Re: hakka: Re: Hakka Dialect

["Dylan W.H. Sung" <mabr12@dial.pipex.com>]

: Hello Hakkas,
: 
: Regarding cug pu or Books of Generations, in olden days only the
: elder sons of the families kept them. Unless the rest of the younger
: sons made copies of them before they moved out, the offspring of these 
: young sons would never possess any of them.    
: 
....
:
: In comparison with other families our Books of Generations are fairly new
: starting after the collapse of the Song Dynasty (960AD to 1279AFD) when
: our ancestors moved to Dong Guan county in Guangdong province. I belong
to
: the 25th generation.
: 
: CHUNG Yoon-Ngan.

Yoon Ngan,	

You are quite right. I am in the 27th generation of unbroken descent from
my ancestor in the Sothern Song Dynasty 1127-1279, prior to that there is a
gap, and then 11 generations are mentioned from Song Jing of the Tang
Dynasty. I estimate a gap of around 5 generations. Otherwise 42 or 43
generations would have elapsed since Song Jing's time c.700 ACE. 

On the issue of dialect, people who rose to class and status in the past
were assigned posts in places other than their ancestral home. If they
decided to stay in their new surrounding, then it is likely their offspring
will aquire habits and speech patterns from their locality. However, the
Hakka dialect would not change too greatly if the population of Hakka
speakers were great enough to buffer the changes from other chinese
dialects. 

People interested in Middle Chinese sound reconstruction should have a look
at Stanley Goertzen's page last at http://rrnet.com/~goertzen/chinese.html

Dylan.