Where does Chinese come from?

The article is reproduced from the official account of WeChat to look at history, by Sun Zhan Source: Look at history ID: EyeonHistory Where does Chinese come from? It has always been a mystery. In the17th century, a scholar named Weber wrote, "Chinese is the earliest language used in the Garden of Eden. Another imaginative scholar simply said that Chinese was invented by a saint in that great country called China, with the purpose of making people of different nationalities living around communicate orally. " In fact, within China people, this imaginative statement has been passed down from generation to generation. Until recently 100, due to the rise of modern linguistics, Chinese was used for analogy analysis with other languages, but various assumptions about the origin of Chinese were always confusing. In recent years, the analysis of population migration in East Asia by molecular anthropologists seems to be approaching the answer to this mystery. The footprint of language 1600 A Dutch merchant ship went to Indonesia via Madagascar. After months of sailing, they arrived at their destination. To the surprise of the crew, they found that although they were far away, the local Malay language was strikingly similar to the indigenous language of Madagascar they passed through. Did these people on various islands have crossed the ocean and shuttled through the vast sea before the beginning of the era of great navigation? Are these islanders who have left Wan Li actually more capable navigators than themselves? The sailors were puzzled. What the sailors didn't know was that their accidental discovery actually touched the core secret of language. In the past 400 years, generations of linguists have followed this secret and started a great discovery process. 1786, Sir Jones of Britain noticed the following points through comparative study: Italian, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic are similar to Indo-Aryan in Asia to some extent. Will these languages have the same origin? He put forward his bold hypothesis that these languages widely distributed in Europe and India have a common ancestor, which is the so-called Indo-European hypothesis. Jones's Indo-European Hypothesis makes linguists try to compare and analyze the similarity between these languages with the same relationship. 186 1 year, German linguist Schleicher, inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution, deduced that languages have a similar process of biological evolution, and drew a genealogical tree of Indo-European languages. On this genealogical tree, the original Indo-European language is at the bottom, which is the trunk and is divided into two parts. The other branch is Aryan-Greek-Italian-Celtic, and these two branches are divided into many branches, such as Germanic, Lithuanian, Slavic, Celtic, Italian, Greek, Iranian and other languages. The Indo-European family tree drawn by German linguist Schleicher Schell Although the Indo-European family tree deduced by Schleicher Schell is not completely accurate, his method immediately became a sharp weapon for linguists to observe this complex world. In turn, they learn languages other than Indo-European. 1600 Dutch sailors' doubts have also been partially answered. In the vast sea area from Taiwan Province Island in the north, New Zealand in the south, Madagascar in the west and Easter Island in the east, there is indeed a homologous island language family. Although this family of 959 languages with a population of 200 million has great differences in internal morphology, they have a clear homologous relationship, which scholars call "Austronesian language family". Austronesian was the most widely distributed language family in the world before Europeans colonized overseas. Does Austronesian ancient and mysterious Chinese also follow this rule-is it also differentiated from another older language, or is it independently created by a saint in China, as scholars initially imagined? Distribution Map of Sino-Tibetan Language Family Since the19th century, linguists have gradually discovered that the language of the most populous country on earth can also describe a "family tree" like other language families. On this genealogical tree, Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese are related, and linguists put forward the hypothesis of Sino-Tibetan language family. Is the genealogical map of Sino-Tibetan language family homologous in East Asia? If Chinese is really related to the Tibeto-Burman language family, where do they come from and how are they distinguished? In the 1950' s, American linguist Swardis analyzed different languages statistically and got about 200 core words. Almost every language contains these core words, which are extremely stable. According to the comparative analysis of the homology of core words between different languages, we can roughly judge the closeness between languages, and these core words also change at a certain rate. By analyzing the different proportions of core words in the two languages, we can calculate the approximate time of their differentiation. When comparing Chinese and Tibetan cognates, scholars found that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages have the same numerals from one to ten, but "thousand" and "ten thousand" are different. In Chinese, "Qian" and "Wan" appeared in the Shang Dynasty, so the differentiation