This is almost interesting, but you gotta find a better way to display things than a 700-line stream-of-consciousness text file.
The idea is somebody else will come along and sweep it up into something much more miraculous, allowing me to fade from the scene.
| Hanji | OC | MC | Taigi | PIE | OE | English | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 社 | /*m-tʰAʔ/ | dzyæX | siā | *dʰéǵʰōm | guma | human | Greek Δᾶ da, meaning earth |
| 祇 | /*[k.d]e/ | gjie | kî | *dʰéǵʰōm | Greek Γαῖα gaia, Attic Γῆ gê, Doric Γᾶ ga, identical to Δᾶ da, meaning earth |
*dʰéǵʰōm, PIE for earth or name for a earth goddess. Meaning extended to of the earth, and gave words like homos and humilis in Latin.
I left these out in the very first post because I didn’t know how likely it was to have these types of religious connections between PIE and OC. However, since I’ve made the connection between 昭 and *dyeu, the heavenly god, it almost makes no sense to not also have had the earth goddess pair transmitted to OC at the same time.
Could you provide a link to the pronunciation of these things for those of us who aren’t trained linguists?
They are all in IPA.
There are a few IPA synthesizers out there, but they are pretty bad.
Something more user friendly…
I wish something like that exists as well. Maybe it’s time to write it ourselves?
Someone write a CNN-based neaural network model for this task.
No hosting though, you have to run it as a python program.
Yeah I’m pretty sure AI can handle this quite well.
I realized that I didn’t put this thought into words before.
There are a bunch of religious words in OC that seem to have been borrowed from some Indo-european language or maybe languages. I think this indicates that at some point, Indo-european speakers dominated the religious aspects of life for the OC speakers. Either they were just there as a religious caste, or more likely, they’ve became the ruling nobles through conquest and transmitted horse and chariot related words to OC at the same time.
That’s why words like *médʰu 蜜 replaced the original Trans-Himalayan word in OC. In other Trans-Himalayan languages, the original word for honey is something like bee juice, like སྦྲང་རྩི sbrang rtsi in Tibetan, which if the cognate survived in Sinitic languages to this day would be 蜂漆, *pʰ(r)oŋ-[tsʰ]i[t] in OC, phang-tshik in Taigi. We obviously don’t say that because it was replaced by *médʰu thousands of years ago, and I suspect it was because honey once held significant meaning in religious ceremonies.
The same goes for gods, life death, and even bears, which obviously meant something for Indo-european speakers, and also one supposed ancestors of all Chinese people from the legends, the Yellow Emperor, whose tribal name is 有熊 (Great Bears).
Religious words in OC that possibly are IE loanwords:
| Hanji | OC | MC | Taigi | PIE | OE | English | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 昭 | *taw | tsyew | tsiau | *dyeu | tiwes | Bright in Chinese. To shine in PIE. Tiwes in OE is a part of Tuesday. Sky, heaven, god also derived from this | |
| 照 | *taw-s | tsyewH | tsiò | *dyéws | tiwes | To shine in both Chinese and PIE. Tiwes in OE is a part of Tuesday. Sky, heaven, god also derived from this | |
| 朝 | *taw | trjew | tiâu | *dyeu | tiwes | Day, morning in Chinese. To shine in PIE. Sky, heaven, god also derived from this | |
| 帝 | *tˤek-s | tejH | tè | *deiwos | tig | deity | OE name of a god. *deiwos also evolved to be Zues, Jupiter |
| 祇 | *[k.d]e | gjie | kî | *dʰéǵʰōm | gaia | PIE earth or name for a earth goddess. Greek Γαῖα gaia, Attic Γῆ gê, Doric Γᾶ ga, identical to Δᾶ da, meaning earth | |
| 社 | *m-tʰAʔ | dzyæX | siā | *dʰéǵʰōm | guma | human | PIE earth or name for a earth goddess. Meaning extended to of the earth, and gave words like homos and humilis in Latin. Greek Δᾶ da, meaning earth |
| 活 | *[ɡ]ʷˁat | hwat | ua̍h | *gwei- | vivat | viva | 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 |
| 歿 | *mˤut | mwot | bu̍t | *mer | mort | mort | |
| 卒 | *[ts]ˤut | tswot | tsut | *dheu- | deighen | die | as in tod in German |
| 羆 | *praj | pje | phî | *bher- | bera | bear | OC meaning brown bear, PIE meaning brown. Bears seems to be sacred to IE speakers, and Huangdi is supernaturally related to bears. One of his tribal names is 有熊 |
| 蜜 | *mit | mjit | bi̍t | *médʰu | medu | mead | honey |
We also see that happening in the era where Sanskrit was influential, right? Significantly later I gather, but it could point to an existing pathway
In that case, Indo-European speakers definitely formed a religious caste.