. Many of the symbols were similar to classical Chinese symbols.

>>2869507
>t. a fucking moron

>>2869342
Sounds like a sinic borrowed word

In cantonese student = hoksung

>>2870730
>>2870734
>>2870740
>>2870799
>>2871249
calm down japs and/or gooks
truth hurts, I know

>>2869507
Absolutely not

>>2869342

>Are you suggesting that being taught something had to have a chinese loan word?

Being a student is not a idea known to primitive jap/kor, It was a foreign idea from China.

Also, "gakusei" and "haksaeng" are determined to be chinese loanword not by your retarded reasoning, it's because these two words rendered into the exactly same chink word "學生", thus they shared a root and are cognates from Chink.
(Inb4 retard gaijin learnt nipponese in romaji)

>Also note the korean word for father: abeoji, has oji in it just like the japanese term for older male relatives.

Not sure trolling or just being really retarded...
korean's father is spelled into a-beo-ji, while nipponese' uncle is spelled into o-jii

>>2871325
Koreanic and Japonic are linguistic isolates,even their relationship with "Altaic" is the result of a sprachbund.

The urheimat of Koreanic was in Liaodong/Jilin/Northern Korea while proto-Japonic was spoken in Central/Southern Korea.

>>2864872
Come and debates us on a new History server

https://discord.gg/NYdGns

>>2869820
wtf, are your lil brain still in the discussion?

>Korean, Chinese, and Japanese speakers can read a bit of each other's older written stuff. The closer to 600AD or so, the easier it is.

Because they're literally all writing in Ancient Chinese(language), sure they can understand each other

There wasn't any (prominent) Korean or Japanese written language at the moment.

>>2869342
>korean for student: haksaeng
>japanese for student: gakusei
They're both Sinic borrowed words you fucking idiot.

>>2869507
Are you serious? The romance languages are only comparable to the Chinese languages themselves (like Mandarin and Cantonese). Japanese and Korean are way too different from each other.

>>2873112
And even then, they aren't very similar borrowings.

>>2864872
The cultural revolution basically wiped out a lot of local languages. Sad really.

>>2873919
>t. I have no idea what I'm saying
Sad really.

>>2873919
The cultural revolution was responsible for the over simplification of Chinese characters, not languages and dialects.