ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.พ. 2018
- How China's scholars uncovered its ancient imperial language and founded a linguistic tradition that's uniquely separate from the West.
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~ Briefly ~ (spoilers!)
What Chinese once sounded like and how that was discovered throughout the ages... to be explained, not through the eyes of European linguistics, but in the old and venerable tradition of Chinese linguistics!
Since ancient times Chinese scholars have been arguing about the right way to pronounce classic poetry and literature. Here's how they dug into the past and reconstructed the earlier sounds behind the characters.
After a note about my struggles with Chinese phonology, our tale begins in 1842 with Chen Li's attempt to piece together older Chinese pronunciation. He's working from a fanqie dictionary put together more than 1200 years earlier by Lu Fayan after a party at his house turned into an argument about the exact pronunciation of ancient rhymes.
We'll look at an example of fanqie, then wander hundreds of years later to see how rime tables presented Chinese phonology in a more systematic way. With these resources in hand, scholars spent centuries convincing everyone that they could reconstruct any syllable and that Chinese had exactly 36 initial consonants.
We return to Chen Li's time to watch him dissect the fanqie and prove that Chinese phonology was more complicated and less understood than previously thought. Then, a Swede named Karlgren will visit China and use information from modern "dialects", including Sino-Xenic pronunciations, to fill in the fanqie and rime table categories with real sounds.
After considering how scholars have built on this work, we end up with tiny snapshots of historical Chinese pronunciation but a good overview of the framework used to investigate it. With one important adjustment: what's being reconstructed turns out not to be a single language called "Ancient" Chinese. It's a period and a categorical system now known as "Middle Chinese". "Middle" because there's an "Old" Chinese, which is even older, has its own (connected) stories and could be worth a visit.
~ Credits ~
Art, animation, narration and outro music by Josh from NativLang
Doc full of sources for claims made and images, music, sfx, fonts used:
docs.google.com/document/d/1u...
Music:
Dragons and Fireworks by Darren Curtis - www.darrencurtismusic.com
Asian Graveyard by Darren Curtis - www.darrencurtismusic.com
All The Tea In China by Shane Ivers - www.silvermansound.com
Shenyang by Kevin MacLeod - www.incompetech.com
Eastern Thought by Kevin MacLeod - www.incompetech.com
Silver Flame by Kevin MacLeod - www.incompetech.com
Opium by Kevin MacLeod - www.incompetech.com
Crazy Glue by Josh Woodward - www.joshwoodward.com
Sneaky Snooper by Jason Shaw - www.audionautix.com
Great Unknown by Jason Shaw - www.audionautix.com
That feeling when you're at a sleep over and one of your boys starts writing the Qieyun
OMG 💀😂
😂😂
The style of this comment is offensive bro. You not about that hood life, you aint in the ghetto hustling rocks bro
White Alliance huh?
@@LittleWhole the style of his comment is "youth black negroid" which clearly he is not
I’m almost 100% sure the ancient Chinese language didn’t sound like the current Mandarin AT ALL.
If you see the reconstructions, it sounded more like Russian or Georgian than modern Chinese languages lmao
time traveler？
crap, does the West Germanic languages
have "resemble" with the current English?
@@imorichwu4797 actually, yes. The west Germanic languages haven't changed as dramatically as Ancient Chinese. At least they preserve many key sounds, and their syllable structure is pretty much the same (whereas in the Chinese languages it was heavily reduced).
@@SachaCubesLatino In certain extent, the Chinese character and ancient Chinese are pretty much the same by the font. we just more simplified.
The Ancient Chinese Unified Written Words, but not speaking tones.
It is said that there are nearly 130 dialects in China
Not dialects, but actual languages. They are languages by definition, they are only called dialects because of political reasons, not linguistical.
@@gamaxgbg your definition of language is weird.
@@peaceleague6514 They are different languages that were unified by a writing system. Having the same writing system post divergence doesn't make them "dialects".
they are dialects as they have no separate grammar or sentence structure. Some even sound similar to other dialects. However, they are not dialects of Mandarin, e.g. Cantonese is a language which is independent of mandarin and a subordinative dialect of Chinese(Sinitic languages)
”I struggle with Chinese pronunciation.”
Who doesn’t?
@july Obviously.
google translate app does a fair job of it
Lol even us chinese have trouble
hahahah all my local relatives.
@@Killerbee4712 not me :T
I feel like I entered the wrong classroom and sit through an advanced class that is fascinating but i'm totally unprepared for
Don't worry, even if my mother tongue is Chinese, I am confused about the video.
@@director-of-the-BSF Singaporean¿
@@polarbear9131 恐怕是义务教育漏网之鱼
@@director-of-the-BSF learning Chinese dialects is incomplete without discussing the Languages or dialects spoken in Nagaland by the Naga tribes
😂😂😂 having basic Chinese language knowledge could be helpful yo.. this comment is so funny to me because I feel the same 😂
Having spent four years in college studying the history of the Chinese language, I am impressed by the accuracy and clarity of this video, and admire the time and effort the team have put into producing this video about a topic known by few people, including even the native speakers. Bravo!
@whachusay He's Chinese, not American
i would think Cantonese has a longer history than Mandarin by quite a bit
the original Vietnamese is nothing like we know them as it, current Vietnamese had changed and based from French
Hung Tran I’m a cantonese native speaker and i also master mandarin chinese and taiwanese hokkien so i can tell you that southern dialects like cantonese hokkien and hakka etc definitely have longer history. If you read the poems written in tang dynasty (which has the most number of rules of rhyming and the tone of every word) you’ll see that southern dialects abide by the rules much more than mandarin chinese (which is a northern dialect). Actually we people living here in the south were originated from Zhongyuan (the politically central part of china for over 2000 years) that’s why our dialects are more similar to the so called middle chinese mentioned in this video.
