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[liukaiqin]

The 水男 novel isn't too hard for me to read, it turns out. I've read the first four chapters or so, and it's all about the extended family quarrelling and beating each other up during the author's childhood. That's all juxtaposed with a little girl he sees later in a park. I don't know if it's any good yet, but five years ago I'm pretty sure there

Comments

[bokane]

Question: 5000 years ago when words were only one character long and half of them had the same pronunciation, how did people communicate with each other? Were pronunciations just much more various? 厲 and 利 are both lì, both frequent in the book, and one means 'danger, whoah' and one means 'yay, advantageous, recommended' or whatever. I mean, was the Book of Changes ever spoken aloud? How was its meaning made clear?

Simple answer is, the same way people communicate today. Remember, before the May Fourth movement really caught on, people were still writing in Classical Chinese, even though they were (in Beijing, at least) speaking something pretty close to modern Mandarin. Classical Chinese was always the exclusive language of the elite - in sort of the same way that Greek was the lingua franca of all educated non-Greek people for centuries. People have a character fetish, as goreism notes, influenced by the style of Classical Chinese, so the tendency is to think that way back when, people actually spoke in all of the 之乎者也, when in point of fact they couldn't possibly have. The great linguist Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren) once wrote a brilliant piece in Classical Chinese to demonstrate why it couldn't have worked as a spoken language -- must find it some time when it's less close to my bedtime.

Also, as goreism notes, there are a lot of things that merged, particularly in Mandarin, which is one of the less conservative dialects. 厲, for example, is pronounced as 'laih' in modern Cantonese, and 利 as 'leih.' Other dialects handle it differently. I don't have Karlgren at hand, but the two would have been distinct in Middle Chinese (around the Tang dynasty, when the first rhyme dictionary was produced).

Sounds have not really evolved that regularly in Mandarin, from what I know - particularly when it comes to the influence of consonantal finals (入声 words in old Chinese) on vowels and tones - but I don't know enough about historical linguistics to say a whole lot more than that. 

[bokane]

Aw, man - LJ ate some of that comment. Anyway, 厉 and 利 are phonetically distinct in many Chinese languages (or at least Cantonese, which is the only one I know decently enough to cite, and probably in Hokkien, which is even weirder), if not Mandarin, and would have been (I asssume - I don't have Karlgren at hand) in Old and Classical Chinese as well.

[liukaiqin]

No, I think I got the whole comment, thanks - sounds like I need Karlgren. Also, I've even heard of Y.R. Chao, he wrote this amazing thing about the lion in the stone den - is that what you're thinking of?

[goreism]

Haha, that's what I get for not reading the thread!

But on the other hand, some graphemic resemblances are masked by sound changes; 年 and 人 are related because in Old Chinese they were (hypothesized to have been) pronounced similarly: ˤznen and znen respectively. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Old_chinese.PNG

[bokane]

Yeah, that's it - but the page gets it wrong; Chao didn't write that piece to make fun of Romanization efforts (he supported them - later he invented a brilliant romanization system called Gwoyeu Romatzyh), but to highlight the need to use Vernacular, rather than Classical Chinese.

[liukaiqin]

The first time I saw Gwoyeu Romatzyh I nearly died. It looks like parallel Hungarian. So actually, maybe it could have made Chinese look more accessible to Latin-script babies if it were the default.

[goreism]

Each time I refer to Gwoyeu Romatzyh, I have to look up how it's spelled.

[liukaiqin]

Totally. I just copied and pasted from where bokane had spelled it first.