between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages must have been earlier than in the Shang Dynasty. Linguists generally infer that this time is about 4000-5000 years ago. But there are still many contradictions in this rough outline. The complexity of languages in East Asia far exceeds that of Indo-European languages. Although linguists can generally accept the Sino-Tibetan language hypothesis after more than a century of research, there are still great differences between them. As early as 1934, Fang Guili, a Chinese linguist, suggested that Chinese was not only related to the Tibeto-Burman language family, but also related to Miao Yao and Taiwanese, while Benedict, an American scholar, thought that Miao Yao and Dongtai had little to do with Chinese, but related to Japanese and Austronesian. Subversive views come from 1990. At that time, the 23rd International Sino-Tibetan Conference was being held. Just as the conference was proceeding in an orderly way, Xia Jiaer, a scholar of the French East Asian Linguistics Research Center, submitted an article entitled "On the Homology of Austronesian Languages in China". As soon as this article was published, it immediately caused an uproar. For the general public, this paper marked with various phonetic symbols and academic terms is no less than a "heavenly book", but all the scholars present know that once the viewpoint of this paper is established, it will be the biggest challenge to the traditional "Sino-Tibetan language hypothesis". Xia Jiaer believes that there are many cognates between Chinese and Austronesian, and these cognates have regular correspondence. In other words, both Chinese and the languages spoken by Malagasy and Indonesians widely distributed in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean islands come from an older "mother tongue". Xia Jiaer's point of view is very challenging-if according to the traditional understanding, each language family has its own origin and is not subordinate to each other, then how to explain the inextricable connection between Chinese and Austronesian? Xia Jiaer's view was supported by Xing Gongwan, a scholar on China. He believes that there is a homologous relationship between "South Island of China and Tibet". Pan Wuyun, a Chinese scholar, has also noticed that this connection exists not only in Chinese, but also in East Asia, where the Dong-Tai language is like the meeting point of various language families, and is closely related to the Sino-Tibetan language family, Austronesian language family and South Asian language family. Xia Jiaer's view on the homology of Austronesian languages in China gave Pan Wuyun a bolder association-will these languages all be homologous? In such a vast language area, one word has attracted the attention of linguists, and that is "rice". In East Asia, rice is closely related to people's diet and production and occupies an indispensable position. Linguists have found that rice is homologous in Austronesian language family, which covers Malay-Indonesian, Palau in the western Pacific, Saide in Taiwan Province Province, Penang, Rukai, Reed in Vietnam, Manobo in the Philippines, Bazehai in Taiwan Province Province, Dakas and Amish. It has obvious homology with Tibetan rice. In addition, the word "mi" in ancient Chinese is of the same origin as Dong-Tai and South Asian languages. Linguist Zheng Zhangshangfang also found that in Chinese, the original meaning of "scab" is "coarse rice", and its homonym means "malignant sore and leprosy", while the corresponding word in Tibetan has two meanings, one is "rice" and the other is "scab". Is it just an accident that similarity appears continuously in this long-span area? However, it seems that linguistics alone cannot solve these mysteries. Language is always changing. It is estimated that every 1000 years or so, a language can be differentiated independently. Although the core words of those languages have strong stability, it is very difficult to judge the genetic relationship between them for more than 2000 years or even longer. This is why linguists are always arguing-words that seem to be closely related in the eyes of one linguist may be meaningless in the eyes of another. At this time, the intervention of other disciplines is inevitable. Archaeological studies have found that there is a long history of rice cultivation in these language areas with rice homologous words. In Hemudu site, Zhejiang Province, rice remains dating back about 7000 years have been unearthed, so the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River are considered as one of the origins of rice. Rice remains have also been found in other areas, namely, Taiwan Province Province, China, 5,000 years ago and Yunnan, 4,000 years ago. Thailand was 4,000 years ago and the Philippines was 3,700 years ago. Archaeologists speculate that rice will spread in two routes, one from the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River-Taiwan Province Province-the Philippines, and the other from Yunnan-Myanmar and Thailand. If so, there are many overlaps with the development route of Austronesian and South Asian languages inferred by linguists. Linguists explain that the spread of rice is similar to the spread of language, because the agricultural society can increase the population more effectively and stably than the hunter-gatherer society. With the increase of population, it will inevitably bring about population differentiation and migration, which