France 2018 Champions du monde you are right. Southern dialects have longer history than northern.
So, do you agree that we actually know how it sounded like?
1:09 Fun fact: the Chinesecharacter "Chen" is also my last name "Tran", which is Vietnamese. Kinda like Müller/Schmied in German vs Miller/Smith in English.
sorry, where is the fun part?
dai east „fun fact“ can also be understood as an interesting information that doesn’t necessarily relate to the context. It‘s an additional information that can make people laugh but doesn‘t have to.
edukid1984 Wow thanks! I didn‘t know about the title aspect and the Hokkien pronunciation! Yes, there was a Tran-Dynasty prior to the well known Dynasty led by the Nguyens.
The Tran Dynasty also introduced the colloquial Vietnamese language into the court, alongside Chinese which also solidified Vietnamese as a language.
well i think this is fun. as a chinese its good to know chinese language also has “cousins “ like european language
Pronouncing Chinese origin terms in Vietnamese is more similar to Cantonese than Mandarin. In Cantonese "Chan" is 95% sounds like "Tran"
I am from Singapore and I speak Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin. As my daughter is learning Japanese, I realised that many of the imported Kanji words are very similar to Teochew, Hokkien or Cantonese. I could also identify many words in Korean with similar pronunciations with Chinese dialects. Some Korean surnames sound the same as Chinese surnames in certain Chinese dialects. My surname 'Lim' is a case in point. It is also a Korean surname. 'Lim' is in Teochew as my father's a Teochew. In Putonghua /Mandarin, it would be 'Lin'. In Cantonese it would be 'Lum'. It's really fascinating.
Btw, i feel the pronunciation of all languages evolve to some extent. English definitely did not sound like how it sounds like now. Middle English (1300s) is almost incomprehensible to an English speaker in the 21st century. I've done Geoffrey Chaucer so I know! 😅
Hakka also pronounce your surname as Lim.
Which language do ethnic Chinese in Singapore use amongst themselves?
@@shashwatsinha2704 It's Hokkian (Fu Jian / Min Nan)
@@emhgarlyyeung Ok. But they learn Mandarin at school right?(in addition to English of course)
@@shashwatsinha2704 Yes, Mandarin at school
-What Ancient Chinese Sounded Like- - and how we know
I still don't know what it sounds like
Nor was it ancient chinese
You can take a glimpse of what Ancient Chinese would've sounded like if you listen to Cantonese, Hakka and the Hokkien languages.
Exactly. Watched the video and didn't even give a sample.
@@simonlow0210 sorry, no, it's not like what you said. Those three language is the successor of ancient chinese as well as the mandarin. Different chinese spoken language are in fact succeeded some characteristics or properties from the ancient chinese. So, in a much more serious approach, even if we listen to Cantonese, Hakka and the Hokkien, how ancient chinese sounded is still a mystery .
Here are examples along the time line
th-cam.com/video/KUIEuG5Ox6A/w-d-xo.html
Imaging combine all European languages into one language. This is what ancient Chinese done.
Maybe all of the Romance languages. I doubt Basque would be a proper example.
Latin...
Not only European but Indo-European language
@@mithrasenkidu9423 no. Only romance languages are descendants of the latin.
@@elsiesrifle how many did you speak there?
2020 now. Here’s just a rough timeline.
Mandarin(北京官话), from Beijing area. formed in yuan dynasty, around 652 years ago.
Hakka dialect(客家话), originated in Henan area, formed during northern and southern dynasties to southern Song Dynasty, around 741 to 1800 years ago.
Cantonese(粤语), originated in northern China and formed during Qin dynasty, spread to Guangdong and Guangxi areas, around 2200 years ago.
Chu dialect (古楚语 distinguished), from Chu State, formed in Zhou dynasty, developed during warring states period, around 2230 to 3000 years ago.
Wu dialect（吴语), Jiangnan area. Formed in Shang dynasty, around 4000 years ago, still the second most spoken dialect in China.
There are even many older languages, but I’m no expert, my point is, for the length of Chinese history, Cantonese CANNOT be the single one language to represent how ancient Chinese sounds like.
No one say Cantonese is the only ancient language. However, canto is way befor qin dynasty. While 潮州話is even older
Its the most familiar to non speakers and noticeably different from mandarin so it gives the right type of contrast example. Now I must hear Wu (Ng?) dialect!
No. All Chinese languages (with the exception of Min) descend from Middle Chinese, spoken over 1500 years ago. Min descended from Old Chinese, spoken around 2200 years ago.
XMV Ziron min 闽 is really old, they still use the word ding 鼎 bronze cookware used more than two thousand years ago.
@@amwzheng1 Yeah, that's what I said.
As a Japanese speaker, some ancient Chinese phonetics have been preserved in Japanese Kanji as well.
i am a Chinese and i don't even know what is he saying lol
Lmaooo
yeah it's so confused even it's a tradition I dislike it because it's not simple
Siu Yin YAU So would Cantonese and Sino-Japanese pronunciations of characters sound closer to Classical Chinese? Could I go to China, Taiwan, or Singapore and speak using either of those pronunciations?
@@aycc-nbh7289 Cantonese, sure, why not... Except you better hope that the person you are talking to also speaks Cantonese.
Japanese on-yomi... nah, you would get weird looks. Remember, modern Mandarin sounds nothing like middle Chinese, of which Japanese on-yomi draws pronunciations from. Also on-yomi don't have tonal information. Also it would be patently obvious that you are speaking Japanese in a weird fashion.
TL;DR: no.
aycc-nbh72 well, the mentioned countries speak Mandarin, so I’d say no to that. I can’t 100% assure you that Cantonese and Sino-Japanese sound closer to ancient Chinese. Just common sayings, which could be wrong
I am a native speaker of Chinese, and I found this video very fascinating and profound to watch. Great work! Thank you!
