Recently, a circulating “viral” blog post about Hokkien being the “sole surviving language of the Tang Dynasty” was brought to my attention, and my two linguist friends, Dave and Marvin refuted the claims of that post using these two parts (Part 1 and Part 2) of an essay that clarifies all the exaggerated claims made by the former article.
Consequently, I decided to briefly examine the Sino-Tibetan Language Family shown in Chinese Wikipedia pages (as they are more detailed).
(Photo Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%89%E8%97%8F%E8%AF%AD%E7%B3%BB#/media/File:SinoTibetanTree_Chinese_version.png)
Afterwards, I briefly examined the citations annotated and decided to make an abridged version of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family Tree, consisting of the languages of interest:
To quote the commentary of my linguist friend Dave regarding the former article:
The varieties of Chinese are actually languages (because they are not mutually intelligible). They have been compared to the Romance languages (which have been descended from Latin, such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian and French). It would be like claiming that Italian and Sardinian are the sole surviving languages of the Roman Empire.
Hokkien (Min Nan) is a language that first broke apart from Old Chinese (which is why it has certain archaic features), while the others broke way from Middle Chinese. (On the other hand, calling Min Nan Hokkien kind of disregards the other Min languages, such as Min Dong, etc. Min varieties have been called “dialects”, but they are actually mutually unintelligible languages. It’s similar to how the languages of Italy have been called “dialects.”)
Like most Sinitic or Chinese languages, Min Nan isn’t pure because there are many Baiyue and Southeast Asian influences (similar to how Mandarin has been heavily influenced by Tungusic languages, such as Manchu). The people of Fujian are descended from the northern Han that intermarried with Southeast Asians. (Italians and Spaniards also have some Arab DNA and Arabic languages have influenced their languages). There have been reconstructions of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese languages. Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowed several words due to contact with several Han peoples (similar to how English has many loanwords from Latin because of the French).
This should hopefully clear out misconceptions on the exaggerated claims of the former article. Although, I think if one has good knowledge of Minnan / Southern Hokkien language, learning Japanese and Korean will be easier and intuitive because there are many similarities between these languages.
Incognito 