For the Gao Lishi stele, the Chinese description had quotes around “backwards”, but the English description does not. The Chinese description seems to acknowledge that the concept of backward or modern is a human imposed concept that isn’t inherently positive or negative.
As fro the stele itself, it’s about a powerful eunuch named Gao Lishi, who had the ears of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang dynasty. Gao tends to be portrayed as a negative figure in popular literary works, comparing him to other evil eunuchs through out Chinese history. These works tends to claim that Gao was envious of Li Bei the famous poet, and plotted for Li to be removed from the court.
In reality, Gao is probably the noblest eunuchs in Chinese history. Gao was originally name Feng Yuanyi, and purported to be the descendent of Bei Yan kingdom’s royalty. His father was accused of mutiny, causing Empress Wu ordering to kill off the entire clan. Gao was spared only to become a eunuch.
Despite his tragic past, and becoming an eunuch, Gao studied hard, and also trained to become a warrior. He was well known for his strength, archery and knowledge. He was adopted by a high ranking eunuch named Gao Yanfu, which was why he changed his last name to Gao. He also changed his first name to Lishi (力士), which means the strong one (the word 大力士 is often translated to Hercules).
How the last name came about is probably the discrepancy that the English description talks about. The stele seems to indicate that Gao changed his name because the court awarded him a new last name, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
Gao then followed the man who would eventually become Emperor Xuanzong. He assisted Xuanzong in overthrowing Empress Wei and Princess Taiping to successfully ascend to the throne. He was deeply loyal to Xuanzong to the day he died. After Xuanzong abdicated post Anlushan rebellion, Gao would defend his old emperor in court and was banished for it. After learning of the death of Xuanzong, Gao mourned by not eating for 7 days, and died as a result.
The stele commissioned to commemorate Gao’s death, and originally stood at his burial site. Pan Yan and Zhang Shaoti were just the people assigned to erect the stele.
As for the ethnic minorities, the discrepancy between English and Chinese descriptions seems to be 民族主義, which the English version unfortunately opted for the word nationalism. While it does mean nationalism, but since 民族 also means ethnicity, it can be used in a different context. Regardless, they could have came up with a better description for that one for both languages. They could also simply spell out the Han-centric ethnocentrism, and Han-ethnic nationalism that the Chinese society and governments imposed on the ethnic minorities.
Wonderful comment. The history from the stele is fascinating.
I fully agree on the unfortunate decision to uniformly translate 民族 as national in the English version cited. I would have chosen “ethnicity” in many of the cases if I’d been translating directly.
You have to consider the historical context of 民族/nation.
For most of history both terms correlate. For example, “the jewish nation” (even without a country). “The Sioux Nation,” an ethnic group also without a state.
Compared to the development of “nation (民族) states” such as England, France, Germany, etc.
Today, we just accept the word “nation” as a political territory, regardless of ethnic diversity within it.
The terms “nation” and “民族” are fluid: especially in China where today, states and nations are subverted into provinces of one nation state.
Who actually believes that Uighur and Tibetans are Chinese 民族?
And why hasn’t anyone, including the OP linked to this text? Which has been discussed on this forum before?
It’s funny when Caucasian mummies are found in western “provinces” of “China” and this is put forward by Beijing academics as proof that Caucasians lived in “ancient China.” And everybody lived happily together in a multicultural environment.
Nice one. But I still disagree with this statement you made in your original post “there’s quite a bit of words in Old Chinese that could have origins in an Indo-European language.”
The prevailing theory is that PIE and ancient Chinese have a common root, not that one is a derivative of the other.
There is no traceable evidence that OC and PIE had shared ancestry (unless you are talking about the people and not the languages). I’m not saying one derived from another, I’m saying there were prehistoric interactions between the two groups that are evident in these ancient loan words.
One more, and this one is pretty good I think. It’s also another chariot related one.
Hanji
OC
MC
Taigi
PIE
OE
English
Comment
軛
*qˤ<r>[i]k
ʔɛk
ik
*yeug-
geoc
yoke
also means to join, to connect, to attach, to constrain
This is the same etymology for yoga, derived from the meaning to join with supreme spirit.