中文真的博大精深
啊河
Apna Anime Not all native Chinese speakers live in China. Many live in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, where the Internet can be accessed freely.
@Apna Anime um bruh? So you think they live under a rock?
@@joytan5048 I think he means that TH-cam is blocked in China
C C he used the word internet? Could’ve used TH-cam 🤷🏻♀️
As a native mandarin speaker, I always knew the pronunciation of Chinese language kept evolving and sounded very different in history. I just never knew HOW different they sounded. And earlier today I discovered a few rhyme attempts that blew me away. This topic is simply amusing. Thank you for the clear narrative!
Me: Please... I just need to sleep
My Brain: How dare you! Don't you wonder how ancient chinese sounds like?
I am Chinese and I majored in Chinese language , so your video literally reminds of me what I have learned about the history of Chinese language in college . This video totally impresses me that you explain these really detail things in a simple way ! I also feel your respect for the Chinese language 😆 thank you for making this video so a lot people from different cultures will understand more about us and our language 😊
你认为外国人能看懂这个视频吗？
@@InvincibleAkuma 我是外国人我能看懂
Did you take the GAO KAO?
你好吗
@@InvincibleAkuma 他们忙着找华人的麻烦
Thanks for the video. I personally speak three Chinese: Teochew (a dialect of the Southern Min Chinese) which is my mother tongue, Cantonese, and Mandarin. All three have different pronunciations of some same characters, have different numbers of tones. And my mother tongue Teochew uses some very old words like 箸 (chopstick, same as in Japanese Kanji, instead of 筷), 糜 (rice porridge, instead of 粥), 鼎 (wok, instead of Cantonese 鑊 or modern Mandarin 炒鍋), 伊 (third-person pronoun, same as in many medieval Chinese poems, instead of modern Mandarin 他). And many Japanese/Korean imported Chinese words actually sounds very similar or almost identical with the pronunciations in my mother tongue. A good example is the Korean **Hunminjeongeum** (訓民正音 훈민정음) , as in Teochew it would be 訓 hun 民 min 正 je'an 音 yim with the correct intonations (Korean doesn't have intonations). Cantonese also uses characters or words that are not used in Mandarin as the modern Chinese. I personally am very fascinated by the varieties of Han Chinese, but sadly most people in China and the world only know about Mandarin, and quite often refer to Mandarin as Chinese, sometimes better with Cantonese but nothing more.
during learning Japanese, I notice that many pronouncation are quite similer to Cantonese , So I think they borrowed the Kanji from Cantonese. BTW, I used to stay in GuangDong for 7 years, however I'm failed to learn Cantonese, when I always made mistake between 你吃了吗？ vs 你起了吗？ ，我头恶(我肚子饿vs我拉肚子) I ended this study trip.
I think why we choose north dialect as official languagee but not Contonese, because it's too hard to learn.according my learning experience, even Japanese is more easier than contonese.
@@tessadu4275 Japanese has its own set of rules of pronouncing Kanji, and for the pronunciation 'borrowed' from China, there are three. The similarity with Cantonese is probably more due to the similarity of pronunciation between Cantonese and other Chineses.
Kindly notice that the examples you give have very different pronunciations in Cantonese, e.g. eat 食 = sik vs get up 起 = hei.
Choosing Mandarin based on Beijing Accent is simply a political decision due to historical reasons that political and economic centers were in the north; Cantonese has its status in Guangdong also due to the economic and cultural influences of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. There is nothing to do with simple or difficult, otherwise the EU should have made language as its official language, and UN shouldn't have 6 official languages, including Chinese.
Mandarin pronunciation is a simplification of Cantonese and other southern Chinese pronunciations. There's no such thing as which language is simpler than the other, what matters are the effort and openness to new things. Cantonese is not my mother tongue (Teochew, a dialect of Southern Min), but I speak three Chineses fluently, and I got to fluently speaking Cantonese by simply watching TV from 4 years old, never taught by anyone.
Chopsticks, Rice porridge, and Book in 閩南語 Minnan Chinese, this language use old words 著，糜，冊. Chinese is a interesting language.
Zane Wong Check out Gaginang.org. We have a website but currently are more active in our Facebook group.
훈민정음 할 줄 알아요?
I ask because I just started learning Korean hanja and I am fascinated by their connection to Chinese dialects. I certainly noticed more similarities between Korean and Japanese pronunciation, but the written hanja seems more similar to old fashioned Chinese.
For those saying Cantonese is how ancient Chinese sounds like, my response is, yes and no. Yes Cantonese is closer to ancient Chinese than mandarin by grammar, but both languages exist during ancient time. You have to admit there are huge part of China never spoke Cantonese or mandarin during ancient time. For example, there is a Wuyu dialect which is spoken in Shanghai, Wuxi and many other areas, mostly spoken around jiangnan area. Wuyu dialect hasn’t changed much since ancient China and is one of the oldest(4000 years) languages in the world, it can be traced all the way back to “Laing Zhu” civilization. It definitely hasn’t changed more than mandarin or Cantonese.
My response would be so the f**k what? Cantonese pronunciation is almost impossible to master for non-native Cantonese and not suitable to be an official language for China. Mandarin is much more accessible for any non-Cantonese speakers including foreigners so it is more suitable to be an official language.
@@dimelo3027
Just because Mandarin Chinese is "more accessible" to people like you, IS NOT A REASON, for it, to be the official language.
An official language SHOULD BEST REPRESENT, a nation + its people.
Mandarin Chinese contains lots of "barbaric", NON-HAN, Mongol + Manchu Words.
@@maggiechan33 Whatever you say Hong Kongie. Don't learn Mandarin pls.
@@phsamuelwork
THANK YOU !
@@phsamuelwork finally
You've done a GREAT job to introduce to everyone our ancient knowledge even little known nowadays. Thank you a lot!!!!
I just clicked on something I don't even know anything about..
