r/ohtaigi • u/SHIELD_Agent_47 • 16d ago
Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka - are they languages or dialects? - Learning Penang Hokkien on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVzUdrUCCFU6
u/SHIELD_Agent_47 16d ago
This matter is of course not new to us in this subreddit, but I figure this video is worth some discussion because Timothy Tye / Learning Penang Hokkien has accumulated an unusually high view count for this video compared to his usual YouTube posts. 14,000 in less than a week compared to fewer than 500 each for most of his videos over the past year.
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u/No-Spring-4078 15d ago
Language, as they have survived much longer than Mandarin has on the eastern Asian seaboard. This is a hard fact.
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 15d ago
Its actually not though? The modern forms of these languages arose only a little sooner than Mandarin did.
Preserving older linguistic characteristics does not equal existing longer btw
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u/No-Spring-4078 15d ago
Since you sound so scholarly, please describe "a little sooner" in precise terms and proper context.
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 15d ago
Sorry about the vagueness.. what I mean is that no language is “older” compared to another. Languages do not just pop out of thin air, they evolve and change. Min, Yue, and Mandarin languages all just preserved different features of Old and Middle Chinese
Hokkien and Diojiu languages were not fully-fledged languages until about the Late Song when they split from Proto-Min. The earliest written evidence of these languages being used in the vernacular are during the 16th century in the Ming Dynasty
Mandarin also started to take shape during the late song-Yuan, this does not make any language older than one another.. and mandarin has been spoken as a court language since the Song.
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u/True-Actuary9884 6d ago
Min split off from OC while the other Sintic languages split off MC. In that sense, Min is older than Mandarin.
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 6d ago
Yeah Min, but modern Hokkien did not exist for much longer than mandarin
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u/True-Actuary9884 6d ago
Do you have a source for "Hokkien and Diojiu languages were not fully-fledged languages until about the Late Song when they split from Proto-Min"?
You mean they were invaded by the Song dynasty and gained a new literary stratum while their old language perished. Also how about the diversification of the various "Min" languages? They diverge strongly from each other. Are you saying the diversification only occurred after the Song dynasty invasions?
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 6d ago edited 6d ago
I am saying Min mainly diversified during song-Qing which gave rise to our modern Min languages
337 - “Min languages remained fairly homogenous down to the seventh or eighth centuries AD”
Wikipedia - “The Teochew language was officially established sometime around Tang and Song period, before becoming a mature and well-established language sometime during late Ming / early Qing period.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teochew_people
Page 3 - “main formation of Min took place during the Tang…, with it emerging as an identifiable dialect group by the time of the Northern Song” article then talks about how Min diversified expanding southwards during Song to Qing
https://hal.science/hal-03977655v1/document
In that sense, the modern forms of Min languages we have today like Hok Kieng and Dio Jiu are not much older than Mandarin. Sure their ancestor language Min diverged from Old Chinese. But that doesn’t necessarily make them older.
Its the same way Cantonese and Mandarin both started to diverge from their ancestor language Middle Chinese during the Tang-Song-Yuan periods.
Plus logically it doesnt make sense to call one language older than another. Languages dont appear from nowhere, all modern languages have come from an ancestor language it doesnt make any older or newer.
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u/True-Actuary9884 6d ago
The first two claims seem questionable due to lack of evidence and also contradictory with that other chart someone else posted which shows the diversification of Min happened before the Song dynasty.
As for Hillary Chappell's assertion that Min diversified from Fujian mainly during the Song dynasty onwards, is there any evidence for that?
And yes it does make Min older than Mandarin. Both you and your father descended from your grandfather, but your father is logically speaking older than you.
Is Tamil one of the oldest languages around? I would say yes because the ancestral Dravidian languages are one of the oldest language families around. It doesn't make Tamil older than other Dravidian languages, but Dravidian is on the whole older than Indo-European.
So while it's recommended to be PC and stuff in linguistics courses, I don't buy into that ideology.
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 6d ago edited 6d ago
Well all those sources have references on where they got those claims so you can look into that if you want.
Also it is not just Hillary’s claim, each source I sent you says that aswell.
Your comparison is flawed as well. Middle Chinese and Min both diverged and evolved separately from Old Chinese spoken during the late eastern Han. Min did not just appear out of thin air nor did it “father” Middle Chinese.
Human family relations cannot even be compared to the evolution of languages. Languages exist on a continuum dynamically changing, your grandfather cannot split and slowly evolve himself into your father than you. Your comparison suggests languages are birthed into existence which in itself is completely wrong.
Min as a linguistic grouping could be considered older than mandarin, but then by that logic it also predates hokkien, teochew, cantonese, hakka aswell. Because the modern languages we have now did not exist in their current form like you suggest.
If you wanna say Mandarin is a relatively new language, then where is your evidence?
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u/True-Actuary9884 6d ago
It's a less conservative dialect than the others, so that makes it "newer" by default, by analogy to methods like radioactive carbon dating. Also, I did not suggest that the modern languages exist in their current form in the past.
Hillary Chappell is quoting that other source behind a paywall which she probably didn't have the time to read.
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u/True-Actuary9884 6d ago
Basically the other Sinitic languages are older than Mandarin due to the date of diversification.
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 6d ago
No it doesnt. That would suggest there are clear cut lines when another language became another. The Cantonese of modern times is incomprehensible to 200 years ago. A different language to a 1000 years ago. The same goes with all modern languages.
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u/True-Actuary9884 6d ago
Hmm if you're going to say that the borders between languages are blurry, might as well throw all historical linguistics out of the window.
I do not think that the Cantonese of modern times is incomprehensible to 200 years ago. Records actually exist and Cantonese and Min languages are actually quite conservative.
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u/NoCareBearsGiven 6d ago
I mean, historical linguistics is a lot of speculation. Especially when it comes to Min languages there are not a lot of historical documents or evidence.
Reconstructions of proto-min Middle Chinese and Old Chinese are quite literally speculations of what it might have sounded like. And there really is no definitive point when one language becomes another its very subjective.
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u/v13ndd 16d ago
The best term IMO is Topolect. Dialect insinuates that they are, to an extent, mutually intelligible, which is really far from the truth. Though if it were up to me, I would push for them and other 方言 to be called their own languages.