The PIE root *yeug spread everywhere. From the Hittite’s iúkan to Celts’ cuing, everyone continued to use this word, such as joch in German and ok in Icelandic.
alive. the PIE root also gave us bio-, vital, viable, vivid and quick. A more complete word for alive in PIE would be gʷih₃wós, and some say the OC word is a Austroasiatic loan from *gɑs
Not a posible PIE loan to Old Chinese this time, but to Old Japanese. The word for car in Japanese is kuruma くるま. It would have been *kúrúmá in Proto-Japanese. The Altaic etymology site says it has an Altaic etymology from Proto-Altaic *ki̯úŕu.
That’s cool and all, but kuruma has that extra ma at the end.
From the lists I compiled above, I think it’s possible that kurima came from PIE *kʷékʷlos *mˤraʔ wheel+mare. The two words in Old Chinese gave us 軲轆馬, which sounds almost exactly the same as kuruma even today.
PIE originally meant to twist, braid, wind, turn. Extended to mean fence made out of wickerwork. Also Wand in German, Dutch
園
*C.ɢʷa[n]
hjwon
hn̂g / uân
wendʰ-
wag
wall
Garden. PIE originally meant to twist, braid, wind, turn. Extended to mean fence made out of wickerwork. Also Wand in German, Dutch
圓
*ɢʷen
hjwen
înn / uân
wendʰ-
wag
wall
Circle. Derived from the meaning of an enclosure. PIE originally meant to twist, braid, wind, turn. Extended to mean fence made out of wickerwork. Also Wand in German, Dutch.
Saw it on a really old paper called Tocharian Loan Words in Old Chinese: Chariots, Chariot Gear, and Town Building
I’ve been sharing my list of possible PIE loanwords in OC with anyone on Youtube that mentions such a phenomenon. Usually linguists and youtubers would just ignore my comment, but last week I watched a lecture given by Linguist Nathan Hill on Sino-Tibetan Languages Introduction, and posted my list there. Professor Hill replied and I got a proper schooling.
Some of these are really smart suggestions. Thank you for sharing them. I only have comments on a few.
The comparison of 雁 *C.[ŋ]ˤrar-s to *ghans ‘goose’ was made already in the 19th century, but some things speak against it. The fact that Chinese has a velar nasal and not a velar stop. The fact that very very few IE words have the root vowel -a-. My current thinking is that they are both unrelated onomatopoeia.
Note that Laurent Sagart has a more recent blog post about 犬 *[k]ʷʰˤ[e][n]ʔ, which he now reconstructs with final -r. This could be a very old loan, but it is also explainable as onomatopoeia. (English cognate is ‘hound’ by the way)
The following comparision is not possible, 馬*mˤraʔ *márkos ‘mare’, the IE is attested only in Celtic and Germanic, the furthest branches from China. The phonology also doesn’t work (how did that r move?), and the semantics are not good either. A *markos is something you ride, whereas a 馬 is something that pulls your chariot. (Invention of horseback riding is very late.) Dieter Gunkel thinks that 馬 *mˤraʔ is borrowed from arvant- and Hannes Fellner and I find this convincing. The argument is a bit complicated and I hope that our article about it will come out soon.
車 *C.q(r)a the comparison should be to cakra ‘wheel’. Baxter and Sagart have a presentation about this word, which you will find on Academia.edu.
These is a pretty large literature on 蜜 *mit compared to *médʰu mead, and there is widespread agreement this is a Tokharian loan into Chinese.
burg came from Proto-Indo-European *bʰergʰ- which meant to protect, which maybe related to *bʰer-, which gave us the word bear (the verb, not the animal), which has the meaning of carry, and bring forth.
堡 came from Old Chinese /*pˤuʔ/, a bilabial plosive followed by a closed-mid to closed vowel, and ends with a dorsal to laryngeal plosive. It is derived from 保 which also means to protect, and originally meant a person carrying a baby on the back.
Wonderful thread. This has me wondering if there are examples going the other way as well. It’s interesting enough to talk about words like “tea” which were passed through trade more recently, but it’s really fascinating to think about technological diffusion in pre-history.
Yeah, that’s a great one. Although, since like 犬, 牛 most likely began as onomatopoeia, languages might come to the same sound without needing actual transmission.
This is a list of some Chinese - English coincidences I’ve run into.
Also I put some various humorous blabber in (but see https://www.jidanni.org/lang/humor.txt ). Certainly most of them are pure
coincidence, with no ‘same origins’ deep significance. I use some references to some Chinese historical phonology terms. I didn’t ever
learn English historical phonology… therefore things are left at current English face value. I also don’t bother to use my own fancy romanization schemes for S. Min, etc. For some neat intra-Chinese non-coincidences, see 王力’s 同源字典。