The more you know 🌈⭐️
What other reason is there to click on an informative video?
But you are learning something
Same here!
@@CertifiedFresh7 😂🤣😂 that rainbow and star (the logo) has me laughing! So indicative of the public service announcements, of my childhood. Lol
Learning Chinese for three years... this is really interesting video!! Languages in China are so varied and different and more of them than I ever imagined before coming here
well that's because China is nearly the size of europe and geographically seperated by rivers and mountains
TechZG why did you pick Chinese to learn? Just curious ^_^
@@SereneGuan i live in china.. :-)
@木不氵酉氵車斤氵農 豺狼自遠方來，不亦斃乎
挂老外
This is really helpful to discuss this topic from different angle , 谢谢
This is fascinating. I would love to learn more hahaha I love learning Chinese and especially learning Vietnamese. There are so many things that make them similar and different and when you are involved in it you start unlocking a lot more understanding and I just absolutely love it!!!!!!
As a Chinese, I don’t know this! Thanks for telling me!
Nonsense Manjaro *didn’t know
@ixervert you can correct someone and not be a dick. He's probably just trying to help him speak better English
@Özer Malkoç i know you are son of bitch！
*A S A C H I N E S E*
and another as i comment
That is just amazing. The age of the Chinese, well Chinese everything never ceases to astound me.
blockmasterscott agreed
Me neither now they even have an official dictator Xitler
The dictatorship is strictly unofficial.
Brian Plum not anymore buddy
Nevertheless, he's more like a Xitalin.
Very productive and very inspiring， thanks for sharing! 👍
This was fascinating, I’d love to hear you do an ever deeper dive. Thanks!
My head hurts
Me too😂😂😂 and I'm Chinese... Although I have broken Chinese
Selena C 你中文不好那你的母語是什麼
@@kevinliu7780 很多人的母语都不是很好，很多书和很多话他们是听不懂的，这是客观事实，在各个地区都有
As it should.
@@kevinliu7780 I personally consider English my main language because I don't consider China my mother land (even if I was born there).
Cantonese still holds a certain rhythm when reading the older chinese script, you can probably start from there
@@s-asw1360 Wtf are you talking? Nobody here is arrogant or have any kind of disapproving attitude towards Mandarin. This person here simply stated that reading ancient poems with Cantonese rhymes more.
You know what? I am sick of you. As you speak, I suspect that you are a mainlander. Are you arrogant enough to not know that the Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau all speaks cantonese? You here directed your undefined anger in your heart towards HongKongers without any reasoning. Honestly your existence brought disgrace to us all- dimwit.
@@s-asw1360 You don't have to be defensive for this. He was just stating the fact that Cantonese more closely resembles Middle-Chinese. This property doesn't necessarily make one language better or worse than the other.
@@s-asw1360 玻璃心真易碎hahahahahahaha
@@victordesabata滚吧。。。香港人什么傻逼样你以为大陆人不知道吗？？？一群傻雕，，你知道悯农吗？哈哈哈你们粤语念悯农顺口吗？押韵吗？？？装什么B呢
🤮造谣 有本事拿出实际的证明来好吗？？？自古以来你们就是南蛮 还骄傲了无语
Thanks for your effort in resolving the Chinese pronunciation! It is really difficult, but there must be something interesting behind it.
Awesum video, so detailed, well researched and interesting, thanks!
I think i read a meme somewhere:
Kong kong kong,
Kong kong kong kong.
公公说，桶敲公公。
Translation:
Grandpa said, the bucket hit him.
Or somewhere along those lines.
Oh yes! My linguistics professor used that meme to tell us the importance of tones. Even though the words sound the same, they're different because of the varying tones!
It might be Hokkien too : )
Definitely Hokkien, as a Hokkien speaker I can confirm it
it’s Hokkien
I thought is mandarin or Cantonese. Come out is hokkien.
You can still read old Chinese today and understand the meaning. That's the beauty when a language not based on the pronunciation.
and why Chinese media like drama and stuff are always subbed
96% people in China can read, even someone speaks a local dialogue, he can understand the show by reading the sub.
oh I wasn't asking a question, I was adding that the shared written system is also why dramas are subbed - for people who speak different dialects lol
But only because they learned written standard Chinese as a separate language, as a 2nd language, right?
I've heard, for example, that written Cantonse is substantially different than the standard language, often using different characters in the situation.
No, written Chinese is not a separate language, it's the root of all Chinese language. In China, even the poor mountain village will get a school before they get power or road. That's why China has 96%
literacy rate that's higher than the US. Any Chinese dialog can fit into written Chinese.
remember guys, never mess with smart people.
it only took a cat fight in a slumber part that Mr. Lu hosts and it motivated him to write those scrolls
In my family, our first language has always been Ancient Chinese. We have always been spoken to by our parents in Ancient Chinese and this started hundreds of years ago. People get confused when we speak to each other in it. I find it fun, actually
Where is your family from?
@@avril6922 we're a mixed family but that part of the family is from Europe and East Asia, specifically China Japan Mongolia and South Korea in East Asia
Cool
Neat. In my family the language of choice is Sumerian. In fact, I came very close to being named Enkidu 🙃
汝曰家人言語然乎
我居然在外国的影片里学中文 。。
中文是一种美丽的语言
@Strider 1 Harry Potter (IN CHINESE) Seriously, for a westerner, any dubbed english movie is a good goto, since you can always compare it against the original english version.
最重要的是，苏轼用的是哪儿一套~
@Strider 1 The caveat is... not every movie have dubs in both languages. Some less-well-performing movies just give you subs.
Translation: I actually learn Chinese in foreign films . .
Please do a video on Old Chinese!!
Edit: That's a lot of likes! Thanks everyone.
tardistardis8 I think he gave us a wink wink that he's working on it as we speak if not planning on it some day.
tardistardis8 interesting
tardistardis8 yes please. This would be very interesting.
