Re: Linguistics Information on Hakka (fwd)

[Hung J Lu <hlu@U.Arizona.EDU>]

Hi back,

Thanks for all your distorsions. Ha!

> 1. Hakka dialect is definitely southern and not from the north. [This 
> implies Hakka people were indigenous to the south and thus all the 
> migrations as researched by Lo Hsiang Lin, Chen Yun Dong are historically 
> incorrect.]

I said: Hakka has southern phonology. 
See my message:

     >> Hakka has southern phonology. Period.

Now, you are saying 

     phonology = dialect

That is, for you, a language consists purely on its phonology
and nothing else. Thanks for teaching me this fact about
linguistics. To you, grammar, vocabulary, etc. are not part
of a language. 

> 2. Hakkas were derived from Hun. [Doesn't this contradict Hakka's 
> southern phonology theory? Unless Huns were from the south (???) or after 
> Hun became Hakka in the south, they totally gave their original tongue 
> and adopted the southern tongue. So, if Hakkas are strong in maintaining 
> their heritage and tradition, which heritage are they maintaining?]

Your brain seems a bit damaged. Ha!

To you, Hakkas are either Han, Hun, or Austro-Taic, there
can be no mixture at all.

Let me tell you the story about Hoklo people in Hainan island.
The majority of people in Hainan claim Hoklo (Minnan) ancestry.
That is, they claim all their ancestors came from Fujian.
Yet, the phonology of the Hoklo spoken in Hainan has some
peculiar initial consonants like [?b], [?d], with brief
sucking of air. Where do these sounds come from? These sounds
are not observed in any other Hoklo dialects. But, if you
take a look at the Li language of the native tribes of Hainan,
the mystery disappears. It's part of the Li language, an 
aborigine Taic language.

This is the standard model that is observed again and again
throughout human history: a more civilized male intermarrying an 
aborigine female. What do their children speak? They children
speak the father tongue, that is, the vocabulary comes from
the father's side. Yet, the mother is the one taking care
of the children. As a result, the language of the children
conserves the vocabulary of the father tongue, yet the phonology
often conserves the phonetic features of the mother tongue.
(A few aborigine words and part of the grammar would usually 
sneak into the language of the children, but not nearly as much
as the father tongue.) We see the same phenomenon all over 
Latin American Spanish.

When Mandarin got into Taiwan, the retroflex sounds (tongue rolling)
basically disappeared. Why do they disappear Taiwanese Mandarin ???
No other reason: the original local languages (Hoklo/Hakka) simply
don't have retroflex sounds.

Middle Chinese had retroflex series, too. Cantonese, Hakka,
Min(Hoklo) don't. Middle Chinese has three grades for aspiration/voicing
(b,p,p') (d,t,t') (g,k,k'), Hoklo has lost d, Cantonese has lost
b,d,g, Hakka almost lost all b,p,d,t,g,k and strongly prefers
to aspirated p' t' k'. The well-known correlation between Yin-Yang
tone categories with the voicing/unvoicing of the initial consonants
is still very well observed in Wu languages, but this feature is
completely screwed-up in Cantonese, Hakka and Hoklo.

Hakka is a big mixture of many things.
Hakka's southern phonology does not mean Hakkas are 100%
southerners. It merely indicates out that the female ancestry
part is likely to have EXTREMELY strong southerner's component.
Get it now? Unfortunately, the Chinese society is a male
society, so the Hakka persons only acknowledge their paternal
ancestors. In other words, it does not matter that all your
female ancestors are southerners, as long as you have a single
great-great-great-great-grandfather that is Han or Hakka, you are 
Han or Hakka. That is why Hakka persons only want to acknowledge
their northerner ancestors and forget about their southerners
ancestors. They only follow the history of their paternal
ancestors (migration and stuff). The hell with the history 
of maternal ancestors.

> My writings have been based heavily on Chen Yun Dong's Kejia Ren (Hakka Ngin)
> which quoted extensively works from Lo Hsiang Lin and western scholars. 
> Frankly I have not gone back to his original source to verify whether his
> citation is absolutely correct.  But I believe as a scholar himself,

In Lo Hsiang-Lin's 1933 book, in the chapter that he discusses the
origin of the Hakka people, the very first thing he talked
about is about the She tribes.

He emphasized over and over again that Hakka is a mixture of
many things.

> Hakkaology conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a 
> publication of Hakkaology magazine. They may not be as authoritative as 
> western works but I think they are authentic.:)

There is just another book that came out of one of these
conferences. I just saw one today in the library. It has
zero fresh data. 

> the western scholarly works, I think it would be nice if the contents be 
> quoted rather than just mentioning the authors. 

I am not paid to do that.

-- Ekki