is one of the driving forces of language communication. In addition, as early as 1959, Zhang Guangzhi, an archaeologist at Harvard University, demonstrated that there was a "Sino-Tibetan South Island Complex" in the paleolithic culture of the Yellow River Basin. He believes that since the Neolithic Age, this group began to immigrate to the south of China, and the result was divided into "Sino-Tibetan Group" and "South Island Group". Is this still a coincidence? More and more discoveries from genetic answers seem to imply that in ancient times, East Asian languages really developed from one of the oldest "mother tongues". But there are more problems. If there is such a hypothesis, then where is the origin of this "mother tongue"? When did such a diverse internal language start to differentiate? What about their close relatives and distant relatives? This seems to be completely beyond the ability that linguistics can explain at present. At the same time, the voice against this hypothesis among linguists has never stopped. Every time there is more evidence to support the homology of East Asia, it seems that there will be more objections. 1999, by chance, Pan Wuyun saw an article. This is a biologist introducing the latest views of molecular anthropologists on the origin of East Asians. In this article, geneticists confirmed with DNA that East Asians migrated from Africa about 40,000 years ago, and then migrated and differentiated from south to north, eventually forming a rich country in East Asia. Previously, the general view in academic circles was that modern people in East Asia evolved from native Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. Pan Wuyun immediately thought that this is closely related to the East Asian language problem debated by linguists. The two conclusions of "homology" and "from south to north" drawn from DNA are actually consistent with the hypothesis of homology of East Asian languages in linguistics. As early as 1859, Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species, "If we have a complete human genealogy map, then the formation sequence of human races will provide the best classification for different languages used around the world." This sentence, now sounds like a comment on the work done by molecular anthropologists today. Soon after, a paper on the origin and migration of East Asians appeared in more detail from the perspective of molecular anthropology. In this article, scholars believe that the ancestors of East Asian ethnic groups first arrived in the south of East Asia, and began to differentiate about 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. One group entered China from Vietnam and went north along the coastline, becoming the ancestors of Baiyue and Dongyi, while the other group turned south in Beibu Gulf and eventually became the ancestors of Austronesian language family. The other branch went from Yunnan to the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River valley via Sichuan, and became the ancestor of the Han, Tibetan and Qiang nationalities. One subgroup expanded eastward and southward around 8000-6000, and eventually became the ancestor of the Chinese nation. Other branches turned to the southwest and eventually became the ancestors of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Although this migration route from genes is only a sketch, it seems that those long-standing unsolved problems in linguistics can be reasonably explained. For example, why are different language families in East Asia inextricably linked? From the genetic map, it is true that they have the same ancestor, but they began to differentiate as early as tens of thousands of years ago, so they will show a completely different look. Miao Yao and Dongtai, which have been arguing about the ownership for a long time, seem to have reached their own conclusions. About 654.38+500,000 years ago, the Miao Yao language family split from the branches of Han, Tibetan and Qiang in the process of northward development, and finally reached the central part of China. However, the Dong-Tai language is differentiated from the northern branch of the coastal line and naturally has a closer relationship with the Austronesian language family. What about Chinese? Is the language spoken by the sub-groups separated from the ancient Han, Tibetan and Qiang people along the Yellow River valley ancient Chinese? Obviously it's not that simple! Do you still remember that there was a nation that went north to Shandong along the coast of South China? They became the ancestors of Dongyi tribe, and some Dongyi tribes went up along the Yellow River basin. Finally, the two nations met in the Central Plains. During this period, they even inevitably met some Miao and Yao nationalities from south to north, and some Altai nationalities from north to south. They fight and blend with each other regardless of race or language. Li, a linguist, described this complicated process as follows: "Primitive Huaxia Chinese is a multi-layered mixed language produced in the historical interaction of various cultures merging into a powerful Central Plains civilization. This is why linguists can find the kinship between Tibet and Myanmar, Miao Yao, Dongtai and even South Island and Altai in Chinese. Sounds much clearer. But for those unsolved mysteries, there is obviously a longer way to go. "Looking at History" (ID: Eyeon History) originally published in the official account of WeChat