That's an automatic process. They won't know what they're doing or why. It just happens.
Would love to watch it
thank you for this informative video! I think it serves to highlight the importance of keeping good records :D. I've read on wikipedia that Taiwanese (Southern Min) is generally considered one of the oldest dialects that can have their sounds traced directly to Ancient Chinese, as opposed to Cantonese, which is more similar-sounding to Middle Chinese, and Mandarin, which has the sounds of Modern Chinese.
THIS IS STUNNING! Such an impressive video. The traditional phonology system is one of the most difficult subjects for students majoring Chinese literature in a University. My experience was I as a native speaker struggled so much when studying those charts and reconstructive methods shown in the stories.
I am Chinese. I'm learning Chinese here.
We should stop calling "Mandarin" as "Chinese". That is way too ambiguous
Mandarin is a spoken dialect.. a subset of Chinese.. Chinese can be either the people, spoken language, the writing, or even the culture
@@tsubasa855 Ask someone who only speaks Mandarin to make an impression of Cantonese
@@felicvik9456 I've heard everywhere in Hong Kong(since a lot of mainlanders come to Hong Kong to travel), it is not that good. btw Im Cantonese from Hong Kong.
I think it's still Chinese but I wouldnt just call 'Mandarin' as Chinese. I think Chinese is actually kind of a conclustion(I dont know how to word this sry) of different kinds of Chinese. In different places e.g. Shanghai and Sichuan, they have Shanghaiese and Sichuanese. Cantonese is now spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau. There's even more but I dont konw how to type it since Im bad at Pinyin.
Yes Mandarin is being an official and main Chinese dialect. When we talk about the most spoken language in the world it will be Chinese and definitely it is referring to Mandarin (spoken dialect). There are many dialects in Chinese spoken by people in different regions in china as well as the Chinese population in the rest of world thus their accent could not be same afterall
I wish I had the ability to be able to read every single language. I'd love to go back and see what people were writing about thousands of years ago. I wonder if any of these ancient humans wrote something for future humans. There had to be at least one of them who thought about doing that.
I know this is an old comment but I'd like to answer. Ancient people wrote history (and even mythologies) for future people.
@@cz5836 True I guess, but they were probably thinking people in a couple generations, not people 1000s of years later.
@@ItzRetz I think it depends. Like ancient kings had really big egos and would often have their battles and exploits etc recorded for the purpose of "immortalizing" their names.
cong cang cing cong cong ngoahhh 🤣😂
if anyone is interested in work done on Old Chinese, which came before what is described in this video, I'd recommend reading 上古音系 by Zhengzhang Shangfang, Old Chinese by William Baxter and Laurent Sagart, or the Sino Tibetan Etymological Dictionary by James Matisoff and others at Berkeley.
Upper old sound threads?
Your art of storytelling the whole video, even in subjects so serious. Just marvellous.
Oh how I cherish your videos!
It's quirky, but the answer to what "Ancient" Chinese sounded like is less about sounds, more about categories!
For me, two things are very unique about this tale:
1. the non-Western linguistic tradition
2. the features of a linguistic period rather than the sounds of a single language
So I'm telling a grander story about that tradition and those categories instead of pronouncing many examples. Plus, like I admit, I struggle with Chinese phonology!
I've heard people attempting at pronouncing "Old Chinese" (as they call it) and it sounds bizarre.
Do you speak any Chinese dialect? How many languages DO you speak, fairly good?
Good to see another video from you.
By the way the reconstructed “Old Chinese” doesn’t seem to have any tone: instead it had a bunch of consonant cluster that was lost in Middle Chinese (Sounds like old Tibetan, doesn’t it?) It also left a bunch of evidences in other languages for example, Old~Middle Korean kåråm from Old Chinese kraam 江.
Lates these consonant clusters evolved into tones, making some minimal pairs or homophones of related words derived from inflections: 賣/買 sell/buy, both mai)
This is great! Wouldn't mind if you made it into a series though, don't worry about your pronunciation, no-one knows what it sounded like exactly so you can get away with it! I'm even more interested in the reconstruction of Ancient Chinese ca. *Shang involving using Tibetan to reconstruct the phonemes.
*P.S. be careful, many things (like one little chart you used) will list the Xia as the first Chinese dynasty preceding the Shang, but in actuality there is not historical evidence that this dynasty ever existed. When the Zhou overthrew the Shang in the first dynastic change they basically obliterated all of the Shang texts leaving only the buried turtle plastrons for us to find millennia later. To legitimate their overthrow of the Shang the Zhou created the Xia and (as the Shang texts were destroyed they could now rewrite history) said that the Shang had overthrown the Xia under the same Mandate of Heaven (a concept they had just created) which legitimized the Zhou takeover, and interestingly this concept prevails throughout the entirety of Chinese dynastic history.
Anyway, just a bit of Chinese history, probably more than you need to know
I am an overseas Chinese. I grew up speaking Cantonese, tried to learn Mandarin during my childhood and eventually gave up because I found it too hard. Being older now, I realise how rich the Chinese languages are, and I really would like to learn as many of them as I can. Starting with Hakka, which is what my dad's side spoke. Also I wish I kept at learning Mandarin when I was younger 😂
加油
@@tsubasa855 谢谢!
I learned Cantonese by binge watching TVB for 3 months. I started with reading the subtitles and I understood everything they were saying before I knew it. Speaking is rather easy because I can tell if my pronunciation is not correct.
多謝你
Help me with Cantonese bro
感謝上傳 ❤️
An excellent video as always! Linguistic history is under appreciated in general, but especially for Eastern languages. Thanks for doing the work.
Pragmatic Culture are you an ancrap?
Tyrell Banks nah not amymore.
Woah, I was wondering if I missed any new NativLang videos, checked your channel and you just uploaded a new one! Proud of my sixth sense!
