Re: references Henan and Hakka

["S. L . Lee" <sllee@asiawind.com>]

Dear Dylan,

You are right that QieYun was written by Lu Fayan of Sui dynasty. The book
was found in Dunhuang which was under Xixia's territory. May be that is why
the movie Silk Road associated that with Xixia. BTW，this movie was done
with a lot of research.

I think there are some scholars are against Luo Xianglin's north-to-south
migration theory. They suggest the Hakka language/dialect was original
indigenous to Guangdong-Jiangxi and Fujian and thus should be called a
'southern' dialect. And the term "Hakka" did not appear under Qing dynasty.
An important assumption of this is the Guangdong people are ALWAYS
indigenous to the south, which is something I tend to disagree. I believe
the Guangdong people were from the north too, but they came from different
areas and different eras than the Hakkas. Obviously they were in Guangdong
before the Hakka.  The similarity of Cantonese and Hakka cannot be used to
support these two are both southern tongues.  If they migrated at different
times from the north, each has evolved along a different path and the
variation still can be thought of as from the north.

As Hakkas settled in Fujian, they also mixed with She and Min people,
incorporating some of their speech characteristics. That is what I think we
should treat Cantonese-Hakka-Hoklo relationships.

We need to look at history in a dynamic sense, and never as a static
situation according to what we see today. For instance, the ancient
civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China) are all suffering from
desertization. So some people proposed that it is the tough environment that
stimulated the civilization. I think this is totally reversed. Desertization
is created by civilization, not the other way round. Over-exploitation of
land and resource is what caused depletion of water and vegetation, setting
the stage for erosion. The climate and vegetation of Silk road should be
much better in ancient times for the trades. I can't imagine the ancient
people could overcome the difficult journeys better than we do with
automobiles and modern equipment.

So, I have to take a whole bag of salt about the southern origin of Hakka
and Hakka tongue.
There are people who define Zhongyuan Yin as Guoyu or the northern dialect.
This contradicts with the -m ending sound in Zhongzhou Yun (Zhongyuan Yin)
which should be closer to Cantonese and Hakka. A famous Peking opera
performer pointed out the -m ending sounds in Zhongzhou Yun:

俞振飛在「振飛曲譜」裡有指出：「中州韻有閉口音，傳統崑曲有侵尋、監咸、纖廉三
個閉
口韻。

Thus, I tend to agree that Hakka tongue preserves Sui/Tang/Song tongue, and
Putonghua(mandarin) is a late comer with Jin/Yuan. We got to be careful how
people define Zhongzhou Yun.

SL Lee