Languages of East Asia

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The languages of

Korean (as Hanja) and Japanese (as Kanji
), though in the first two the use of Chinese characters is now restricted to university learning, linguistic or historical study, artistic or decorative works and (in Korean's case) newspapers, rather than daily usage.

Language families

See also:
Classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages

The Austroasiatic languages include Vietnamese and Khmer, as well as many other languages spoken in areas scattered as far afield as Malaya (Aslian) and central India (Korku), often in isolated pockets surrounded by the ranges of other language groups. Most linguists believe that Austroasiatic languages once ranged continuously across southeast Asia and that their scattered distribution today is the result of the subsequent arrival of other language groups.[1]

One of these groups were the

Zhuang, most of the Tai–Kadai languages still remaining in China are spoken in isolated upland areas.[2]

The

revolts in Guizhou.[3]

The Austronesian languages are believed to have spread from Taiwan to the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as some areas of mainland southeast Asia.[4]

The varieties of Chinese are usually included in the Sino-Tibetan family, which also includes Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Tibet, southwest China, northeast India, Burma and neighbouring countries.

To the north are the

subject–object–verb word order and some degree of vowel harmony.[6] Critics of the Altaic hypothesis attribute the similarities to intense language contact between the languages that occurred sometime in pre-history.[7]

Chinese scholars often group Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien with Sino-Tibetan, but Western scholarship since the Second World War has considered them as separate families. Some larger groupings have been proposed, but are not widely supported. The

Dené–Caucasian, including Sino-Tibetan and Ket
.

Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area

Main article: Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area

The Mainland Southeast Asia

Chamic) and Austroasiatic families. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion.[8]

Characteristic of many MSEA languages is a particular syllable structure involving

aspiration, limited clusters at the beginning of a syllable, plentiful vowel contrasts and relatively few final consonants. Languages in the northern part of the area generally have fewer vowel and final contrasts but more initial contrasts.[9]

A well-known feature is the similar tone systems in Chinese, Hmong–Mien, Tai languages and Vietnamese. Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (apart from

tone split
where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin.[10]

MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, though there are exceptions.

subject–object–verb
order retained by most other Sino-Tibetan languages. The order of constituents within a noun phrase varies: noun–modifier order is usual in Tai languages, Vietnamese and Miao, while in Chinese varieties and Yao most modifiers are placed before the noun.
Topic-comment organization is also common.[14]

Languages of both eastern and southeast Asia typically have well-developed systems of

Sub-Saharan African languages
.

Influence of Literary Chinese

Main articles:
Sino-Xenic vocabularies

For most of the pre-modern period, Chinese culture dominated East Asia. Scholars in Vietnam, Korea and Japan wrote in

Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese classics. Their languages absorbed large numbers of Chinese words, known collectively as Sino-Xenic vocabulary, i.e. Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese. These words were written with Chinese characters and pronounced in a local approximation of Middle Chinese.[17]

Today, these words of Chinese origin may be written in the

simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean hangul, Japanese kana), or a Latin alphabet (Vietnamese). The Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages are collectively referred to as CJKV, or just CJK
, since modern Vietnamese is no longer written with Chinese characters at all.

In a similar way to the use of

Latin and ancient Greek roots in English, the morphemes of Classical Chinese have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts.[18] These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form.[19]

Topic–comment constructions

In

topic as the first segment and a comment as the second. This way of marking previously mentioned vs. newly introduced information is an alternative to articles
, which are not found in East Asian languages. The Topic–comment sentence structure is a legacy of Classical Chinese influence on the grammar of modern East Asian languages. In Classical Chinese, the focus of the phrase (i.e. the topic) was often placed first, which was then followed by a statement about the topic. The most generic sentence form in Classical Chinese is "A B 也", where B is a comment about the topic A.

Chinese
Japanese
Korean
Ryukyuan

Okinawan Ryukyuan example:

今日 ぬ 夕御飯ー なー 噛だん。
Transcription: Chuu nu yuu'ubanoo naa kadan.
Gloss: today GENITIVE dinner-TOPIC already eat-PERFECTIVE
Translation: I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: already eaten.)

Note that in Okinawan, the topic marker is indicated by lengthening the short vowels and adding -oo to words ending in -N/-n. For words ending in long vowels, the topic is introduced only by や.

Vietnamese

Vietnamese example:

Hôm nay tôi đã ăn bữa ăn tối.
Chữ Nôm: 𣋚𠉞 碎 吔 𩛖 𩛷𩛖啐。
Gloss: today I already eat dinner
Translation: I've already eaten today's dinner.

Politeness systems

Main article: Honorifics (linguistics)

Linguistic systems of

Politeness systems in Chinese are relatively weak, having simplified from a more developed system into a much less predominant role in modern Chinese.[20]
This is especially true when speaking of the southern Chinese varieties. However, Vietnamese has retained a highly complex system of pronouns, in which the terms mostly derive from Chinese. For example, bác, chú, dượng, and cậu are all terms ultimately derived from Chinese and all refer to different statuses of "uncle".

In many of the region's languages, including Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Malay/Indonesian, new

closed class words: they are not stable over time, not few in number, and not clitics whose use is obligatory in grammatical constructs. In addition to Korean honorifics that indicate politeness toward the subject of the speech, Korean speech levels
indicate a level of politeness and familiarity directed toward the audience.

With modernization and other trends, politeness language is evolving to be simpler. Avoiding the need for complex polite language can also motivate use in some situations of languages like Indonesian or English that have less complex respect systems.[citation needed]

Distribution maps

See also

  • EALC

References

Citations

  1. ^ Sidwell & Blench (2011), pp. 339–340.
  2. ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 233.
  3. ^ Ramsey (1987), pp. 278–279.
  4. ^ Diamond (2000).
  5. ^ "While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related." Lyle Campbell & Mauricio J. Mixco, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics (2007, University of Utah Press), pg. 7.
  6. ^ Norman (1988), p. 6.
  7. ^ Schönig (2003), p. 403.
  8. ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 182–184.
  9. ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 186–187.
  10. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 53–56.
  11. ^ Enfield (2005), p. 186.
  12. ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 187–190.
  13. ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 280.
  14. ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 189–190.
  15. ^ Enfield (2005), p. 189.
  16. ^ Nichols (1992), pp. 131–133.
  17. ^ Miyake (2004), p. 99.
  18. ^ Shibatani (1990), p. 146.
  19. ^ Wilkinson (2000), p. 43.
  20. ^ "KCTOS 2007: What Happened to the Honorifics?". www.inst.at. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

Sources cited

External links
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