Thank you for making this video. My daughter is linguistics major and we speak both Mandarin and Cantonese. So this video is very related to what she learnt. I have Malaysia Chinese friends and they use many old words in their Cantonese compare to the words we use in Hong Kong, like 返學，they say 返書館。 So they kept some older words from their great great grandparents when they moved from China to Malaysia 200 hundred years ago. After 4000 years, Chinese language has been changed so much and fortunately the writing was unified in Qin Dynasty.
Also saw that some Malay words have been mistaken as Malaysian versions of Cantonese e.g. _pandai_ ('smart')
I was totally amazed! Thanks
This has to be one of the strangest languages in the world
Still one of the coolest though
The language is spoken by about a quarter of the population lol. it's not really that strange.
In fact, I find Chinese and English are quite similar because they have the same word order, i.e. Subject + verb + object, this order looks natural, but is quite uncommon
It's not uncommon.
Ziqi Gao All romance languages have that word order
Not that uncommon, the Malay language family also uses that grammatical order.
This is so interesting! I'm just recently starting to teach my daughter to recognize Zhu yin symbols since that's how I learned how to spell words growing up in Taiwan. I didn't realize it was a relatively "new" system in spelling Chinese!! This is so cool to know that I went back to read more about before my 4yo start asking questions that I couldn't answer.
Wow, such an impressive approach to classical stuff!
Hello. Great videos. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work. Have you ever thought about looking into the many languages of the indigenous peoples of North America, the American Indian. I know some of their Navajo language was used to send messages during world war 2 that were impossible for the Axis to decode and were transmitted much faster than the standard way of US military communications. You have a large selection of languages to pick from. People are still alive that speak, read, write and understand some of the original native languages. Thanks friend!
It's good to have another high quality video in this channel, I salute you!
I really enjoyed this. I’m a vietnamese speaker and learning Japanese and I saw connections and that sparked my interest in just knowing a little bit of chinese to see how they’re connected. it’s great to see how the pronunciations from Sino vietnamese and sino japanese and sino korean helped uncover middle chinese pronunciation and the differences is what I uncovered while learning chu nom and han việt as well
The checked tone is different from what people usually call the fourth tone in mandarin. In fact, it is a feature that mandarin does not have. The reason why it is called the fourth tone in the video is that what are normally known as the first and second tones in Mandarin are actually the “yin” and “yang” version of the same tone. In many other Chinese languages such as Wu Chinese, there is an “yin” and “yang” differentiations for every tone, giving eight different tones in total.
Most mandarin dialects don't have the checked tone but 南京話 still does
@@jonathancross3097mandarin lost the checked tones due to Manchurian element affected
If you read ancient Chinese poems in Taiwanese (Min language), you will find poems actually rhythms and sounds so much natural and smooth.
If you read these poems in Cantonese (or even Hokkienese), you will find poems actually rhythms correctly and sounds much more attractive. This is because Mandarin were just the language spoken around the Beijing areas under the influence of the Nomad conquerers. Because these poems were written when Mandarin did not even exist.
The way he pronounces Chen Li (Chun Li). All I can think of is "spinning bird kick". :)
He pronounces it correctly. It's the English pronunciation of "Chun Li" that is mangled compared to the original Mandarin :)
@@dublinerin I never said he pronounced it wrong. My comment was inferring that it reminded me of the Street Fighter Character. (This is what I was trying to refer to in a joking manner to anyone who knows what I am talking about). Thanks anyway for clarifying it though (I won't pretend like I know anything about Mandarin because I don't). :D Hope you're staying safe.
@@dublinerin Her name is almost always pronounced like "Chewn" in the games (which is from the Japanese). Not 100% sure how 春麗 would sound in Mandarin.
If you want to further understand Middle Chinese, you're going to have to dig into Chinese "dialects." This really opens an entirely different can of worms, but languages like Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu, Hakka...etc., have existed long before Mandarin. Sure they are dying out but they do hold some prominent steps toward understanding how Chinese "used to be/sound."
Cantonese is actually quite close to middle Chinese by linguistic standards. What you will start to notice though, is that a lot of these old "dialects" share are many more tones than Mandarin's four.
Insightful! Discussing Min varieties will be particularly important if we ever get to a lookback on Old Chinese.
Min Chinese and a bunch of other southern Chinese varieties actually have non-Chinese substrates, which makes it quite interesting from a historical linguistics standpoint.
Four tones is hard enough for me.
Cheung Geng Lok 张嘴进来“实际上”是不好的。当前的任何方言都不能保持切韵体系。切韵体系大概有3800个音，而当前普通话只有1200多，粤语也是1000多。你接近究竟是什么方面。“锄禾日当午，汗滴禾下土。谁知盘中餐，粒粒粒皆辛苦。”粤语并不押韵。
Adam Vanderpluym FYI Vietnamese have 6 tones
Fascinating. Thank you.
I learned a lot from this channel than in my schools. I have to thank the channel owner for his great ideas
I understand two of the Chinese languages (Cantonese as 1st lang, Mandarin as 3rd lang) and your pronunciation is pretty good! I have done research on the many Chinese languages (as a budding writer) and believe that if we want to trace back to Old Chinese, we need to uncover the Min (Fujianese) dialects/languages, because many of those seem to derive from Old Chinese!
Thank you!! This video tells me there are way too many things I don't know about my mother tongue... really eye-opening !! I love our culture even more...
Thank you brother, I have always been proud of my country’s cultural heritage
This was a very interesting video!
I'm Chinese and that's the first time I saw a video talking about Chinese ancient pronunciation, you have a clear mind and make me have a basic understanding of linguistics, thanks a lot! Nowadays Chinese use '清' and '浊' (which mean 'clear' and 'dirty' ) to describe English consonants, previously I thought they may be translated from English or Japanese after the 1840s, now I know they have been used for 800 years, that's amazing!
Another interesting way for the non academics to explorer how ancient Chinese sounded like is to look at country names.
A good one is Greece, an ancient country with an ancient history. Greece was known as Hellas. The Chinese characters are 希臘。 Mandarin pronunciation would be closer to She-La (xila, if you know ping ying). You can tell something is off here. Now, let’s try Cantonese. It’s Hey-Laap. P is soft. Much closer. And in Minan (Fukien dialect), it’s He-La. In Cantonese, that’s a short e. In Minan, that’s the long e. So I guess it’s Cantonese at the time the Greeks met the Chinese.
Dialect is fuuny
You're right but also wrong. Just because the Cantonese word for it is the closest to how it sounded originally, it does not mean people spoke Cantonese during then.
I don't think the ancient Chinese and the Greeks met in the ancient time. But they may have learned about Greeks from India through import of Buddhism, culture, and trade.
@@astroboy2345 The Greco-Bactrian kingdom, which was the easternmost part of the Hellenistic world, had some contact with the Chinese during the rule of the Han dynasty.
@@monky3997 There is no Chinese record or culture relics coming from such encounter in Chinese history that I've seen. At least from the perspective of direct contact between the Ethnic Han and the Greek. I mean they know of each other. (Similar to the Romans and the middle Chinese are aware of each other's existence, but never got into direct contact.) It is possible it could be non-ethnic Han subjects of the Han Dynasty, such as the Turks or Persians settled at the western most reaches of the silk road who may have come into contact with the Greeks and brought items of the trade. But we know the Chinese had extensive culture exchanges with the Indians. And large portion of India had once been conquered by Alexander.
I’m a Chinese and I learned these from you. Thanks, good on ya!
This reminds me that my teacher told me to read Chinese poetry in Taiwanese Hokkien if I have any problem on distinguishing tone pattern(平仄).Because Mandarin we are speaking now is not always useful for reading the poetry written by ancient Chinese.
For example,"白" is "平聲" in Mandarin,but it's actually "仄聲".And I can only distinguish it by speaking it in Taiwanese Hokkien.
You can tell Cantonese and other Southern dialects are closer to Middle Chinese, because ancient Chinese poetry rhymes better when it's read in them ;) I remember in class, my Chinese poetry teacher sang an ancient poem by Li Bai in the Min dialect. Our jaws just dropped. It was amazing.
yes because southern Chinese language are the soul of ancient Chinese
The southern dialect (min, Cantonese) all have the ancient tone that you pointed out, if you use the example of the word for "country"
Even Wu dialects have some level of this but it is much more subtle in terms of the word country.
@@maxverner2341 你也不敢苟同步骤雨天下第一天一天的很有❤的吗？ have fun and also click me. Watch the dark masters videos.
kok and kwok
thanks for mentioning this. Min is probably the most conservative of living Chinese languages, having split off from Old Chinese before Middle/Ancient Chinese was developed.
I am studying ancient chinese to help me with my japanese studies, mostly to understand the etymology of kanjis and help me with word-building, like how you can do with ancient greek and latin prefixes and radicals and be certain you might create a word that either exists in a romance language with a different spelling, or even if it doesn't exist, people would immediately recognize it and it will become a new word. One example of that is the word Bradypnea. If anyone knows about Bradycardia and Apnea, which are rather common health problems, you immediately recognize what the word means. What's more surprising is that this system also works for english despite not even being a romance language.
It really fascinates the beauty and complexity of Chinese language. For me, as a native romance speaker, Chinese sounds and looks even more magical than Latin, despite all the tropes of Latin being some enchantment language to summon demons. What I love about the chinese language the most are those 4 hanzi chengyus. I remember reading a translated Chinese novel and many times, the translator had to explain a certain dialogue in translator notes because the original author used one of those, and he had to explain the meaning of the idiom and how it related to the story at that moment. Four single hanzis brought way more meaning than just the sum of its parts.
Very fascinating, thanks!
It's fascinating even for us native Mandarin speaker.
Btw just rediscovered your channel and there's new video! So lucky
程皓 这个真是长知识了
Just wanting to share this somewhere. These ancient reading can also be found even in English. For example, the Peking Duck. The word 北京 (Pek Kin) is the older reading of modern Mandarin pronunciation of "Bei Jing"
程皓 how about you stop treating uygurs like shit?
+Simon Low probably from late cantonese immigrants?
@Pat z I doubt it...
A new video to watch about 6 times in a row!!! :3
...I do actually do that...
I watched your Etruscan video like 4 times when it was uploaded :3
Only four??
lol. In a row? I do watch his videos multiple times, but usually after at least a week of my last viewing.
King Keegster Don't be surprised, it is that good, people love this that much. sometimes I watch them again right away, sometimes I do it later, but, I always watch them again multiple times, in a row too. Let's face it, this is the only material that ever gave me the same type of excitement and an even greater amount of anticipation since I was told bedtime stories as a kid. This channel feels like home to me, because language is my greatest passion and others here share it..
he's just bad at explaining and has a muffled voice.
i watched the rare phonemes one like 20 times
😂😂 I was going to freak out at you because you were saying "ancient Chinese" until you changed it to "Middle" Chinese at the end.
I took an amazing class at ASU all about this, Professor Young Oh is doing rad research with Old Chinese reconstruction!
could not have explained it better than this,well done
4:38
But Chen Li's not convinced. He's combing through old 犯贱, meticulously chaining initials of initials and finals of finals.
反切读成了犯贱，哈哈哈
Looked up 反切 in my Chinese dictionary, I got tomatoes instead lol 番茄🍅 gotta love tonal languages.
I used to hate dictionary util I start to learn English
I speak Chinese as a foreign language and as soon as I saw that I was like wtf tomatoes
@Person Hello Tibetan probably
lol the pin yin s is the same but the tones are different lmao
Just make sure to never say "tomato knee" to a Chinese person.
Wow 😯. My mind is completely blown! I want to learn so much more!
I'm very interested to know how two languages that first met each other without anything in common developed mutual understanding. How Ricci was able to learn Chinese and taught math to Chinese was just jaw-dropping.
just like how you teach the kid,that is how we teach him
Awesome video. You shocked me on kuk (country). As a native Korean speaker, this is such a fascinating finding. As I ponder and dig deeper into my own roots, I cannot help but mesmerized by the vastness of Asian history and the way how things are so intertwined. Thanks again.
I am Chinese, but very ashamed that I don't know any of this! This is eye-opening!
Yibin Chen
Arabic is much easier, and yet there’re things I still don’t know/understand...
"eye-opening" I can tell you're a Chinese
ImperfectGirl you can tell I’m a Chinese by my name. Also this word, “eye-opening”, is very commonly used. :)
ya, next let us move on to history...bet ya do not feel any better!
Yibin Chen she was making a racist joke unfortunately
Great work
Wow, you taught me something even I don't know about my culture, really appreciated.
I thought you were going to talk about Old Chinese (the one with lots of uncomfortable consonant clusters) instead of Middle Chinese when I saw the title. Godd video nevertheless.
Will you do a video on old Chinese?
YESSS THANK YOU FOR THIS VIDEO. I'm extremely interested and invested in Sino-Xenic languages and their relationship with Chinese, historical and modern. I hope you can talk more about Sino-Xenic languages, especially Vietnamese.
With such a description is like calling English a _Romance-Xenic_ language, because of its high Latin and French influence!
Actually, Sino-Xenic has evolved into not just meaning "originating from China." The borrowing has to be large-scaled and systematic. Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean all borrowed Chinese in a very systematic way, aka bringing the entire vocabulary into their language with designated and systematic readings.
This isn't the case with English, which borrows from Latin and French throughout a long period of time without being systematic.
+Tim Tran
Have you actually seen English? There was a time some linguists thought it could be a Romance language with heavy Germanic influence! That view, of course, is nonsense, but my point might not work so much as I barely know about Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, besides the surface level stuff.
Yes I know English lol. I speak it. And again, it's not systematic. You need to understand the "systematic" part of Sino-Xenic readings to understand the difference between JKV Sinitic borrowings and Latin borrowings from English.
+Tim Tran
I guess I should.
Awesome video!!!
Wow, it's a great research that I can't imagine.
Dude can you do sections of your videos of you reading a small sample of the language featured? Maybe at the start or end?
O don't think he is able to do that for u. Search up Cantonese u will find wat u need to know.
He did say he struggled with pronunciation.
Parts of the ancient Chinese "sound" is still alive in a lot of chinese dialects. Like cantonese and suzhou dialect,etc.
Only know 30% of these as a Chinese, thank you very much for sharing, your work is professional!
Not only the video, but also the illustrations are great! I only wish I could hear an example of Old or Middle Chinese
Yay you uploaded, my day just got better. I also got a little less stupid.
The debate about north vs. south still exists today and is unfortunately saturated with a lot of misinformation, driven by misguided nationalism and a kind of regional supremacism peculiar to the Chinese-speaking world. You see, the Mandarin topolects of the north have diverged from Middle Chinese quite remarkably in phonology, whereas the farther south you go, the more phonologically conservative the languages are. This, coupled with the fact that the north bore the brunt of foreign invasions from the steppes throughout Chinese history, made many people conclude that Mandarin is so different phonologically because of influences from languages like Mongolian and Manchu. Southern supremacists often claim that Mandarin is not really Chinese and may insinuate that northern Chinese people are not pure Chinese, usually claiming that their own southern language (generally Cantonese or Southern Min) is pure Chinese. Some reject linguistics altogether and claim that their language preserves faithfully what was spoken in the ancient past.
The reality, of course, is that there isn't much evidence of Mongolic/Tungusic influence on Mandarin. Mandarin itself preserves some features that are lost in southern languages (e.g. the dental-retroflex distinction). Southern languages have also diverged in their own ways, and Min isn't even descended from Middle Chinese (though it preserves Middle Chinese pronunciations in its vast number of literary readings, which are mostly borrowings from the Tang dynasty).
But you'll see comments peddling questionable information on every video having to do with Chinese historical linguistics or poetry reading.
Some northerners certainly do it too. I focus on southerners because they tend to be more vocal, which is understandable given Mandarin dominance and the rapid decline of southern languages. The strong literary tradition in the south is critically endangered today, a result of backward language policies. China, Taiwan, and Singapore have all been guilty of suppressing languages other than Mandarin, which has only contributed to the resentment of southern nationalists.
I consider Chu to be its own Sinitic branch. I designed an emblem representing the twelve major branches of Han Chinese: i.imgur.com/A4Xks97.png
The Qieyun, which serves as the foundation of Middle Chinese, described the conservative Chinese topolects of the Northern and Southern dynasties. By definition, it has traits from both the north and south, and thus it is possible that some small degree of outside influence, from any direction, could leak in. Neither the south nor the north was immune to this.
Yes, 粵 is one of the Sinitic branches. The 百越 people are related but not the same.
Blinky Lass I always thought 卷舌音 and 儿化 are remnants of Mongolian/Manchu influence. Are you saying these are, in fact, ancient Chinese phonetics that have since disappeared in southern China?
Many thanks for the video; it was very interesting. One quick question: these videos serve as a very good summary of or introduction to these reconstructed languages, but if I were interested in a more in depth look at things like Chinese sound shifts & Middle Chinese lexicons & the like, are there any good resources that could be recommended for further research?
Fascinating topic, but you didn't explain much. I was lost the whole time, but interested. Revisit the topic, and break down each step so that we can understand the developments and the logic of the reconstruction process.